Oh, thank you! I'm leaving soon to go babysit my grand nephew so I downloaded it. I'll probably listen tomorrow.

How timely is this? The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time focuses on Middlemarch today! You can listen via the website or download the program.

I finished this section last night but am hesitant to post given the wacky turn the "clubs" have taken. Thanks again to Kathy for herding the Middlemarchers.

Alice in Wonderland indeed. I have to log in every 4th or 5th time I come to the WTM forums and as of this morning there is an icon informing me I've been invited to join the Lit Hub club. And now our current reading thread is under part of an essential oils club!! I have a double roasted garlic infused olive oil that makes veggies and pasta quite yummy. I'm thinking it might just be an essential part of my kitchen going forward.... I'm going to sit in front of the tv now with my glass of wine. It has been a busy day of music and teaching -- no brain cells are available for reading tonight!

Is anyone else seeing both Essential Oils club (where I am now) and Literary Hub in their clubs list? The Literary Hub has about half of this thread but no other content. Our clubs seem very Alice-In-Wonderland-ish at the moment!

The last time I came here I came by clicking on a notification which took me straight to this thread, so I didn't realize the name had changed until I read the posts mentioning it. I did see the words Essential Oils briefly pass by but I must have thought it was another club and I was seeing a club title from the front page as it took me to Lit Hub. If you read the site news thread you'll see that other groups have had strange name changes too. Hopefully it means they're working on the last of the club issues and that they'll be fixed soon. I flew through Isaac's Storm in a day. It was written in such a way as to make it a page turner, even for me who already knew a lot about that hurricane and its aftermath. Funnily enough, I've tried to read Erik Larson before and was bored with both The Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts. The former I tried in both written and audio book form and just couldn't get far. I had 2 Audible credits and will be earning another in a few days so I went to browse and see if anything jumped out at me. On the front page I saw A Higher Loyalty and decided to get it. It's narrated by James Comey himself. Right now I'm about 1/3 of the way through listening to The Cider House Rules so it will be a while before I get to it. I'm almost done with Book 5 of Middlemarch. I haven't read any further in my other books because I want to get caught up on this one. I shouldn't have detoured and read Isaac's Storm but I couldn't help it. When a book says "read me now" I must obey. :D

Olive for this Italian-American. I wonder if other private groups are still having this problem. Yes, canola too. Canola is my regular cooking oil with olive oil being used for certain cooked foods and always the choice for cold dishes and salad dressings. Both are essential in my house too. :) I love it! :D

Maybe we should become the essential readers? Safe travels!

At home I use both safflower and olive, but here in Spain, olive is definitely the essential oil! :D (not posting much till I get back, because phone only, and only when I have WiFi)...

In honor of our new group identity, I offer this currently free Kindle book: Essential Oils: Detailed Essential Oils For Beginners Guide For Physical and Emotional Health Regards, Kareni

Olive. Canola is also essential in my house, but I think some people don't count that as real. Or essential.

@fastweedpuller I just added "The Road to Unfreedom" as a recommendation at my library. They usually buy recommended books, I just have to be patient!

Yes, it's a collection of academic and general interest articles on authoritarianism edited by Cass Sunstein.

I wish we were private again. I have a mini rant on that topic, having been recently subjected to a facebook article on essential oils and cancer that raised my blood pressure. It had nothing to do with dad, but he's not doing well. So, it made me more irritated than I might have been. I finished The Vintage Caper and the third book of Middlemarch. I need to read Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers for my next book club meeting. I've also started the Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits. Mysteries are wonderfully distracting.

I just refreshed the page on my laptop and noticed that as well!! What a hoot! To stay on (ahem) topic: olive, sunflower, walnut or sesame?

WEIRD I bookmarked our dear Lit Hub from the 2nd Topics tab, all the better to see what's new. Having just wandered over to my saved bookmark, tapping it, I see that we're now... the Essential Oils group! Yay us.

And then you sent it to me for my husband; he enjoyed it. I then passed it on to a woman in my book group. She liked it, too. Thank you again! Regards, Kareni

Finished last night (instead of sleeping; how I love middle age!) my Baudelaire. Much of it consists of a section called "My Heart Laid Bare," full of opinionated and often cryptic thoughts that passed through his head. One must read these keeping in mind that he was in his early 20s and French. If his calling it "My Heart Laid Bare" hadn't already told you that. Baudelaire really had it in for Belgians. Also for George Sand: (I swear when I first read that, I read "telegraph" as "twitter.") Having finished my private Lemony Snicket mini-challenge consisting of Baudelaire and Oliver Twist (Wee Girl has been watching the new season of Unfortunate Events), I need to get reading on the Ovid I'm supposed to be doing with Middle Girl, and fit in Far From the Madding Crowd. Maybe in that lovely 2 to 4 a.m. slot again. Chiguirre, Is the title of Can It Happen Here? derived from Sinclair Lewis' novel, It Can't Happen Here? I gather there was a little renaissance in sales for that Sinclair recently.

I've had Prairie Fires on hold at the library for months. Thanks for the heads-up that it's long--I'll have to read fast since I can't renew it!

The influence of inheritance--or lack thereof--certainly comes to play in Book 5. Casaubon's motives were selfish but I am not sure that it was his intention to create rumors concerning Dorothea and Will or if he was more focused on creating an insurance policy guaranteeing that his work would be finished by his wife. He certainly had a narcissistic view of his own self importance. But did he intend to deprive his wife of happiness? One can't help but feel that some revelation is being foreshadowed. (While it is never mentioned, I wonder if that "Polish blood" implies that Will is further corrupted by Catholic or Jewish blood.) Fred, Fred, Fred. I have so little patience with this guy. Mary might be better off with Mr. Farebrother--even if he comes with a pack of women in tow. And then there is Mr. Raffles! What nefarious schemes follow? Lydgate strikes me as naive in some ways. Yes, he is a good medical man but his initial insistence on buying furniture, silverplate, etc. on credit to please Rosamond is perhaps not unusual given our own culture where easy credit leads to bad financial decisions. That relationship is one that has me scratching my head. Initially we saw Lydgate as a man more focused on research than sociability. It strikes me that he may have been better off with a wife who could help him advance his social position, i.e. a wife who would move the local widows to donate to the new hospital. Is there any depth to Rosamond?

I understand from a LIW fan friend of mine that Prairie Fires is also a pretty long book, chiguirre. I have not done the proper vetting at all to see if the back third etc of the book is notes, but... Sometimes we have to have limits! I have a few in my stack (looking at you, Dark Money) which guilt me daily, as I know I should finish them...

I read Prairie Fires on Christmas break. It's an in depth account of the lives of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. The best part is the biography of the Ingalls family in the beginning of the book. I didn't enjoy the last part which focused on RWL. She had some mental health struggles and it was painful to read about her life. Trinqueta stopped after the first part about the Ingalls family and enjoyed that a lot. That might be the best course if you find the last part hard going. I hate not finishing a book (it's not rational, it can be a pain when a book just doesn't thrill me, but I will slog on to the end) so I finished it.

I've finished listening to Shrill and Dear Madam President with Trinqueta. They go together well, sort of flip sides of the same coin of how to be female in our current world. I also finished SWB's Rethinking School. It isn't new information if you're a board regular but it is well written and an excellent place to start for newbies. I'm working on The Door, American Innovations and Can It Happen Here?. I'd recommend all of them with a few cautions. The Door is traumatic, it's well written and fascinating, but it's traumatic. American Innovations is a collection of stories mostly from the New Yorker so you might have read them already. If you haven't, you're in for a treat! Can It Happen Here? is a compilation of articles, some are more academic than others. Overall I've enjoyed listening to it but there are a couple of yawns in there too. I'd say it's best for people who enjoy political science and looking at the larger trends behind the headlines. There are no stunning revelations. It just puts current events in a broader perspective. I'm going to start Less and The Gulf this week unless I get sidetracked. I've been meaning to read them and the Pulitzers gave me the jab I needed to put them on top of the pile.

I read the non-fiction book A Kim Jong-il Production a few years ago. The kidnapped South Korean actress, Choi Eun-hee, has passed away. If you enjoy non-fiction, you might want to take a look at this book. It's definitely a case of truth being stranger than fiction.

Thanks for this, Kareni. I just got four of the titles listed.