Top Ten Tuesday: 10 Books on My Spring To-Read List

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature from The Broke and the Bookish.

It’s finally warming up here in Idaho. I’ve always liked winter, but the weeks and weeks of snow and below 10 degree weather have been getting to me. Normally, spring is my least favorite season (daylight savings is the worst), but this year I could not be more excited that it has decided to make an appearance. I’m still getting used to the idea that I do not need to take my wool coat with me everywhere I go.

I think for many people spring means getting to go outside again, but for me it means getting to read outside again, which I love to do until the second bug comes near me.

Here are 10 books I plan on reading this season (you know, in between moving and visitors and wedding planning):

• The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown

Our intrepid book club leader has chosen this book for our March meeting. She was a coxswain for her college rowing team. I’ve never read a lot about crew (or about sports in general), but I’m interested to see where this book goes as the story and time are really interesting.

• The Orenda by Joseph Boyden

This is our book for the April book club meeting (at least I think it is. Maybe don’t quote me on this…). I know virtually nothing about it except for what I recently read about it on Goodreads, where it has excellent reviews. It seems to be a book about the Iroquois tribe and the Huron tribe, and is the story a young woman who was captured, her captor, and a missionary who travels with them.

• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

One of our members chose this book for May. I had heard the title of this book before, but I didn’t even realize it was nonfiction until I looked it up today to find the author’s name for this post. This book about Savannah, Georgia seems dark and strange–I can’t wait to read it.

• The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance by Anders Rydell

I plucked this book off the shelf at the library, and I don’t know anything more about it than the title. But I figured since it has to do with WWII and books, I’m pretty much guaranteed to like it.

• Nine Folds Makes a Paper Swan by Ruth Gilligan

Another book that I found by chance, this book’s title intrigued me. The story follows members of Ireland’s Jewish community following WWII.

• Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

This is the only book from last year’s book club meetings that I haven’t finished yet. Mostly because the little paperback sort of got lost behind all the shiny library hardcovers I plunked in front of it.

• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

I don’t know why, but I really want to read this book that has sat on my shelf forever with increasing urgency.

• The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende

I really enjoy reading Isabel Allende’s work, and when I read about this book in the NY Times Book Review, I knew I had to pick it up.

• In the Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique

This is another book I found while strolling down the library’s shelves. It follows a family whose ancestors were shipwrecked on a Caribbean island.

• Love and Louis XIV by Antonia Fraser

This book follows the women in Louis XIV’s life. I’m fascinated with this time period in French history, and I’m always interested to read about the women behind the men.

Have you read any of these books? Do any of them pique your interest like they did mine? And what are you reading this spring? Let me know in the comments.