Top Ten Tuesday: Books I'm Ready to Read for Spring 2020

"Top Ten Tuesday" is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl!

Okay, gang! We're three months into 2020, and so far, the world has survived a giant portion of it being on fire, the death of a global celebrity, and now, a country-spanning pandemic that - if left unchecked - could bring us to the brink of medical catastrophe. How's everyone doing?

I know. Me too. And I'm sorry. Let's just try to read through it all, together.

Here are some of the books I'll be attempting to ride out self-isolation with this Spring:

currently reading 

1. Wine All the Time, Marissa Ross
Ross was a comedy writer and assistant to Mindy Kaling when she started keeping a blog of all of the terrible wines she used to drink in her spare time. Over the years, her taste in wine got better, as did her ability to translate those notes into a popular, millenial-drawing blog, Wine, All the Time, and even brought her to the desk of the Wine Editor for Bon Appetit magazine, a title she currently holds. Now dispensing all the advice, and dishing all the insider know-how, this book has not only been truly informative, but really compelling to read, especially for a novice.

2. The Hours, Michael Cunningham 
A Pulitzer Prize-winning celebration of the lit lover, which follows separate narratives through the fictitious lives of three women: opening with Virginia Woolf on the morning she attempts suicide, then pivoting to a '90s socialite named Clarissa as she prepares for a party, and a '49 housewife reading Mrs. Dalloway, while planning her husband's birthday.

I first heard about this book while, appropriately enough, reading Mrs. Dalloway for a Modern Literature class in college. I'd picked it up on a whim while browsing a bookstore earlier this year, and haven't been able to get it out of my head, so I decided to pick it up... and so far, it's making me want to reread Mrs. Dalloway again, too. (Should I have added it to this list?)

next on the docket

3. The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next #1), Jasper Fforde 
An old favorite reread, and a series for which I own and have read all seven novels, that has really been begging for a retread recently. I don't know what it is about the slightly insane, absurdist British humor that runs throughout this novel, but it makes me feel like I'm back in high school, drinking tea out of a giant mug at our kitchen table. I think that's the vibe I need right now, while we're all hunkering down in quarantine.

4. My Life with the Saints, Fr. James Martin
Well, I may not be able to go to church anymore - after the Archdiocese of Seattle decided that all masses should be cancelled / switched to an online platform due to the Covid-19 crisis - but that certainly doesn't mean Lent itself is cancelled. So maybe my life is due for a little more theological edification now, more than ever? For the record, Rachel Hurd Evans will be reappearing in my reading lists in the near future, too.

5. Jane Austen: A Life, Claire Tomlinson
This is going to be, I think, my big author biography of the Spring, if not the 2020 (Last year's was Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws, a 600-plus-page behemoth detailing the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Shelley). My two previous attempts for getting into this densely-packed history only made it about a chapter in, but I think that has to do so much with what time of year it is... Spring just sets itself up so much better for reading Austen, don't you think? Maybe I should try picking up Persuasion, when I'm done?

hoping to pick up soon 

6. Food Grown Right, in Your Backyard!, Brad Halm and Colin McCrate
I don't know how the hell it got to be March, but it feels like just yesterday my family returned from a two-week vacation at the end of August to find that my tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash had been abysmally mistreated in my absence. This book was one of my favorites for planning out my first garden last year - more on that in a later blog post - and I'm excited that I now have a copy of it of my own with which to plot my plots to my green thumb's content.

7. Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows #2), Leigh Bardugo
If you follow me on Goodreads, you might have noticed that I recently finishing reading Neal Schusterman's Scythe. This is because my baby brother has made the selfish and cruel decision to go to college in September, and leave me behind forever... which means that I'm on a hard deadline to finish all of the books he's recommended to me before he goes. I loved Six of Crows last year, and I need to finish up the sequel in the duology before the television show premieres!

8. Nothing Fancy, Alison Roman 
Okay, yes, yes, this is a cookbook. But in case you haven't noticed, I've kind of got a good thing going with those around here. To be totally honest, March's installment in my cookbook-reading resolution hasn't exactly been going so well - I blame the difficulty in shoe-horning in recipe components to an emergency prep grocery list - but with Roman's humor and candor, I've got good feelings about the book I've planned out for April.

9. The Kissing Quotient, Helen Hoang
As if I'm going to make it through being confined to a house with my two younger siblings, university course-planning Dad, and hospital emergency management (I know, yikes) Mom, for the foreseeable future, and not drown my sorrows in the cooling stream of Cupid's chosen genre? The dating apps may be down, but if anyone's willing to court me via email, Facetime, or carrier pigeon, I'm open to it. In the meantime, I'll be picking up this critically-lauded romance novel.

10. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey
Spring is a great time of year for cleaning out your closets and cabinets, and brain. Time for my biannual reread of this, my favorite self-help book of all time. Sometimes, it's just nice to have a check-in with yourself, and figure out what sorts of things you can be improving on in your life. And the good news is, I'll have plenty of time to practice my good habits at home before real life returns and waylays them again.

What's in your Top Ten? Let me know, in the comments below!