This week’s Top Ten Tuesday asks about the books we buy (or are given) that languish unread on our shelves. Here are ten of mine (I have way more than ten to choose from), including some from my favorite authors:

1. Frederik Backman’s My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry
2. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
3. The Odyssey by Homer
4. Villette by Charlotte Bronte
5. Toni Morrison’s Paradise
6. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
7. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
8. On Writing by Stephen King
9. Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford
10. Bill Bryson’s At Home

Any of these books you can’t believe I haven’t read and should get to immediately? What titles are on your list?

This weekend included a delicious lunch (I had a lemon-muffin French toast with strawberries. Yum!) and a stroll around Eastern Market with Sarah on Saturday, a bike ride home on one of the local bikeshare system I belong to’s new e-assist bikes, and a trip to the movies. We saw Bohemian Rhapsody, which we really enjoyed. If you prefer your celebrity biopics to be full of ruthless truths and raunchy scenes, than this will not be the picture for you, but if you appreciate how friends become family, how relationships can be complex, and examples of collaboration in the truest sense (oh, and the music of Queen), then you’ll likely enjoy it.

Today, we cruised through the farmers market for some breakfast and a few items, spent several hours at the garden, and ended the daylight portion of the day at the park with hot beverages. We had vegetarian pepper steak for supper featuring peppers from our garden, and in the evening I got in some reading and knitting while snuggling with the cats.

It was a good weekend for us. How was yours?

Apparently what I’ve done with my extra hour of time tonight is to spend it knitting and listening to Christmas music. Quietly, of course, because Rudi shouldn’t have to have dreams of sugar plums dancing in his head quite this early.

Honestly, it’s not so much that I’ve been craving Christmas carols, but it’s an effort to get a handle on the holidays this year. The past couple years, holiday tasks I enjoy have started slipping through my fingers, leaving me feeling stressed. I thought if I got a bigger jump on some of them, I might be able to better appreciate the process and the month of December. Plus, my library lets you download three songs a week for free to keep and I get more options for my annual Christmas cd if I get twenty songs for free. So I started listening a couple weeks ago and have been spending a few hours each week auditioning music, as it were. The music ranges from good to bad, from traditional to modern, and from instrumental to pop. Plus, it includes a range of international singers I might not encounter otherwise. I mean, sure, I’m probably not likely to include a German lullaby version of “Rudolph,” but you never know. As my dad will tell you, I sometimes find some pretty weird songs.

Right now, it’s Jessie James Decker’s “Baby! It’s Christmas” that’s playing. It’s the last song on her album and the only one that will get a second listen. But I probably wouldn’t give it great odds unless it really grows on me with that next play later in the month.

Oh, and speaking of Christmas, I’ll open up signups for the Virtual Advent Tour on the 15th.

I admit to being a little at sea this weekend. But here’s what I have on tap:

• Do laundry. And I need to get to the bank to procure quarters in order to accomplish that.
• Watch a movie. I have a discount ticket to see Bohemian Rhapsody, which is playing at the big single-screen theater in town.
• Ride a bike.
• Stop by the library. (The new Galbraith novel should finally be in for me!)
• Shop at the farmers market.
• Take part in the final cleanup/part of the garden this season. Also, pick the rest of my peppers and dig up my potatoes and any peanuts I grew.
• Come up with a game plan for cleaning our apartment. (Our Christmas party is in a month.)
• Finish at least one knitting project and one book. (This week it’s totally doable — I’m on the second toe, and Harry is in the Chamber!)
• Do some text-banking for a national campaign. I don’t want to, but I should, since we’re down to the wire.
• Paint my nails. (I didn’t get them done for Halloween and I have some cleaning to do, so I suppose this isn’t urgent, but I think it would make me happy.)

I mean, I know that seems like a lot, but it doesn’t feel like the right lot. And I know it mostly seems like the same stuff I do every weekend, but I feel like it’s missing some element of fun, but the fun stuff going on isn’t my cup of tea. I’m sure it’ll all work out, though. It always does.

What are you hoping to do this weekend? Do you have a plan for that extra hour? Sleep? Campaigning? More time at the bars?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. My fall volleyball team finished up its season with a loss, a trip to the bar, and the promise of playing together again in January when the season starts back up at that location. We aren’t a great team, or even good, really, but we enjoy ourselves and each other, and are a supportive team. (I have a new team that I’ll play with for the next six weeks and an offer from our team captain to play pick-up volleyball at her school after work on Tuesdays.)

2. Working in stockinette in the round and re-reading a favorite book (Harry Potter and Chamber of Secrets, the illustrated edition) work well together. I don’t need to look at my work, and I know what happens in the story, so it is less urgent that I turn the page *right this minute*, rather than after I get to the end of the needle, but I make lots of progress because I don’t get bored.

3. Between a costume contest at my office and handing out candy on our stoop, I saw a number of great outfits this Halloween. My favorites were the gender bending Mary Poppins and chimney-sweep Bert (apparently the young woman ordered the Mary Poppins costume online only to find when it arrived that it was far too long for her petite frame and her male friend was game to switch things up); Sesame Street‘s The Count, who had spats, fancy glasses, and numbers on a string and who did the laugh on request (her officemates were Bert and Kermit); and a boy dressed as Edgar Allen Poe, complete with fake raven and quill pen.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

Wishing you a Happy Halloween from the Burrow!