Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is audiobooks. Because the focus within that is up to us, I thought I’d share some audiobooks that really worked for me:

1. The Harry Potter series, narrated by Jim Dale.
   Yes, Dale’s Hermione is awful and screechy (and while Hermione can be screechy, that’s not her default) and his take on other female characters isn’t much better, but each one of his characters stands on their own — and there are a lot of them over the course of seven books.
2. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, narrated by Paul Boehmer, Susan Duerden, Rosalyn Landor, John Lee, and Juliet Mills.
   I listened to this after reading the print book, which is good, because I knew what was going to happen and didn’t have to feel all the feels the first time through listening. This multi-voice cast does a great job with the story and really bringing the correspondents to life.
3. See You in the Cosmos, narrated by Kivlighan de Montebello, Brittany Pressley, Graham Halstead, Michael Crouch, and Jason Culp.
   Another multi-voice cast brings this heartwarming middle grade novel about an eleven-year-old boy, his dog Carl Sagan, and his quest to launch a golden ipod (filled with the sounds of the world around him) into space as he journeys across the west and as his family life falls apart — and rebuilds itself in new and surprising ways.
4. The Woman Who Smashed Codes, narrated by Cassandra Campbell.
   This nonfiction history was a recent read for me. Campbell does such a good job narrating a book written by a guy that I kept being surprised she wasn’t the author. She really brings cryptologist Elizebeth Smith Friedman to life and helps you appreciate the great debt we owe her — both for her work bringing Nazis in South America to justice and for helping to develop the very codes that form the bedrock of our modern spy system — and our modern electronics. (If you like Campbell as a narrator, raidergirl3 has a whole list of books narrated by her that she recommends.)
5. Becoming, narrated by Michelle Obama.
   I love this book. I love this woman. Listening to her read it just makes me feel so much better about the world.
6. Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, narrated by Xe Sands.
   Sands does a good job voicing an 85-year-old New Yorker heading out for an evening stroll on New Year’s Eve in 1984 and thinking back on her life.
7. Norse Mythology, narrated by Neil Gaiman.
   Count me amongst those who would listen to Gaiman read the phone book. He has such a surprisingly soothing voice for someone who makes a living with his pen. For me, listening to this title allowed me to better picture the story peopled by the actors of the Marvel movies, from Tom Hiddleston to Jamie Alexander to Anthony Hopkins.
8. A Conspiracy in Belgravia, narrated by Kate Reading.
   I love the Lady Sherlock mysteries and Reading (pronounced “redding”) does a great job reading. I love when people’s names and occupations match up! Rudi and I listened to this one together and both of us enjoyed it.
9. Creative Quest by Questlove.
   I’m still in the middle of reading this self-help guide to creativity from the literary drummer of The Roots, but am really enjoying his casual approach to the narration. He paused at one point in talking about a French chef to phone the guy and ask him to pronounce his name. He intersperses his explanations of drummers whose work has inspired him with beats they’ve laid down. It just really works in this format.
10. The Fox and O’Hare series, narrated by Scott Brick.
    This is a cheesy heist series, and Brick’s reading makes certain interactions between FBI agent Kate O’Hare and master thief Nicholas Fox seem more salacious than sexy, but maybe they would come across that way on the page, as well. Either way, this is totally ear candy.

Are there audiobooks you’ve particularly enjoyed listening to?

A month ago, I headed down to the garden to start putting it in order and to plant my first round of peas. I’ve since put in two more plantings of peas and will add one more this week. This is my measurable progress so far:

I don’t have a whole row of tiny shoots that look like this. I have one pea. But where there’s one, more will follow. A lot of what happens with peas happens below ground at first, so I’m not overly worried. So much of gardening happens on faith, doesn’t it? And I know from last year, when only two of us in the garden got pea crops, that unreasonable faith that February or March is a great time to plant in the mid-Atlantic is crucial, particularly since it warms up so fast here.

I planted bulbs last fall. My daffodils finally emerged. They are weird.

Those are full-sized daffodils where the stalks pretty much don’t exist, so they’re hardly above the ground. They are pretty, though, and I could see their cheerful color from a ways away, so that’s the most important thing.

I also planted onions. Or maybe shallots. Either way, my potato patch is full of shoots, so they are growing as desired. I’m looking forward to finding out what I planted.

My sorrel has repopulated itself and I can start harvesting that anytime I want some citrusy greens in my salads. I’m planning to head back down to the garden later in the week to plant some more greens — arugula and spinach and kale and the like.

What are you hoping to grow this year?

I thought I’d share some of what’s flowering around D.C. right now, per today’s bike ride:

Mostly those are the early cherry trees on Hains Point, which abuts the harbor, the Tidal Basin, and the Potomac River; peak bloom (the day when 70% of the flowers are open) won’t be for another week. Most of them look like this right now:

Is anything blooming in your neck of the woods yet?

Corey has two modes when we’re home just the two of us — screaming at me for more food … and this:

I think he loves me…

Glory be! It’s the last weekend of the ski season! Rudi will be home by midday on Monday! It’s supposed to be dry!

In my final few days holding down the home front, I have already started the weekend off right by heading across town for a book reading (Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, about an early 20th-century woman who builds a candlepin bowling alley in a Massachusetts town), followed by a Korean mushroom bun eaten while walking to the grocery store (for whipped cream).

Tomorrow, there’s an early afternoon alumni gathering that I might attend. Then I’m going to head back to the bookstore for another reading (Giraffes on Horseback Salad by Josh Frank, Manuela Pertega, and Tim Heidecker, a graphic novel version of the film script written by Salvador Dalí for the Marx Brothers lost until the late 1990s amongst Groucho’s papers) and then possibly on to a second bookstore, where they’re holding a standup show based on failed attempts to follow Marie Kondo’s uncluttering advice. I’m not usually a standup fan, but I’m hopeful that this one will work for me. Otherwise, I’ll just head home to Netflix (or read) and chill.

Sunday, I’ll head to the farmers market (I suspect it’s still too early for ramps, but maybe I’ll find some spring onions or spring garlic) and then it’s off to a friend’s house for the afternoon to divvy up our baseball season tickets. I’ll probably bike home via the Tidal Basin. Peak bloom season isn’t slated to arrive for another week or two, but the early trees supposedly have some flowers, if they didn’t all drop during today’s afternoon thunderstorm. The UConn women play in the evening, so I might try to stream some of the radio broadcast of their game while I attempt to put the living room back to rights after yesterday’s excitement.

What do you have planned for the weekend?

I just spent the past 12 hours doing flood control. It was only that long because in doing flood damage control, I discovered that ants had moved in and set up nests along the 10-foot length of the dry bag I’d left there all winter to cut down on flood damage. Thousands of ants. Karen called and asked if it was possible I was exaggerating. I was not.

The good news is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend or something like that, and the groundwater incursion took care of a surprising number of ants. My supposedly environmentally friendly cleaner also was a surprisingly effective tool of mass death. (I hate insect swarms because I feel really bad about having to kill them. But there’s really no getting around that with ants.)

Sadly, ants are not an easily defeated foe, so I am aware that the next few days I will need to remain vigilant and set up checkpoints and demand IDs. There will be no masquerading as the smallish spiders I let live in my corners. (Imagine how much worse it would have been if the spiders hadn’t been there!) And I have left the furniture in that part of the room askew to make checking the baseboards easier.

But we can’t end on that kind of note. Let’s look back at three beautiful things from our week in order to conclude the night in a more positive headspace:

1. The Thai place by my house makes very good (emergency) takeout.

2. Our friend Sarah kindly lent us her car so I could take Rudi to the Baltimore airport early last Friday. Because his flight left before dawn, I was back just as the pretzel bakery by her house was opening and got to enjoy very tasty treats — their specialty drink is a hot Nutella — early in the day.

3. No obvious signs of life yet amongst the peas I’ve planted in the garden, but when I tucked a few of them back into the ground, I noticed they’d grown roots, which is also true of the onion or shallot bulbs I planted last fall.

How about you? Tell me what’s been beautiful in your world this week!