Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rudi returned home after spending a week of caregiving. The cats and I are very glad to have him back.

2. Chris and I manage back-to-back weeks of multiple nights of pickup volleyball. Tonight was the last day this week, with most of our team being able to join us.

3. Aroush is able to join the team this upcoming season. I love when I’m able to bring together the people I like playing with best. (Rebecca is my next recruit when her class schedule allows.)

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

As promised, here are the books I read last year that I liked best. The top ten are arranged chronologically in the order I read them (first the six five-star reads and then the best of the four-star reads), because I don’t really think one stood out above the rest. And I share my other four-star reads at the end, since I didn’t do book reviews last year. Ultimately, this is about half the books I read last year, and I recommend them all:

Five-Star Reads

• The Door-to-Door Bookseller by Carsten Henn
  An older, lonely man who delivers books for a shop finds himself joined on his rounds by a young girl. And suddenly, his life — and those of his customers — begin to change in unexpected ways.
• Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
  A teen girl growing up in Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma sees no opportunities for her life to get better after her mother dies, she suffers tremendous injuries, and her father founders in grief. But, maybe, even in all the darkness, there is still light. Told in verse.
• Shark Heart by Emily Habeck
  A heartbreaking parable about losing a loved one to a devastating illness.
• Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune
  A reread, this story is about a man who only discovers his humanity after he dies.
• Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy
  When an elderly woman inadvertently brings a mouse into her home, she finds there is a ripple effect, and her solitary and regimented days are suddenly filled with chaos and characters.
• October, October by Katya Balen
  On her 11th birthday, a young girl who lives alone in the woods with her father finds her life upended when he is suddenly hospitalized and she must stay in London with her mother, who moved away many years ago.

Rounding Out the Top Ten

• The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
  A young woman must figure out how to respond when her oft-traveling father disappears, her guardian (her father’s well-off employer) curtails her freedom, and a book suddenly lands in her lap, inspiring a harrowing flight across space in pursuit of family and truth.
• Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin
  Translated from the French, this novel focuses on the caretaker of a graveyard. It alternates between flashbacks to how she arrived at her current profession, diary entries from a woman recently buried at the cemetery, and a more linear story about the caretaker and the woman’s son. Again, a novel about grief and awakening from it.
• You Are Here by David Nicholls
  A post-COVID novel told in alternating points of view between a male teacher who loves hiking and is battling PTSD and a female editor who has trouble leaving her London apartment until a friend from her past won’t take no about a walking holiday with her godson and some other friends. Ultimately a story about breaking out of your comfort zone and taking chances, even when that feels like the last thing you should do.
• Margo’s Got Money Problems by Rufi Thorpe
  A young community college student is impregnated by her English professor and then must find a way to stay afloat when she chooses to have the baby. After her ex-pro wrestler father moves in (fresh out of rehab for an addiction to pain meds) and she starts an OnlyFans account (where people will pay her for nude content), she must deal with the continued impact of people judging the decisions she makes for herself and her family.

Other Four-Star Reads 

Mystery

• Murder Under Her Skin by Stephen Spotswood
• The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

Fantasy/Romantasy

• A Power Unbound by Freya Marske
• Just Like Magic by Sarah Hogle
• Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree
• Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis
• A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle Jensen
• The Afterlife of Mal Caldera by Nadi Reed Perez
• The Apprentice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer
• Mamo by Sas Milledge

Romance

• 10 Things That Never Happened by Alexis Hall
• A Home for the Holidays by Taylor Hahn

The Rest

• The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay (essays)
• A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck (kidlit)
• I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy: Renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky (poetry)

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl is a traditional early January post and invites us to share our bookish goals for the year. First, let’s check in on my goals from last year:

1. Read 52 books. Done! It took me until the last day of the year, but I did tick them all off in the end.
2. Review books on blog. And publish my best of list(s). Ha! Pretty much I didn’t write on the blog last year other than Three Beautiful Things and the occasional Top Ten Tuesday post.
3. Buy books in another country. One of the highlights of 2024!
4. Read 2+ classics, including a Russian novel. Fail! Although I did buy a Russian classic to read.
5. Finish the Top 100 Children’s Books. No, but I made progress. I’m down to eight, seven of which are currently sitting next to the couch.
6. Read 17 of my own books including 5 I’ve owned 2+ years. Nyet. I read four, only one of which came to me pre-pandemic.
7. Listen to 20 audiobooks. So, so close. I finished 19 and had several more that I just couldn’t get across the finish line in time. (There were also two titles that I started in audio and switched to paper.)
8. Read 3+ books of poetry. Two.
9. Read 5+ books in translation. Three, although to be fair, I expected both of the last books I read to have been translated, and neither was.
10. Get all my books onto shelves. I made good progress. Although most of the books I culled are still sitting in a box in the living room waiting to go to Little Free Libraries or over to Arlington for their Friends’ book sale. I think with some serious finesse, I could maybe get the rest onto shelves this year.

Now, with that in mind what will this year’s goals look like?

1. Read 52 books. This is a good number for me. When I get a job, I may have less time to read. Or maybe I’ll go back to listening to books on metro and reading at lunch and then it’ll go up. Either way, I’m sticking with it.
2. Read 25 books I own, including some I don’t think I’ll want to keep. There is a post-in-progress about which books I’m hoping to include, but right now it leans heavily on books I want to keep.
3. Read more diversely. Usually I do a better job about reading books by BIPOC and queer authors, and without meaning to, in 2024, I only read 9 books that qualify. I’m aiming for at least 15 books this year.
4. Write at least 6 non-Top Ten Tuesday posts about books this year, including some assessment in the summer about how my reading is going.
5. Read more backlist titles. I only read 11 books that were published before 2020 last year. Tackling some of my personal library collection should help increase that number, but let’s aim for 15 books published outside this half-decade, and at least 7 from before the year 2000.
6. Read 3+ books of poetry or novels in verse. Again, this shouldn’t be a challenge, given how many books of poetry live in The Burrow.
7. Read more nonfiction — at least 5, rather than the two I managed last year. Usually I squeeze in memoirs, but the only one I began, I think I want to read in print, rather than the audiobook copy I had.
8. Read a book by an author who lives in Africa and one who lives in Central or South America.
9. Send the books I’ve bought as gifts to the people they’re meant for. (Or donate them if the recipient has aged out of them.) Again, this shouldn’t be as hard as it is.
10. Give every book I own a permanent home on a shelf.

So, how about you? What kind of bookish goals do you have for 2025?

Every year, Jana of That Artsy Reader Girl, generously keeps up the tradition of Secret Santa started at the now defunct The Broke and the Bookish, where she sends your info to someone and sends you an entirely different person’s info. There are different levels for participation and I’m sure it takes a lot of energy to get everyone squared away, and that’s all before people start having challenges (such as anyone sending to or from Canada this holiday season). So, every year she runs it, I and the hundreds of other people who look forward to this annual tradition are terribly grateful to her.

This year, my package arrived early (mine snuck out at the deadline and arrived, like the real Santa, on Christmas Eve). I always admire the folks who wait. And sometimes I let the box sit a couple days to get closer to Christmas, but I never make it all the way to the holiday. I’m too excited and impatient!

Kathleen, my Santa, hails from Delaware and put together a fanciful package full of books and other delights. First is a list of places I might want to visit in her home state (and nearby Pennsylvania), and since we’re just a couple hours away and since Delaware is home to my favorite beaches in the area, we will be checking them off. She also tucked in a couple rolls of pretty washi tape and a pen from her work, which, coincidentally and unbeknownst to her, is also the name of the neighborhood where I live in D.C.

Because she knew we’d recently acquired kittens, she included this delightful ornament, which I put well out of reach of the felines (although, to be fair, Coal has challenged my understanding of what that means).

Kathleen made this ornament for me. It includes quotes from The Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies and a terrific book. It is also out of reach of the cats, because I think they would love to find their way inside to take all those quotation scrolls and squirrel them away under furniture.

There is tea and a single person teapot with a cherry blossom motif (it’s required with D.C. citizenship to love cherry blossoms), perfect for putting on a tray within reach as you read on the couch. Kathleen included some delicious spicy holiday jam, a local product filled with berries and jalapeño, and which has been giving my morning toast that extra something something to help start winter mornings.

And finally, the books. She gave me the first of the manga adaptations of Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, which I’m very excited to see how they put that together. She also gave me Evie Woods’ The Lost Bookshop, which looks so good. And finally, she gave me Elin Hildebrand’s Winter in Paradise. I’ve read the first two books in Hildebrand’s Winter Street series, and this is the first in a newer wintry series set in the Caribbean instead of Nantucket. I love a beach read when it’s cold outside!

Kathleen, thank you so much. I love everything and am looking forward to hours of reading and drinking tea this winter! Happy #TBTBSanta!

Once upon a time, I used to share the things I planned to accomplish, hoped to do, or might be interested in tackling over the weekend. That was, of course, back when I had a job and weekends were vastly different from weekdays and mostly before COVID (and before my warm-weather weekends often just became an opportunity to play volleyball). But I thought I’d bring this back at least for the winter as a way to encourage myself to get out of the apartment during daylight hours and to cross off some necessary chores with a minimal amount of accountability. (Really, there’s no accountability; once I put it down here, I may never get to it and may never feel guilty about that. But still, one must start somewhere. Name the problem…) Plus, who can argue with more blog content? I mean you could, but I’m not sure that anyone besides my mom and my BFF reads this regularly anymore, so why would you?

Right. Back to the potential to-do list for this weekend, assuming that whatever this cough is doesn’t turn into a full-blown cold:

• Go to the two libraries where I have holds waiting for me.
• Finish reading at least one book.
• Hand over this week’s compost at the farmers market.
• Tidy the living room.
• Bake some cookies.
• Set up my 2025 journal for the start of this year. (Yes, I was late in getting it.)
• Write a fave books of 2024 post.
• Watch the UConn-Georgetown game on tv. (It wasn’t on my radar this year and tickets are now $50+ to watch in person.)
• Send the rest of my new year’s cards. (Ahem. They started out as Christmas cards, but I got stuck.)
• Do another load of laundry.
• Get take out or take myself out to eat. (I’ve been so responsible this week while Rudi’s been away!)
• Start either the pair of socks I wound yarn for on Jan. 1 or the baby sweater for my friend’s daughter, who arrives in less than a month (that yarn is in the stash and I have an old swatch for the pattern; I just have to figure out where both are currently).
• Refill the tea tins.
• Replace the batteries on the fairy lights.
• Snuggle the kittens.
• Paint my nails.
• Sort out the veg drawer (hopefully before going to the farmers market with the compost), since it looks like something maybe died in there.
• Find the wall calendar and my new atm card, both of which arrived in the mail in December.

Okay, yes, that’s definitely an ambitious list. And I probably won’t get to all of it. But even a fraction would probably make me fell pretty good about things.

What are you hoping to do this weekend? Curl up and read under your warmest blanket? Watch a movie? (I recommend Flow and Emilia Pérez if you’re considering the theater) Get Christmas put away?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. D.C. gets about half a foot of snow. Rudi does the first pass at the sidewalks, after his flight is delayed until the afternoon, which means I only get stuck with about half the shoveling, rather than all of it.

2. Rudi’s delayed flight does mean he gets to accompany me to the snowball fight at Malcolm X Park:

3. Winter weather means winter foods — grilled cheese and tomato soup and paninis and cookies. Yum!

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