Obviously we need a Third Coast getaway, right? I don't think I'll be able to get down to Mumto2's territory on this trip, alas, but British Air now flies direct from Heathrow to Austin....

The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Kenneth Grahame (Wind in the Willows), free on Google books.

Better than I imagine it is on a tape after you've played and rewound the same segment a dozen times. Seriously, given how many times one wants to hear the "teacher" repeating a phrase or paradigm, I can't imagine using a cassette recording. [ETA: Though apparently it worked fine for Kathy in Richmond, so who am I to say?] Used to be, Bolchazy-Carducci offered an annual $100 coupon for AL in their e-newsletter (subscription free). Since they started offering their new Latin program, the coupons have apparently stopped; but I have heard that a little polite interest by telephone may have resulted in a personal discount for someone I might know. Can't hurt to ask. That said, I paid full price for both levels ten years ago, and never regretted the expense. Great Girl at 15 audited a Virgil class here at Big State University which required three years of high school Latin as a pre-req, and discovered that the "two year" AL course fully equipped her for the course and put her ahead of nearly all the other kids. And now I'm using it with Middle Girl, for whom it's working very well. YMMV. [ETA again: Okay, I swear the last time I looked, the choice was DVDs or workbook and cassette tapes. But now I see it's workbook and CD. Dang, I would have gone for that option back in 2003. But is that only for level 1?]

We've never used Latin Prep, but Great Girl learned to read Latin well from Artes Latinae. We use the CD-ROMs, but that's just the still "frames" from the workbook - non-moving black-and-white line drawings, with dashes for typing in the letters - coordinated with the sound from the tapes. I've never seen the DVDs and had assumed the DVD format was no different from the CD-ROM format; but it sounds like there is a difference. Because the CD-ROM only combines the workbook and tapes in a convenient way, with better sound quality (I don't care for computer learning, either, but AL barely qualifies in this format); the reader, teacher's guide, and test booklets are all separate.

Agreed on incorporating therapy into lessons or other activities. ST folds nicely into reading and writing. And agreed also on maintaining the basics, plus at least one "strength" or favorite subject. The big time-suck is definitely therapy appointments, which interfere with everyone's homeschooling. We were terribly fortunate this year that Wee Girl's awesome therapist quit the awful place she'd been working and switched to in-home therapy. Any chance of in-home?

It must be the Irn-Bru. :D Or, as Wee Girl put it on the flight over, "the place with tea and jaffa cakes."

The room (deck?) with the swing is beautiful ... but wouldn't it take out those windows on the backswing? My girls would definitely be finding out. Finished #23, or maybe 22 or even 21 ... Robin Jenkins, The Cone-Gatherers, which was really excellent. Supposedly it's the most important post-war Scottish novel. Similar to Of Mice and Men, but with apologies to Steinbeck, much better. A quiet exploration of good and evil, the erosion of British class-based society, and human brotherhood against the backdrop of the distant war. Heartily recommended. The librarian was surprised I'd never heard of it, but pleased I was following it up with Rob Roy, and plans to extend my national literary education with some Buchan novels when I bring back the Scott. Oh and I learned that Buchan is not BYOO-can but BUKH-an, with that soft "ch" as in "loch." Middle Girl pleased the librarian by having already read Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, and even more by reading Conan Doyle's lesser-known "Brigadier Gerard" stories. Apparently Churchill was a big fan of Gerard.

Cette demoiselle-là would not fare well in either a midwestern blizzard nor a southwestern desert.

But don't let your tank get below half-empty when driving across west Texas. That feeling when you pull into a station at last, only to find they're all out.....

:) I read Colette in matronly maturity, while in the Chihuahuan Desert. I wonder how different our subjective experiences were. Heather, I "liked" your post because (1) you're better! (2) you're getting lots read! and (3) having had dengue fever is a lot awesomer sounding than having had a stomach bug. I do hope you're much better.

Those were my first dip into Colette. I'm disappointingly un-well-read. I do think I would have appreciated her more in my younger years. Much of the interest in Claudine at School for me was seeing how the French education system worked a century ago.

I've fallen into the trap of reading too many books simultaneously. In progress this week: The Poetic Edda (halfway done) Dmitri Merezhkovsky, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (very good, but alas left it at home accidentally) François Mauriac, The Life of Christ (very good, but basically devotional reading - best done in chunks) Robin Jenkins, The Cone-Gatherers (a good read, and must return to the library pretty soon) Robert Louis Stevenson, The Merry Men and Other Stories (title story is more of a novelette, and gripping - sort of Stevenson-does-Poe - but the Scots dialogue is occasionally indecipherable) I did finish 22. Henry James, Washington Square. A very nice little novel, and Catherine Sloper may now be one of my favorite James characters. Minor, but satisfying. Books read so far in 2014: 22. Henry James, Washington Square 21. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 20. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty 19. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain 18. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ ...? 16. Colette, Music-Hall Sidelights 15. Colette, Gigi 14. Colette, Claudine at School 13. Byron, Don Juan 12. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, Or The Royal Slave ...? 10. Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur 9. A.J. Symons, The Quest for Corvo 8. Austen, Mansfield Park 7. St Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias 6. Shakespeare, As You Like It 5. Maupassant, "Le Horla" 4. Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories 3. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables 2. Frederick Rolfe, Hadrian VII 1. Mann, Death in Venice & Other Stories Somehow I've missed two books, and my numbers don't work. My complete list is at home. Darn.

Aaaaaaa! No more Blyton!

Why, thank you. Really I think it's the eyebrows that pull off the look.

Hello, friends! Lots of airplane reading this week - unfortunately, most of it was reading aloud ghastly Enid Blyton stories about pixies and brownies and tiny houses with legs and precious children named things like Tom and Susie - followed by little reading time at all. But we got more settled, and I decided for a few weeks to set myself a When in Rome* challenge, and to that end have read James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which let me tell you was one strange book. Among other strangenesses, it features in a pivotal scene the atmospheric phenomenon called a "Brocken spectre," regarding which I refer the interested to Wikipedia, occurring in a place we expect to soon visit.** Next books in my personal challenge: The Cone-Gatherers, by Robin Jenkins (recommended by our local librarian), and a collection of R. L. Stevenson's stories. Now, to read the thread I've been neglecting! *not actually in Rome **still not Rome

Learned from my chemist dad: Don't pass glassware or filled containers to another person; set them down and let the other pick them up. When passing any item hand to hand, passer doesn't let go until passee says Thank You; passee doesn't say Thank You until she has a firm grip on item. Keep a metal container of sand, with a lid, in the kitchen. A scoop of sand puts out fires nicely. Or burning items can be dropped in and the lid put on. Safer than water and faster than a fire extinguisher. Wear eye protection when you should, even if it seems dumb/inconvenient. Plastic goggles are cheap. Hang them up somewhere for easy access.

I had been thinking that I couldn't contribute to the discussion because I really don't enjoy books with magic and fantasy elements. Then I realized I just finished the Thrymskvitha, about Thor tricking the giants into giving back his magic hammer. But of course that isn't fantasy, it's poetry. Yes, very different.

Reading through the Poetic Edda now. In translation, of course; and if I find out that Eliana has already read it in high school in the original Icelandic, I'm just going to pack it in and give up reading for Netflix. ;) It's a collection of Old Norse poems written down in the thirteenth century, but from pre-Christian oral sources going back an unknown number of centuries beforehand. The first poem, the Voluspo, includes a list of dwarfs from which Tolkien famously got all his dwarf names, plus Gandalf. The second poem, the Hovamol, is kind of a Book of Proverbs or Poor Richard's Almanack for Vikings. My favorite stanza, a version of "Early to bed, early to rise": He must early go forth who fain the blood Or the goods of another would get; The wolf that lies idle shall win little meat, Or the sleeping man success.

I've got a 1940 Australian book called The Man Who Loved Children sitting around, supposedly a classic. You could read it first and tell me if I should bother.

Well it's a very small book (one of those old Everymans), and I have to travel next week, so I'll read it then, and I think the Edda this week, since it's bulky. I'm very curious, and will report back ... but I've never read Dan Brown, so I won't be helpful in figuring out putative influences.

The thing is, it's not the word from "on high," but the word from "way back." The ancient Catholic understanding is that the Eucharist both signifies and embodies the unity of the Church. The Didache of the second century states the principle thus: "As this broken bread was scattered on the mountains [as wheat], but brought together was made one, so gather your Church from the ends of the earth into your kingdom." Even earlier, the bishop St Ignatius (110 A.D.) addressed the issue of intercommunion at non-Catholic assemblies, teaching explicitly that the Eucharist is one, as the flesh of Our Lord is one, and is a matter of concrete union with one's local bishop, necessarily apart from those in schism or holding heretical beliefs. It's perhaps worth noting that the explicit Catholic teaching against intercommunion - for Catholics among non-Catholics, or vice versa - is more ancient than, for example, explicit patristic teaching about the divinity of the Holy Spirit. This is a matter very central to Catholic life "on the ground," and has never therefore been left in any doubt.

Three. Shelves.

I'm not likely to be reading the book in question (that TBR pile ain't gettin smaller!), but if you have any interest in that slice of history, you might look at Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in the early eighth century and the most significant primary source for England in that period.

21. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty It strikes me how much modern liberalism focuses on rights, while Mill was primarily interested in liberty, and how that apparently subtle difference leads to very different conclusions. And how his views on what constitute personal liberty are so much more expansive than those of contemporary liberalism. I think this is a book I'd love to discuss, if anyone else wants to read it (or re-read; I imagine I'm not the only one here who was first introduced to Mill as an eager freshman). Several books on the TBR pile; which one to choose? It's high time for some poetry, and I got started on the Edda, but was distracted; then there's the Mauriac, unfinished from my Lenten reading; and this strange book from the dollar shelf, called The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, published in Russian in 1900, with nothing but five-star reviews on Amazon and a claim that Dan Brown took much of The Da Vinci Code from this book. Oh, and Gibbon keeps calling me from the shelf, reminding me of my resolution to read him....

Oh Rosie. I am so sorry.