What I read this year (April)

21. The Martian, by Andy Weir (finished April 5). In which astronaut Mark Watney is left for dead on Mars when his team is forced to scrub their mission, and then has to figure out how to survive alone long enough to be rescued. I loved this book, and kept reading bits of it out loud to my husband, many of them having to do with disco music and Aquaman. I'm even interested to see the movie they're making of it, though I am not the world's biggest Matt Damon fan.

22. Doctor Who: A History, by Alan Kistler (April 7). More geeky fun, and I even learned some stuff I hadn't known: like the fact that Sean Pertwee was considered for the role and turned it down on the ground that his dad's performance had been so iconic.

23. Avatar: The Last Airbender--The Search, by Gene Luen Yang (April 19). In which Zuko recruits his mad sister Azula to help him search for their long-missing mother. I was late to the party for Avatar, catching up with the whole series on DVD years after it first came out, but I was hooked from the very first episode. I'm really enjoying these official sequel comics, and I've learned to wait for the hardcover deluxe edition with creators' commentary.

24. Time and Again, by Jack Finney (April 20). In which illustrator Si Morley learns to walk back and forth between the 1970s and the 1880s. There's really no need to go into detail about how time travel works in order to have a fascinating time travel story...though I had some issues with the ending, as I said at the time.

25. To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing, by Simon Garfield (April 26). I also enjoyed the author's book about typefaces, which just goes to illustrate what a huge geek I am. I always had fun writing letters, and I'm told I wrote extremely amusing ones back when I was in college and grad school, before email really took off and I got out of the habit of handwritten correspondence. This year I participated in the Month of Letters challenge, and I fully plan to do so again.