Near to finishing my Chekhov collected plays. I'm going to pretend "The Cherry Orchard" counts as a color.

Yes, actually that's what first prompted me, in my misspent youth, to pick up a copy of Labyrinths. Also Yasser Arafat's birthday. And the anniversary of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. (My apologies to any Huguenots.)

We were buying some food from one of the trendy food trucks in town, this particular one owned by a nice Russian immigrant couple. The man asked me why Middle Girl wasn't in school, and I said she didn't go to school. He looked shocked and said "What?! How old?" When I told him she was nine, he was more confused, and I explained that I taught her at home. He suddenly had a look of clarity, and said his mother took him out of school in Russia and taught him, too. From his age, I'd guess that to have been the mid to late Nineties. I'd had no idea that was being done in Russia. If his English (or I suppose my Russian) had been better, I'd have loved to have learned more about his education.

Not at all; in fact the south-of-the-river side of Austin has become quite trendy. (When I was growing up, its reputation was for being couch-on-porch, flamingo-in-tire redneck. ;) ). The east side (east of the interstate) has the reputation for being the "bad" side of Austin, but if you look at the actual data, the southeast (south of the river, east of I-35), the northern portion that's north of Hwy 290 and between Hwy 183 (Research Blvd.) and I-35, and the area immediately west of the UT campus are the high-crime residential areas of Austin. If you're looking at the bedroom communities/ outlying towns like Dripping Springs or Buda, you're way outside the "bad" part of anything.

Hi! You should get yourself signed onto the Austin Area Homeschoolers Yahoo! groups and ask these excellent questions on the Discuss Board. I live in central Austin so don't have the info you need, but there are many, many homeschoolers in all the places you mention, and they'll be happy to answer your questions. If you fit their demographic, you might also try contacting CHEACT (Protestant Christian homeschool group in the Austin area). I'm not affiliated with them, so I don't know how helpful they'd be, but like AAH they have a big membership.

Thank you. :)

Being very fond of both those books, and trusting your tastes, I now have no choice but to go check Pym out from the library.. . . (But not this afternoon, because it's my birthday and I'm being taken out to the girls' favorite eatery. :) )

In the right light, it's many lovely reds colors.

It's easier to see that red is a noun in "It's a lovely red" if you pluralize it: "In fact, it's many lovely reds, each darker than the last" or some such. Only nouns form plurals with the signal -s.

I'm not sure I'd say they're exactly ciphers, with a certain correct answer. Insofar as they are cipher-like, though, the most famous story in the collection, "The Library of Babel," may be the closest thing to a key. Many (all?) of the stories are inter-referential, also. Happy reading!

That's the nickname for a different city. Probably Oakland. I don't even remember what challenges I signed up for. It's all sort of deteriorated into the "What Looks Interesting Now In My To-Read Stack" challenge. I'm past my goal of book-every-other-week, though. It helps that Wee Girl is doing more independent reading this year.

So far, just learning of the existence of Buzz Rounds has sufficed to prompt the memorization of primes for my girls. http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/blog/5775 You can't win if you think 97 is prime! Chanting primes is also useful for the anxious when being given shots. But, on regentrude's side here, we don't require it; it just happens as you learn the math, and then gets extended as one of those household competitive show-offy things. Like memorizing squares, cubes, and digits of pi.

For some reason, I had a hankering this week for Anton Chekhov, and have started through my Collected Plays Of. Let's just remind ourselves who we're talking about here: Now you may be thinking, "So he's passable by modern standards; but was Chekhov properly appreciated for his genius in 19th-century Russia?" Why yes, yes he was. Also still (still!) reading Pindar, and The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.

One of the Lais of Marie de France (12th century) is a werewolf story. Great Girl studied it last year. October spooky reading thoughts: Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; Poe, of course; maybe Ray Bradbury? - it's been a long time; James, The Turn of the Screw; and I've got my eye on The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories which has been sitting around.

Ditch him and re-read Dante. ;)

Treasure Island is best read aloud to a breathlessly engaged ten-year-old who begs for Just One More Chapter. Probably the only way to read it, really.

I'm just jealous. I bet it wasn't any 105 degrees in Canterbury. And my next exciting trip is to San Antonio. Yee-ha.

Better than A High Wind in Jamaica? And Treasure Island? Now I feel I must read it.

For real extra credit, you have to make your pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral and recite the General Prologue at St Thos. Becket's altar: "Whan that Aprille with hir shoures sote/ The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote...."

Finished 25. Jean Genet, Funeral Rites I hadn't read any Genet since reading Our Lady of the Flowers in college, and it was rewarding to come at him with greater maturity. Funeral Rites is a difficult book. The narrator, named Jean Genet (but not the author), attends the funeral of his young lover, Jean, a partisan fighter killed just before the liberation of Paris, then visits his house. In working out his grief, he creates in his imagination a kaleidoscope of events - chiefly sexual or violent, or both - involving Jean, his mother, his half-brother, the family's housemaid, a young German deserter taken in by Jean's mother, and a teenage collaborator he glimpses in a newsreel and christens Riton. In narrating these events, Genet (the narrator) imagines himself as the various characters, often shifting between the first and third person pronouns without warning, and sometimes maintaining the first-person stance while shifting between characters; though without confusing the reader. Lyrical descriptions, painfully beautiful meditations on grief, and explicitly pornographic or disturbingly violent scenes fade in and out over the course of the book, which has no chapter separations. Very powerful; but a book which I would hesitate to recommend to anyone who would have difficulty with the content. I won't include an excerpt, as all the snippets I thought I wanted to share were not publishable on the forum here. Not a "hot writer"; but Genet had a rough life, and gets a sympathy vote.

... and I can't get any more photos to load up, being now on my iPad, but my favorite literary eye candy has to be Anton Chekhov, here: http://handsomemenwhoarenowdead.blogspot.com/2010/07/ive-got-hot-russian-for-ya.html There's a guy you'd want to meet in a cherry orchard, hm?

Lord Byron, of course: : And Hemingway (younger):

Hmph. It's true that dh is a younger man... By six days. :D Are we doing Hot Writers now? Hang on....

Aargh Stacia stop adding books to my list....

I'm thinking all those most-stolen books have a reader demographic that overlaps with the demographic having the most arrests for larceny in general. I bet Jane Austen has a very low rate of theft.