This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share Books I Loved that Made Me Want More Books Like Them. I couldn’t think of titles that sent me scrambling for read-alikes, but I could come up with a list of books that made me want to read everything its author had written/will write:

1. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (I used to save money for trips to Waldenbooks at the Meriden Square, where I went through all the Anne books and into Montgomery’s other series/standalones.)
2. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (I might not love everything he writes, but I will read it.)
3. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell (I recognize this book has some problems with the portrayal of Park, but I loved it.)
4. The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (This is another book with some problems in terms of racial interactions, which Kingsolver tried to address in her later Pigs in Heaven. I haven’t reread it in a long time and can’t speak for how it holds up, but I adore it has made me a Kingsolver devotee.)
5. A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle (Pretty sure it’s time for a reread of this classic tale of home improvement and cultural miscues)
6. The 13 Clocks by James Thurber (I don’t know how to best categorize Thurber’s works except maybe to say it has a strong moral compass and a witty soul.)
7. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (Another must-read author of my youth. I’ve even read her religious essays.)
8. When the Sea Turned to Silver by Grace Lin (Her descriptions are pure poetry.)
9. A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd (This book conveys such a love of words!)
10. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (I adored his way of telling stories through both words and pictures.)

Other books in this same category include Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, Booked by Kwame Alexander, and The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon.

How about you?

By and large, it was a quiet weekend. I didn’t feel great on Saturday, so I napped in the afternoon, messing up my plans for a productive day. But I felt much better when I got back up in the evening, and Rudi and I took a trip down to the garden to harvest some things that we ended up not eating, followed by a trip to Trader Joe’s to pick up some more things that we ended up not eating. We did eat some things already living in our fridge, though, thereby making room for our new acquisitions. We watched Rudi’s Red Sox beat the Yankees, and then I watched the Mets beat the Padres. I knit and then listened to my audiobook.

This morning I sallied forth to the farmers market. I bought a lot of strawberries and the first zucchini and green beans of the season, as well as a variety of other odds and ends.

I spent the later part of the afternoon at the pool for my first real swim since August 2019. (I’ve been to beaches since then, but either temperatures or rip tides made me decline to do more than dunk myself and then run back to my towel.) It was glorious. I swear the pool was Bahamian blue (or at least what it looks like on tv) and the trees practically glowed green, but that may just have been my joy at some sense of summer normalcy.

I pulled some spring greens out (all the arugula and some of the spinach) and yanked more violet leaves and bunching onions in an effort to find places for all my new plants. A few remain to be planted, which will force me to leave work at a reasonable enough time to spend an hour at the garden early this week. And then Rudi and I watched the Kennedy Center Honors before he retired and I raced the clock to finish my audiobook. (Downloading to your phone is very convenient, until you’re at the last day with more chapters remaining than you’d like before it stops being playable.)

The week ahead holds our baseball seat lottery for the rest of the season, hopefully my volleyball championship, and possibly a belated birthday outing for Rudi.

I hope you have a great start to the week!

Someone planted a jungle in my garden while I was away:

We harvested peas and strawberries and two bags of greens.

I got a head’s up tonight that more changes are coming at work. This will mark the fifth major shift in as many months that touches either my department or the organization, and I admit that I’m struggling to keep my head above water. Each time I think I’ve processed and adapted to a change, a new one comes along that threatens my newly adjusted footing, and this latest wave is the biggest one yet.

In the long run, I will be fine. My department will be fine. The organization will be fine.

But in the short term, I’m scrambling and feeling unsettled and just wishing for some solid ground beneath my feet.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rudi and I wrap up our trip north with a stop at Dairy Queen in Montvale, N.J.

2. Rudi replaces the shifters on my bike to ones that are smooth and work without needing to hold them together, my grips to ones that don’t leave imprints in my palms, and adds my DCPL bike bell to my handlebar. I feel loved and tended to.

3. Seeing my parents and Karen after such a long time apart. May we never repeat the experiment.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

I’m a little further along on my sock foot than I was last week. I’m also about a third of the way through Jo & Laurie by Margaret Stohl and Melissa de la Cruz. And in audiobooks, I’m past the halfway point on The Bookshop of Second Chances and most of the way through No Time like the Future, Michael J. Fox’s latest memoir.

Check out As Kat Knits for the weekly knitting and reading roundup.