This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share books featuring traveling. All of these earned five stars from me:

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows: Pen pals are so fascinated by each other that one travels from London to the Isle of Guernsey to meet the rest.
2. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin: A young girl runs away to find the Man in the Moon
3. Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds: Is the boy in this novel in verse in the same place as the one who got on the elevator just seven flights up? I’d like to think not.
4. 49 Days by Agnes Lee: In this sparse graphic novel, over seven weeks, a young woman must journey across unfamiliar terrain to come to terms with being dead — while her family must contend with still being in the land of the living.
5. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis: Four siblings evacuated from London travel through a coat closet into a magical, winter-stuck land.
6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle: A girl, a boy from her class, her young brother, and three otherworldly beings travel to space.
7. Exit West by Hamid Mohsin: Two refugees leave behind their Middle Eastern home and step through a door to what they hope will be a new life.
8. Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell: A girl everyone believes to be orphaned runs away to Paris in search of the mother she remembers from her babyhood.
9. The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart: A nomadic father flees a particular moment in time with his child, but, unlike him, she wants to find her way back home to Washington state.
10. Shark Heart by Emily Habeck: In this heartbreaking love story, a woman must drive across the country to let her husband, who has turned into a shark, go into the wild.

Do you have favorite books about a journey?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is local authors. Here are ten authors who live or lived in Washington, D.C. (Please note, if you have Congressional representation, you aren’t from D.C., no matter what people from Maryland and Virginia may tell you.)

1. Elizabeth Acevedo (I met her on my birthday in … 2019, maybe, when I took myself to Mahogany Books in Anacostia and asked the bookseller for a recommendation for a local writer. I was still in the building when she stopped by, and the bookseller came to find me so she could sign my copy of her poetry collection, Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths.)
2. Jason Reynolds (Jason often comes out to support other authors’ talks, so you periodically see him out and about at a local bookstore.)
3. E. Ethelbert Miller
4. Leslye Penelope (She went to Howard, so we’re counting her.)
5. Tiffany D. Jackson (Ditto)
6. Jessica Spotswood (a D.C. Public Library employee, who helped run our book club chat for a while!)
7. Stephen Spotswood
8. Kyle Dargan
9. George Pelecanos (Confession: I haven’t read any of his books. But he’s probably one of D.C.’s most famous writers.)
10. Nicole Chung (I haven’t read any of Nicole’s books yet, but I will.)

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to pick a word and find ten books where it’s contained in the title. April and May are the months when I spend a lot of time planting (and, this year, watering), so I thought I’d share ten books from my to-be-read list that contain the word “garden” in one form or another:

1. In the Night Garden by Catherynne Valente
2. The Winter Garden Mystery by Carola Dunn
3. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
4. Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols
5. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan
6. Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game by John Thorn
7. Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens by Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil
8. Garden Spells by Sarah Allen Addison (I think I picked this one up at a library sale when I was staying in Connecticut and left it with my mother.)
9. The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos (Goodreads informs me I own this book, which is a surprise to me.)
10. The White Garden by Stephanie Barron

Have you read any of these? Do you have other gardeny reads you’d recommend?

After a slow start, I ended up finishing seven books during March, several of which I enjoyed quite a bit:

A Lady’s Guide to Marvels and Misadventure by Angela Bell

Not going to lie: If I’d known this was going to be Christian lit (albeit one that believes in women’s rights and science), I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. If you can put up with some mostly mild proselytizing with your steampunk, it’s worth reading this international scavenger hunt that Clara’s beloved inventor grandfather sets up for his uptight granddaughter, his footloose protege, and (in her role as chaperone) his animal-loving daughter (they’re traveling with a zoo by the end of the book). After realizing his granddaughter has become stuck in the role of caregiver (even when such a role is unneeded), he sets off anonymously in the gigantic owl flying machine he built with instructions that she and her traveling companions must follow in order to catch up with him before the newspapers do.

Paper from the library. (more…)

April in National Poetry Month, so for today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic, I’m going to do a poetic twist on That Artsy Reader Girl’s choice of “top ten books you’d be a fool not to read” and shout out novels in verse and books of poetry:

1. Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds: Reynolds does a flawless job in this novel in verse (written for young adults, but which everyone should read) of composing the narrative between our protagonist, a teen in an elevator out to avenge his brother’s death, and all the people he’s known who’ve been shot.
2. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse: A work of historical fiction, this novel in verse focuses on a teen who was injured in the fire that killed her mother, who is grieving at the same time as the Oklahoma prairie on which she lives is dying from Dust Bowl storms.
3. Me: Moth by Amber McBride: A teen whose family was killed in a car crash and the abused boy next door embark upon a desperate roadtrip and, as with most literary roadtrips, find out more about themselves and each other than they expected to.
4. Booked by Kwame Brown: As with Long Way Down, this is one of those books I point to where the form allows you to things you might not be able to in prose. In this case, it’s a boy who loves soccer and coming to love books and whose narration mimics the tempo of a soccer match.
5. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson: In this memoir in verse, Woodson looks back on a childhood spent in New York City and South Carolina in the 1960s and ’70s and aspiring to be a writer.
6. If God Invented Baseball: Poems by E. Ethelbert Miller: A local poet and journalist of renown, Miller infuses these poems with his love of the game.
7. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter: An homage to the Emily Dickinson poem, but with a twist, since it is not hope that perches in this family’s souls, but grief. And quite literally moves into their London flat, when a six-foot-tall crow shows up at the door to greet a poetry scholar and his two young sons in the quiet after everyone has left following the funeral of his wife/their mother.
8. Honest Engine by Kyle Dargan: Another D.C. poet, whose collection of poems runs the gamut from the State of the Union to sleep deprivation to a dozen or so poems about loved ones gone from this earth, with a surprising amount of science fiction fandom thrown in for good measure.
9. The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary by Laura Shovan: On the first day of 5th grade, a teacher informs her students they’re going to write a poem every day in class. The novel shares a selection from each of the 18 students over the course of a tumultuous year of change and activism. Magnificently, Shovan succeeds in giving each kid enough of a distinct voice that you get so you can recognize a poem’s author without checking first.
10. The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop: I would be remiss if I didn’t include the collected works by Bishop, one of my very favorite poets. Bishop loves to play with words and with traditional poetic forms. You probably read “One Art” long ago back in school. It’s worth revisiting now that you’re older, as are many of her other poems.

How about you? Do you have favorite poetry collections or novels in verse you’d recommend?

I read four books in February, three audiobooks and one in print:

A December to Remember by Jenny Bayliss

Eccentric curios shop dealer Augustus North of Rowan Thorp has died and left his three daughters an unusual bequest: They inherit his estate only if they complete two tasks as a unit. The three estranged women are unhappy about the plan, but each of them needs the money selling the property will bring. (more…)