First things first: Nowadays I can't think about Tuesdays without this song starting in my head. You can either blame or thank my boyfriend for that one. It's a mix for me, probably due to the mere-exposure effect.

Speaking of that dude I live with, we had our fifth(!) anniversary last week. He took me out to a lovely French dinner (très délicieux) on Thursday, and on Saturday I took him on an aborted brewery tour (their water mains broke down, boo). Since we had some time before we had to take our rental car back, we killed our last hour by seeing how much all-you-can-eat sushi we could stuff in our faces. We, er, outdid ourselves.

We also went to a college hockey game on Saturday night. I'm a pretty big hockey fan. Big, bearded guys splitting time between graceful skating and hitting each other? Sign me up. Beyond that, it's a pretty fast-paced sport, which makes it the perfect game to follow for space cadets like me.

All in all, a definite improvement over last week...

... and it just keeps getting better, because The Broke and the Bookish want me to talk about the top ten books I would classify as all-time favorites that I read within the last three years. I expected this to be harder than it ended up being!

All covers from Goodreads. Collage by Picmonkey.

The ones I have reviews for: A Wizard of Earthsea, A Clockwork Orange, The God of Small Things, White Teeth. This means that I read 4/10 since I began blogging! It's been a great few months of reading.

The ones I've mentioned my love for before: Anna Karenina (here), Possessing the Secret of Joy (here, here, and here), The Cider House Rules (here, here, and here).


That leaves Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, and We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. I love the first two for very similar reasons. MBM first ignited my love for public health/medical anthropology, and it wouldn't be a stretch to say it's been a huge influence in what I hope to do career-wise. Henrietta Lacks is similarly social-justice-inclined, and it is an engaging, well-reported story to boot. And then there's Kevin, a horrifying story of motherhood gone sour (or, really, sour from the start). If you can stomach gruesome violence and taking a hard look at what it would mean to not love your children, I can't recommend it more.

And last but not least, we have Bibliophile by the Sea's First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday Intros. I just started Authority, the second installment in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy:

In Control's dreams it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light. He is staring from a cliff down into an abyss, a bay, a cove. It always changes. He can see for miles into the still water. He can see ocean behemoths gliding there, like submarines or bell-shaped orchids or the wide hulls of ships, silent, ever moving, the size of them conveying such a sense of power that he can feel the havoc of their passage even from so far above. He stares for hours at the shapes, the movements, listening to the whispers echoing up to him... and then he fells. Slowly, too slowly, he falls soundless into the dark water, without a splash or ripple. And keeps falling.

What do you think? Would you read on?