I am on hiatus. Which is why I am making book recommendations for April a week into April. I will give you this much (and a few other blogs) and then disappear again for another week or so. Life.

April is Easter, at least this year. (What’s with the lunar date thing?) I have yet to read a great Easter-y book to recommend for you, though I started Ben Hur like two years ago. Haven’t gotten past the first quarter and won’t this year, either.

But I do love to re-read Anne of Green Gables (and the series) in the springtime. I just feel it and then it happens. However, this year I am going to scootch on over to one of L. M. Montgomery’s other books and we’re starting with Emily of New Moon, the first book in the Emily series. I have read it a couple times and love it, but am usually distracted back to Anne. I have not reviewed it here, so that’s just a little part of the reason why I’m headed there this spring instead of Anne.

April is also poetry month. I have a few books of poetry (and single poems) that I have reviewed and can recommend:

• “The Jabberwocky,” from Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Caroll (with commentary, as well)
• How to Eat a Poem, The American Poetry & Literacy Project
• Brand New Ancients, Kae Tempest
• Asphodel & Other Love Poems, William Carlos Williams
• Glass, Irony and God, Ann Carson
• “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” William Butler Yeats
• “Kingdom Animalia,” Aracelis Girmay
• “A Song in the Front Yard,” Gwendolyn Brooks
• “The Afterlife,” Billy Collins
• “Falling,” James Dickey
• “The Long Boat,” Stanley Kunitz
• Spinning the Vast Fantastic, Britton Shurley
• Hell, I Love Everybody, James Tate

So back to Easter and Poetry Month.

I helped set up the poetry display for the bookshop. Here are the books that I pulled from the shelves:

• Call Us What We Carry, Amanda Gorman
• The Divine Comedy (Michael Palma trans.), Dante Alighieri
• The Book of Psalms, Robert Alter
• A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein
• For There Is Always Light (journal), Amanda Gorman
• The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry
• Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
• If Not, Winter, Anne Carson
• You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, Ada Limon ed.
• The Odyssey (Emily Wilson transl.), Homer
• Kitchen Hymns, Padraig O Tuama
• New and Selected Poems, Mary Oliver
• No One Is on the Line, Mohsen Mohamed
• Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World, Padraig O Tuama ed.
• Water, Water, Billy Collins
• The Sonnets, William Shakespeare
• Modern Poetry, Diane Seuss
• A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker

A few books of poetry I am looking forward to reading sometime:

• Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Pablo Neruda
• The Complete Poems, Emily Dickinson
• Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg
• Mountain Interval, Robert Frost
• Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
• Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
• Metamorphoses, Ovid
• 100 Selected Poems, E.E. Cummings
• The Essential Rumi, Rumi
• Annie Allen, Gwendolyn Brooks
• American Primitive, Mary Oliver
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes
• Spring and All, William Carlos Williams
• Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke
• Collected Poems, Wallace Stephens
• Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie, Maya Angelou

As for some Easter reads that could work. (Easter books are about as common as Thanksgiving songs):

• Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace
• Chocolat, Joanne Harris
• Miz Fannie Mae’s Fine New Easter Hat, Melissia Milich

Some of the most anticipated publications for April 2025 needs to begin with Emily Henry’s 2025 summer read, Great Big Beautiful Life. It comes out on April 15th and there will be midnight release parties so you could look into that if you are a big fan (and there are many of you). If you want a copy right away, I would suggest pre-ordering a copy ASAP, which you can probably do through your local bookstore just as easily as elsewhere.

For one reason or another, I am also really looking forward to Audition by Katie Kitamura.

Other new publications this month:

• The Bright Years, Sarah Damoff
• Heartwood, Amity Guige
• A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett
• Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, Kylie Lee Baker
• Say You’ll Remember Me, Abby Jimenez
• Flirting Lessons, Jasmine Guillory
• My Best Friend’s Honeymoon, Meryl Wilsner
• Where Shadows Meet, Patrice Caldwell
• Watch Me, Tahereh Mafi
• Protocols, Andrew D. Huberman
• Fearless (Powerless Triology #3), Lauren Roberts
• The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits, Jennifer Weiner
• The Geographer’s Map to Romance (Love’s Academic #2), India Holton (which I should have a review for shortly)
• No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, Gardiner Harris
• Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (Vera Wong #2), Jesse Q. Sutanto
• How to Seal Your Own Fate (Castle Knoll Files #2), Kristen Perrin
• Gifted & Talented, Olivie Blake
• Don’t Sleep with the Dead, Nghi Vo
• To Save and Destroy, Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Vanishing World, Sayaka Murata
• The Pretender, Jo Harkin

I have already read the ARC of Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang and it has hit summer book potential. To see who I recommend it for and if it’s for you, see my review HERE.

The movie, The Friend, just dropped in theaters at the tail end of March. You could hurry up and read the book, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, first.

April 2025.

• We Deserve Monuments, Jas Hammonds (DNFed)
• Normal People, Sally Rooney (which I’ve already read)
• Senlin Ascends (Books of Babel #1), Josiah Bancroft
• The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (re-read from 20 years ago)
• Modern Poetry, Diane Seuss

ARCs, poetry, and other random books I hope to get to real soon:

• I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com, Kimberly Lemming (DNFed)
• What Pecan Light, Han Vanderhart
• The Geographer’s Map to Romance (Love’s Academic #2), India Holton
• And Yet Held, T. De Los Reyes
• If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun, Christopher Citro
• A Family Matter, Claire Lynch
• The Symmetry of Fish, Su Cho
• Worth Fighting For, Jesse Q. Sutanto
• The Phoenix Pencil Company, Allison King
• The Familiar, Leigh Bardugo
• We Do Not Part, Han Kang
• The Fraud, Zadie Smith
• The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong
• Ghost Roast, Shawnelle Gibbs
• Swordheart (The World of the White Rat), T. Kingfisher
• The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman
• The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad #2), Tana French

March 2025. Nearly every book I read in March I would recommend. Some more emphatically than others.

• And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
• A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes#1), Brittany Cavarallo
• Olga Dies Dreaming, Xochitl Gonzalez
• Dear Life, Alice Munro
• Big, Vashti Harrison
• House of Fury, Evilio Rosero (caveats of excessive violence and sexual assault)
• The First Sister (First Sister Trilogy #1), Linden A. Lewis
• In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1), Tana French