Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Saturday volleyball resumes in earnest, and old faces stop by to celebrate.

2. My team heads out to dinner after a well-fought loss. It’s so good to gather together around a table.

3. The old garden manager and I finally get a call together where he tells me that it won’t be possible to add me to our old bank account after all and that I’ll need to open a new one. It has long been leaning in that direction, and it’s nice to finally have a concrete answer, even if it means more work for me.

Did I finish Into the Stacks posts for the fall? I did not. But since this week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is a freebie, I thought I’d at least get around to sharing my favorite reads of 2025, and maybe get caught up later (or not).

The first half of the list are my five-star reads of the 60 books I finished last year. The second half were my favorites of the four-starred books. There were 35 of those, so narrowing that group down took some work (and thus, I have also included an honorable mention list). If I wrote about it last year, I’ve linked to the post:

1. We Are Definitely Human by X. Fang
   A charming picture book about kindness and community and how we interact with those who are different
2. A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sanju Mandana
   A found family romantasy about what constitutes real magic and power
3. These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett
   An essay collection that explores the relationships we form over the years, the adventures we have along the way, and how we imbue things with meaning to mold a life that is dear and true.
4. The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst
   A romantasy with a main character who must overcome fear and anxiety to help save her new community — and herself (and whose community must do the same for her)
5. 49 Days by Agnes Lee
   A graphic novel that covers the seven weeks following a young woman’s sudden death: we witness her family and friends mourning in their own ways, while at the same time her soul navigates the bardo, or Buddhist limbo between life and being reborn
6. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
   In the near future, the British government tests a way to pluck doomed souls out of the past and bring them forward in time. When a “minder” falls in love with the 19th-century sailor in her care, she must work to uncover the why’s of the mysterious program.
7. A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall
   An onion of a epistolary science fiction novel set on a future/mirror/alternative Earth: at the story’s core is correspondence between an agoraphobic young woman who lives an insular life in a submerged house in the ocean and a renowned young zoologist living in an academic community on its surface, while the surrounding layers are provided by the correspondence between her sister and his brother as they later work to uncover how and why their siblings disappeared.
8. Back After This by Linda Holmes
   A contemporary romance set in D.C., because sometimes you just need a love story set in your city. (If you need more, it starts with a meet-cute involving a gigantic loose dog and two strangers who chase it, builds with continued random (and then not) encounters between them, and is anchored by a work situation that manipulates the protagonist into a starring in a reality podcast series involving blind dates.)
9. The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King
   A work of historic science fiction and generational trauma that focuses on the power of storytelling about a contemporary computer programmer and her grandmother, who, after escaping oppressive Chinese regimes twice, must decide how much of her backstory and their matrilineal magical gift to share with her granddaughter before it is lost to the ravages of dementia.
10. Starter Villain by John Scalzi
    This science fiction novel focuses on a middle-aged, down-on-his-luck loner who’s lost his marriage, job, father, and (imminently) family home. He’s substitute teaching while failing to make ends meet and has just been laughed out of the bank when asking for a loan to buy the local pub. With the only thing going for him being the two cats who have adopted him, he learns his long-estranged, wealthy uncle has died and asked for him to host his wake. When it turns out that the event is filled with hit men of his uncle’s enemies who then proceed to blow up Charlie’s house, he’s whisked off by his newfound “handlers” to his uncle’s supervillain lair where, it turns out, he’s inherited a cache of nefarious businesses. As I wrote to my nephew when I gave him this book for Christmas, while it’s a James Bond caper on the outside, it’s really, at its core, a book about kindness.

Honorable Mentions:

• I Am the Messenger by Marcus Zusak (alternative fiction)
• World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (personal essays)
• There’s Something About Mira by Sonali Dev (romance)
• Accomplice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer (romantasy)
• We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (mystery)
• Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell (kidlit fantasy)
• Uncommon Favor: Basketball, North Philly, My Mother, and the Life Lessons I Learned from All Three by Dawn Staley (memoir)
• Good Spirits by B.K. Borison (romantasy)

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Today’s baseball game was a gorgeous sunny day. After biking across town, Rudi and I stopped for popsicles on our way to our seats. And we followed the Nationals’ loss with ice cream cones, which we ate by the river.

2. When they renovated D.C.’s main library a few years back, they added a green roof deck, which is probably my favorite thing about downtown. Sarah and I met there to work, and after she headed out for evening activities, I stayed to read until the sun sank behind the neighboring buildings.

3. Rudi and I picked a leek from our garden on Wednesday. We have a couple bags of nettles in the fridge from last week’s farmers market, so I’m hoping there will be some soup tomorrow night.

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

While April isn’t coming to a close just yet, we are into the final third — and the last full week of the month. As such, here are some things I’m hoping to cross off my to-do list before next Sunday:

• Get my volleyball team sorted for next season. The location (the Mall) is set; I just need to look at everyone’s schedule and get as many of us on the same page as possible.
• Send out a resume. While Sarah and I have met a couple times this month to work on job-hunting and while I’ve found several leads, I’ve puttered through revising my resume again and trying to pull together some pieces from my last job to include in a portfolio. This week, I should get something out the door, just so I don’t lose momentum.
• Coach three times. My second job has not been as communicative as I would have hoped after they pushed the start day for our clinics back, but as far as I can tell, we are still on for next Saturday.
• Dine with my friend John. He mentioned he was excited to do dinner after volleyball next Saturday, and since Rudi will be out of town, I have underscored that I’m in.
• Do an Earth Day event at the garden with a local nursery school. My dad suggested Rudi should dress up as a rat to represent the local fauna, but I’m 75% sure he was just kidding.
• Get at least one more person signed up for a garden plot from the 150-person waitlist. The three people I contacted last week were no-go’s, so I’ve already reached out to the next three. Fingers crossed.
• Get the rest of my plot weeded, the potatoes planted, and the trellis erected for the peas.
• Watch baseball. Rudi and I have tickets Thursday afternoon, and we are both hoping for a warmer time than the game we attended earlier this month, which had us dressed into our winter coats.
• Bake bread. I just need to dig the breadmaker out and get it going.
• Trade some books with the libraries. One is overdue, but I’m hoping to finish the humungous graphic novel I have out and get it back to them as well, since I have two books on hold.
• Finish my pair of fingerless mitts. There’s literally an hour’s worth of knitting (max) left to do on it and this week looks like I might want some help with handwarming.

What’s on your agenda this week?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. WMATA, the agency in charge of public transportation around the D.C. area, sometimes wraps its trains and buses with advertising or seasonal adornment. Today, I got to ride the cherry blossom train, and as I was walking up the street from the station, the wrapped bus passed me by.

2. People singing along with their car stereos as they pass my apartment.

3. The tulips in my garden plot bloomed.

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

I’m hoping this weekend includes:

• Playing volleyball
• Baking bread
• Planting seeds
• Taking part in the garden cleanup
• Going to the library
• Buying spring produce at the farmers market (ramps, asparagus, and morels were checked off last week; this week I’m hoping to spy some rhubarb and maybe an Easter bread if the Greek food stand pops up for the Orthodox holiday)
• Finishing a book and a knitting project
• Doing laundry
• Vacuuming
• Changing out the litter box
• Watching a movie
• Writing my March Into the Stacks post (only 3 books should be reasonable!)
• Sending some mail

It may not all happen, but I’m certain some of it will. And the list is here if I falter and wonder what I should be doing.