Looks like lots of BAWers have good information about dramatic presentations of Shakespeare, and the writer of the article had advice that surely works well for her students at Oxford, and seems reasonable from here. So take any of this with a grain of salt. I don't know anything about drama, and so I've never approached Shakespeare as drama. It seems to me that what makes Shakespeare so difficult isn't the theatrical aspect anyway; that's why it's hard to read on the page, but so much easier to make sense of when watching it performed. But I do know a little about poetry, and it seems like it's Shakespeare as a poet that readers wrestle with. The highly condensed meaning, polyvalent language, and four hundred years of language difference make his verse much less accessible than Kenneth Branagh on his horse urging his men into the breach. On my soapbox for a moment. If you really want to learn to read literature, reading about how to read literature won't do you any good, the Well-Educated Mind won't help, and making a plan won't help. Reading things you think you ought to understand and appreciate but don't enjoy because they're overwhelming absolutely won't help. What you have to do is read literature that's interesting and within reach, sufficiently that you want to read plenty of it. And if you want to read Shakespeare in particular, you have to start by really learning to read verse specifically, and by that I mean traditionally structured poetry, in English, from the 16th through 19th centuries. If I can give a concrete suggestion, buy a copy of Walter de la Mare's massive 2-volume poetry collection Come Hither. It's out of print but easy to find used. De la Mare wrote it to introduce children to English poetry, but it's a great place for anybody to start. His approach is to just plunge the reader right in, with a few guiding notes, none of them academic or pedantic. As a poet himself he was a great judge of poetic quality. Few of the poems were originally written for children. A number of them are songs from 16th and 17th century plays, which for plenty of the Globe theatre's audience would have been more memorable than the soliloquies. Anyway the important thing if you really want to read pre-modern English literature is to start reading pre-modern English poetry, and so you have to start with something you can read and will like reading. Then you'll start to understand not just the vocabulary but the conventions, from the inside, and before long Shakespeare will just seem like an especially good children's poet. 🙂 And if you never go on to Shakespeare, you have an enjoyable collection of verse to read. Personally I don't even understand the Shakespeare fetish. There's plenty of worthy pre-Victorian English writing, including great Elizabethan dramatists and poets, whom people used to read; but today everyone acts like Shakespeare was the only one writing in English until Jane Austen appeared. My two cents, YMMV, and I'm probably wrong.

Finished The Prisoner of Zenda, and since Wee Girl hasn't yet finished Kim, I have a free couple of days (hopefully) to read something else. New Random Pick: News From Nowhere by William Morris.

I've now got nearly all my books entered into LibraryThing. Wee Girl gets to have Middle Girl and Daddy home all day, every day. If only Mommy would go away and take lessons with her, it'd be perfect. MIddle Girl is learning to drive on the nearly empty freeway that used to terrify her. Dh is living in extreme introvert's paradise. In general, we're having a lovely time. Our home has been peaceful and joyful. There have been hard moments, especially when the girls are missing their friends; but they're connecting on-line and really re-connecting with each other. Wee Girl has been calmer and happier; Middle Girl has been a loving and considerate playmate to her little sister. Big Negative: The man-bun is making an unwanted comeback.

@Negin I read Gilead for a book group years ago. I remember liking it; but people whose reading opinions usually jibe with mine tell me they disliked it intensely, so there you are.

Agree with all this. Also this is an inconvenient time for decluttering. There are boxes of books and clothes taking up space in my living room, waiting to be driven to the (closed) thrift store and library discard store. The cat seems to find them satisfactory. Pretty kitty! And impressive book-finishing.

This week I finished The Evolution of a State; or Recollections of Old Texas Days, by Noah Smithwick, d. 1898, who was an itinerant blacksmith, a Texas Ranger, and after the Revolution, a mill owner near Marble Falls, Texas (just northwest of Austin). It's a strange experience reading about wild west adventures in places that are now familiar developed areas. I had no idea there was a notorious Indian massacre up where my mom lives, or that a settler named Barton, after whom Barton Springs was named, moved out to the cold spring area because it was out in the wilderness, far away from the overcrowded capital (it's considered central Austin now). At one point, desperate for a District Attorney, the citizens of Travis County dragooned an 18-year-old law student for the position as the most qualified man available. Smithwick himself barely missed several of the crucial events of Texas history -- too late on the scene to be massacred at Goliad or the Alamo, and a day too late for the victory at San Jacinto because his commanding officer detoured to avoid a Mexican army detachment that turned out to be a herd of loose cattle. But he was there for the Runaway Scrape: the panicked evacuation of the settler families, mostly women and children, across the Texas rivers in spring flood, as they tried to reach the United States ahead of Santa Anna's army. (Santa Anna didn't murder civilians, but the news of the atrocities at Goliad and the fate of the Santa Fe Expedition terrorized the settlers.) Smithwick fled Texas right before the Civil War when his speaking out against secession put his life in danger. Necessary reading for all locals. Surprised I'd never heard of Smithwick before. Currently reading The Prisoner of Zenda, as Wee Girl decided I would read that while she reads Kipling's Kim, and then we'll swap. Puffin Classics for the next week then! Zenda is the book you'd get if P. G. Wodehouse wrote The Prince and the Pauper.

Mid-May for Latin and Chemistry; June for Physics. This is the year of the APs she didn't want to take: she dislikes science and is taking Phys, Bio, and Chem hoping to place out of all science in college; and she resents having to return to Caesar for the AP. For such a cheerful child she's awfully grim about her exam! Thank you for the well-wishes. I hope to survive her APs.

Results of Round 3 of the Crown Family Quarantine Reading Competition: Winner, Wee Girl (again...) with: 1. Uncle Cleans Up 2. Bedknob and Broomstick 3. Carbonel and Calidor 4. A Tale of Two Cities 5. The Santa Fe Trail 6. Tales of Ancient Egypt Second place, Violet: 1-3. King Henry VI 4. A Tale of Two Cities 5. The Church in an Age of Revolution Third place, dh: 1. The Tragedy of Hoffman 2. The Season of Migration to the North Fourth place, Middle Girl: 1. "I'm trying to prep for my APs, okay?"

This gives pause for thought. The HSLDA has its faults, which have been thoroughly hashed out on these forums, and I'm not a supporter after having had a front-row seat in an incident where they swept into a situation that was being dealt with in-house and ratcheted everything up to 11. But ... this awful woman has a point. We have the arguments and evidence on our side. But how often does that matter on the ground? If homeschooling is "winning" in part, possibly even in large part, not so much because we're winning over hearts and minds but because homeschool moms are networked wolverines when some idiot legislator decides to placate his local teacher's association at the expense of homeschoolers, then I do think the HSLDA deserves some of the credit for that. Even if I disagree with them on every other issue than homeschooling. Yes, I wish there were some other organization without the baggage of HSLDA, and with their name recognition, membership rolls, and take-no-prisoners cussedness. But there isn't.

Thank you both! I've forwarded the links and names to dd and will see what she thinks. ETA: She likes the look of the British one, German for Reading Knowledge, and the Hammer's Grammar and Usage. So I've ordered those. Thanks again!

So after writing all that out, it became clear to me that what we want is a German grammar with exercises. Does anyone have any experience with any of these? Or another not on that list?

Btw I have nothing to report because I have to read YA historical novel Hittite Warrior, which I will neither report the completion of nor count on my official list except mentally on my invisibly Disgruntled Reading 10x10 category. But last time I was able to read it, my real book was pretty good and I'll report on it whenever. Also I am still reading to Wee Girl Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea which I've never read before and definitely will count.

Friends, I need to order a couple of German textbooks. Dd has been advised that this summer is a good time to get her German in place, while she has significant down time. Her classics tutor has offered to push her through German 1 & 2--possibly 3--this summer, "meeting" several times a week. But he has no suggestions for a textbook. She can read and speak French reasonably fluently. She can read Latin easily, and is doubling down on her Greek. She plans to use FSI German (dated, but free and familiar to her, and which she found very useful back in her French 1 & 2 days, with its relentless oral drills). Her tutor is fluent in German. So spoken language is not an issue. She wants a textbook that will (1) directly teach German grammar, unlike FSI; (2) have a minimum of conversational elements; (3) be at a college rather than high school level; (4) be significantly more recent than the Cold War-era FSI. I want a textbook that I can order two copies of: one for her and one for the tutor, who is flat broke due to being stuck in the US but unable to legally work. The goal is not to order a beer in Berlin but to read academic papers in German. I have zero German; dh lived in Germany as a child but has forgotten every word of it. Any suggestions? I'd like to order in the next couple of days.

@Kareni Keeping your husband, and you my dear Kareni, in my prayers.

@Meriwether While the bulk of the article consists of warmed-over anti-homeschooling rhetoric from the '90s, there are three differences from the articles of the bad old days. One: back in the day the hit piece would have ended with the Big Prediction: "In twenty years we'll be seeing all these home-schooled people, ignorant as pigs, on welfare!" That's gone. Two: your observation. The accusation decades ago was that homeschoolers were "Fundamentalists" who used nothing but the Bible, and who taught Creationism in science class. There was some awareness that Christianity came in different flavors; and there was a sense that some fig leaf was required as to why one shouldn't trust Fundies with the education of their own children. Now it's enough to assert (absurdly) that nearly all homeschoolers are "driven by conservative Christian beliefs," and res ipsa loquitur, as they say at Harvard Law. (The third difference is that the hyphen in "home-school" has now been dropped.)

I personally held it in until the very end, when the ritual intoning of "... Something Ought To Be Done" was too much for me. Sure and we'll get on that right away! Just as soon as fifty million American households are all done with their mandatory homeschooling. The illustration is fantastic. I think I last saw one like that in an old copy of The Teaching Home.

Oh my. Surely it's been two decades since I was last able to play a proper round of Homeschool Trope Bingo? Why, after all this time, does this particular zombie shamble out, blinking and coughing, into the sun? My guess is that one Harvard faculty member too many noticed the awfulness of the materials his child's school was sending home and thought he could probably do better himself. Just, you know, for the duration. Can't have that kind of thinking catching on. It could spread like a virus.

Wow, thanks for the extensive info! I'm forwarding all this to Middle Girl for evaluation and will report back. (My own Greek consists of having learned to say "efcharisto!" when the waitress in Athens brought our food.)

I'd love to hear what vintage materials you've found useful for Greek. Middle Girl started with Hey, Andrew! guided by dh's two years of college Greek, moved on to Athenaze, got bogged down, we hired a tutor (starving grad student), and eventually she took an intensive 3-years-in-one-summer course that completely brainwashed her into desperately wanting to be a classics major (it helped that the first half of the course was basically review for her). Wee Girl is finishing up Hey, Andrew! and has really liked it; her Latin is pretty good so the inflections haven't been an issue for her. But Athenaze wasn't great in Middle Girl's opinion, and Wee Girl is too young for a tutor (middle school). Really what we want is something like Artes Latinae (structural linguistic approach), but for Greek. But we'll take anything at all that could at least be an occasional alternative to Athenaze and the adventures of Dicaeopolis. ETA: How is the Italian edition different from the American (which is what I presume we have)?

Well done!!!

I ordered the Penguin Classics version, which is translated by one John Sturrock. Penguin is reliable and French isn't a challenge to translate, so it's probably fine. "Shipping times may be longer in your area."

Today I finished my book on church history between the French Revolution and the present (well, 1971), the last in the Pelican/Penguin series on History of the Church. New random book: The Evolution of a State or Recollections of Old Texas Days, the life of Texan pioneer Noah Smithwick, 1808-1899, as recorded by his daughter. Paradise being, naturally, Texas. Looks like a good read! Also finished Decadent Poetry from Wilde to Naidu, an excellent anthology of the English Decadent movement in poetry. This one goes into 10x10 category Les Enfants de Baudelaire: Symbollsts, Decadents, & Surrealists.

No movie suggestions, but you might consider Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People. There have been tv and movie versions of it.

One year ago, weren't we all talking about getting hold of the Victor Hugo novel? I see the Penguin edition is only a few dollars used....

The whole Pelican/Penguin History of the Church series is really good. It's at just the right spot where it assumes some basic familiarity with ecclesial history -- the reader is assumed to know the important differences between Baptists and Presbyterians, for instance, and not to need Newman and the Tractarian Movement explained -- but it also doesn't assume the reader to be an expert on any particular denomination. It was a British series, so the British Isles and western Europe are the focus, and there's nothing much on American church history or the Eastern Orthodox. The editor (and author of some of the volumes) was the great church historian Owen Chadwick, and it's all very fair-minded and balanced.