257 books to choose from for our spring reading challenge 🌼
 Feeling like your TBR needs some ~ spring cleaning ~ ? We've got six fun categories to inspire you — and this post gives you 257 (!!) recommendations to choose from.
More for your TBR list Fun & funny Quizzes
From Scaachi Koul: "Beverly Cleary Made It OK To Be A Ramona In A World Of Susans"  I came out of the womb annoying and that was that. My brother was 12 years older than me, my cousins 15 years older, and my parents had not exactly been planning on having another baby in their forties. I was short and clumsy and loud, quick to anger and ready to cry over any personal grievance, real or perceived. I had a bowl cut when what I wanted was a Shirley Temple perm. Younger sisters were supposed to be delicate peonies always learning from those who knew better, but I, for better or worse, was a little asshole.
I may have been a jerk, but I was a literate one, desperate to see a fellow monster in print. Even when little girls in literature were considered scrappy, they were rarely as plainly unpleasant as me. I didn't want an underdog you could root for; I wanted to live vicariously through an unrepentant nightmare of a human being. There are very, very few books written for little assholes — except, maybe, the Harry Potter series, if only for the pedantic fanbase it has created — but there is almost no art for jerks with underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes, and very few books dedicated to helping little kids harness their own bad behavior. But then there was Ramona Quimby, arguably Beverly Cleary's most famous creation.
Last Thursday, Cleary died at 104. She wrote more than 40 books before her retirement and sold more than 91 million copies worldwide. Her books were beloved by kids everywhere; they perfectly captured what it was like to be little and klutzy and excited (though sometimes apprehensive) about the big, strange world. The Ramona series was my favorite.
For your reading list  Credit: ndpublishing All the Poems by Stevie Smith Prolific poet and doodler Stevie Smith wrote from 1937 to her death in 1971, but she wasn't on my radar until this fantastic New York Review of Books piece on the 2016 collection of her work, All the Poems. "She is often described as dotty, batty, silly, odd, childish, droll," Hermione Lee writes in the review from the same year, to which I responded: Okay, I'm listening. I picked it up five years ago but I keep it close by — I've found it especially comforting this past year.
These poems and corresponding drawings reveal an artist so supremely strange and funny, but also prescient, lonely, irreverent, morbid. Smith was vicious about the publishing industry and rejected propriety as a prerequisite to art. She was critical of religion. She was bisexual, and wrote aching, sexy, playful poems to the men and women she loved. She was a vocal animal rights activist. She was vibrant and depressed.
You get a poem like that, and then a few pages later you find "The Songster" — four playful lines about Miss Pauncefort, who "sang at the top of her voice," unbothered by the fact that no one has any idea what she's singing about.
Smith was so much and she didn't let anyone tell her that one aspect of who she was negated another — her writing is a celebration of all of our inherent contradictions. Get your copy. —Arianna Rebolini
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