Ours is much less fancy and braided, more round and lumpy, but basically that, with the five red eggs. Hint: dye the darkest brown eggs you can get, or they'll be pink. And now we're watching the 1980 BBC series. Middle Girl: "Did everyone have fluffy hair in 1980?" I just finished A Tale myself, and you're right, it's better the second time. I'm now reading The Church in an Age of Revolution: 1789 to the Present Day (vol. 5 of The Pelican History of the Church), which is more interesting than I'm afraid it sounds.

That's why I mentioned Bookfinder. Go to bookfinder.com, type in Russia in revolution for title and Horizon for keyword, and see the cheap copies from various booksellers. (There's no copy actually being sold for $951. That's a placeholder listing; if you tried to actually buy it they'd tell you it's out of stock.)

Russia in Revolution, from the Horizon-Caravel series, is aimed at the secondary school level (which is about my own level for history) so may fit your "like I used to read with my kids when we homeschooled" criterion. Bookfinder lists it at $9.

Easter on schedule! Sunrise home service; baskets with choc bunnies and jelly beans; egg hunt; random attacks with cascarones; eggs scrambled with (vegi-)chorizo for breakfast. Now watching The Ten Commandments while the Easter pie bakes. Made Texas sheet cake last night for dessert. Hopefully the last ingredients for the Bread of Easter Brightness will come this week and we'll bake it then. Calling and skyping family and godparents. And hopefully finishing A Tale of Two Cities this evening. For transformative literature, I'm still reading from J. H. Cardinal Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons; if I ever read all of them it'll show up on the list! Off now to eat, again. So let it be written; so let it be done.

Thanks for that list! It includes two of dh's favorites, The Roaring Girl and The Alchemist.

Sandy -- I was looking at an earlier thread and realized I never answered your question! Sorry! Answer: Increasingly often, now that the enforced home-time has given me a chance to get reference books and Middle Girl's Greek and Latin library entered. This last time, for instance, I got three exceptions--The Oxford Companion to Something Or Other, a book by Philip K. Dick (dh's, no thank you), and Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare (which I started, decided wasn't very interesting, and discarded)--before ending up with King Henry VI.

Go for it! You don't need to read the plays first, at all. King Richard the Third (who shows up also in the King John VI plays) is played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Don't miss his villainous villainy!

So what do you think, do we call this season Coronatide, or Quarantinegesima?

I read A Journal of the Plague Year back in ... [checks book timeline] ... 2014. It was interesting. A few things from the book have been coming to mind since our own Plague Year started. One is that, though it was going to be another two centuries before the actual vector for the Bubonic Plague was known, the authorities did know that ships brought it from Plague-afflicted cities, and crowded conditions with lots of garbage around fostered the Plague. (They also thought it transmitted person-to-person, which was reasonable enough based on observation of other diseases, but not of course true for Bubonic Plague.) The 1665 Great Plague caused economic disaster as other cities ceased to trade with London, and nearly all commerce stopped, impoverishing the English countryside, which soon enough started to have its own Plague outbreaks on top of that. What saved the English economy was the Great Fire of London the next year, which despite its additional tragedy and devastation, was necessarily followed by a building and purchasing boom that put the countryside as well as the London population back into business. (It's been six years so don't fact-check me, but this is what I remember from the book. Also that, despite being classified as "fiction," it's credibly believed that Defoe based the book on his uncle's journals, and as far as we can tell it's highly accurate.)

Happy Hobbitting to the LOTR participants! And joy of Palm Sunday to those participating at home today. Middle Girl cut flowering branches off the ligustrum and we read from the breviary, processed around the house with branches, and Wee Girl sang Gloria, Laus et Honor in her nicest chant voice. It was in a lot of ways nicer than standing in crowded pews holding up a palm frond. This is King Henry VI week for me; I read Parts I and II and started Part III yesterday. We'll re-watch the corresponding Hollow Crown videos later. In general, we're trying hard to spend this Coronatide as off-screen as possible, so lots of books, baking, music, family runs, puzzles, and games, with a family movie just once in a while. Middle Girl has leapt into the breach, coaxing Wee Girl through her simmering anxieties with sisterly art projects and cookie baking. Meanwhile Wee Girl continues to win handily each round of the Crown Family Quarantine Reading Competition. Also continuing through Decadent Poetry from Wilde to Naidu. This week I read the Yeats section; I'd never thought of W. B. as part of the Decadent movement, but some of his poetry, especially in its early versions, convincingly qualifies. The Travail of Passion --W. B. Yeats When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide; When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay; Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side, The hyssop-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kidron stream: We will bend down and loosen our hair over you, That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew, Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

Freddy was popular in our house, too. But there were many questions to answer. "Mommy, what's a 'pinko'?" "What's a 'third columnist'?" Gather around, little children, and let me tell you about the days of the Cold War...

I regret to hear that I sound spiteful; I'm not conscious of any spite. I don't think of "bitter" and "spiteful" as the same thing; the former seems reasonable in the circumstances. At any rate I don't think I disagree with you on the points at issue.

Frances, I think you're misunderstanding me, and I think that's a combination of (1) I'm posting more bluntly and heatedly than I ought (I blame weeks of quarantine plus my own tendencies to type without reflecting; (2) things can sound sarcastic and ironic on the internet when they aren't (and vice versa); and (3) as I mentioned above, there seem to be two sides forming and I don't find myself on either but I'm coming across as being on one of them. I'm not offering to get together with anyone to pray: I was using that as an example of a clearly less hazardous activity -- one I wish I could still enjoy -- than the photos of crowds outside cannabis stores in California. I agree with your characterization of the nuns. I was using "pious" in its straightforward, literal, and positive sense. They did the right thing, without being forced. (Clearly I'm not doing such a good job of not posting anymore on this thread.)

1. Probably true that people would be unhappy about closing gun stores. But I wasn't suggesting that I (and people in my situation) are more unhappy about our favorite place to go being closed. Rather, I'm saying that it's obnoxious, and possibly unconstitutional (because it seems to undermine the "general applicability" argument requirement), for the state to designate liquor, cannabis, and gun stores as essential but religious services as inessential. 2. Forgive me but I find the "We'll be overwhelmed by alcoholics who have run out of booze" argument both morally and legally unconvincing. 3. Good for your Mom. I mean that unironically. But the fact that one person, or some pious nuns, decide to take a particular action doesn't mean that therefore other are morally or legally bound to take the same action. I remember your saying so, and I want to make clear that it's the specific designation of religious services as "inessential" while society's favorite vices are designated as "essential" that I find troubling. I feel as if I shouldn't have posted, as it seems that two "sides" have formed to this debate, and I've been assigned to one. But I'm not on either side. For the record: I have no moral objection to the closing of religious services by the state under these conditions. Personally, I stopped receiving Communion weeks before people started talking about avoiding large gatherings. I stopped going to Mass and kept my family home before that was permitted by our bishop, and at a time when our pastor specifically said that only those personally at high risk were dispensed from Mass attendance. My religious beliefs make this totally fine. I have no patience for religious leaders of my own faith who think defying public health restrictions are a matter of conscience, because this has happened many times in the history of our faith. Further, there is clearly no constitutional problem to shutting down religious services. if the ACLU wants to challenge that, they have no support from me. All I am saying is that it is morally objectionable, and very possibly legally problematic, for the state to designate certain businesses catering to vices as essential while designating (by default) religious gatherings as non-essential. That is ALL I am saying. Leaving the thread now for the two "sides" to argue it out.

I don't think you are addressing what I said, but rather what you think I said.

You're reasonably correct insofar as by "rights" you mean "Constitutional rights"; I don't know that there's been an exact federal case on point, but under current constitutional jurisprudence, a generally applicable law (or order, or whatever) with the intent of protecting public health and not involving anti-religious animus would pass muster. But do you have enough imagination to see why it is bitter to me as a Christian to see state actors deem marijuana stores, liquor stores, and gun stores as "essential services" that must stay open, with long lines and crowded aisles? While I can't go pray the rosary before the Sacrament with a handful of other old ladies sitting in different pews, because that's not essential. Personally I look forward to the lawsuits based on that.

I'd noticed. After finishing the second installment of Maxim Gorky's unhappy life in My Apprenticeship, I moved on to another random pick: Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It, by Loren Eiseley. It's the intellectual history of the predecessors to Darwin, written for a general audience. Darwin wasn't hesitant to acknowledge his debts to other men in other fields of science (except when he was), but The Origin of Species was supposed to be a preliminary writing to his fuller work which would (importantly) have footnotes, but which was never written. Together with missing correspondence and the general cross-fertilization of ideas in Darwin's time, Eiseley has to do quite a lot of detective work to figure out and explain the web of ideas and influences leading up to Origin. Eiseley makes the important observation that we have a tendency to "read back," from our post-Darwin viewpoint, crucial points of evolution, natural selection, and variation into Darwin's precursors, when often the ideas they were expressing weren't actually the same things. Crown Family Quarantine Reading Competition Standings: Round 1 (completed): Wee Girl, 7; Violet, 3; Middle Girl, 3; Dh, 2. Round 2: Dh: J. G. Ballard, Complete Stories, Vol. 1; John Taine, The Greatest Adventure Violet: Maxim Gorky, My Childhood Middle Girl: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment Wee Girl: Stephen Meader, Who Rides in the Dark?; Jean Kellogg, The Rod and the Rose; Charles Wilson, Wilderness Explorer: the Story of Samuel de Champlain Wee Girl has been working through our shelf of historical fiction this week. Dh says The Greatest Adventure, a 1929 science fiction novel, is based on Arthur Gordon Pym, in case anyone who enjoyed the Poe was looking for more Antarctic adventures. When I finish the Darwin book, I wonder if anyone is still interested in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame? I managed to find a copy and that might be my next, especially if anyone else wants to read it. I wonder how the Plague situation in Paris is affecting repairs.

Now I've had to dig out my aging copy of The Master and Margarita. Maybe it's time for a re-read.

Not your fault! I have so many international homeschooling friends who have struggled to pass on their native language to their children, and it's seldom succeeded into the teen years. I haven't yet brought myself to read Pushkin because it feels like not reading poetry in Russian would not be reading it at all. Any recommended translations?

Thank you! We've now seen it (YouTube has it), and it was so pleasant to see a made-for-kids film that isn't animation. Wee Girl, who is becoming a bit of a book snob, enjoyed it but carped at all the places it deviated from the book.

"I'm such a terrible judge of fantasy in the best of times. And right now of course I just can't settle into fiction so as to enjoy it properly."

The Master and Margarita was very popular in English departments in the '80s. I first learned about it when I asked a fellow student what his t-shirt, which showed a scruffy cat holding a pistol, was all about. Great recommendation!

I'm currently reading Soviet writer Maxim Gorky's (b. 1868) autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, My Apprenticeship, and My Universities. All 3 books are reasonably short and very readable. And cheap in used Penguin editions.

I like, “This would be a great book for those who like this kind of thing!!1!” Somehow though people are not taken in by this crafty phrasing.

Bring the girls to visit their cousins and grandparents: 20 minutes drive from here, and they might as well be on the moon. Go to Mass and light a candle for the repose of the souls of those who succumbed to this awful sickness. Go to Torchy's and eat a pile of brisket tacos. (Please imagine being a normal Texan quarantined with a bunch of vegetarians.) ETA: BUY A NEW REFRIGERATOR. The main cabinet is set to maximum cold so half the food won't spoil; so instead half of it is frozen solid. And twice a day I wipe up the condensation from the ceiling of it as it drips down onto the food. This fridge was a cheap little box 20 years ago and it is not covering itself with glory in these quarantine days.