I would get the first volume or two of Kitchen Table Math, and spend at least as much time playing the games as doing Miquon.

Other: I might send an e-mail saying something like, "I was copied on an e-mail that you sent to Jane Doe, but the text was just gibberish. Could you re-send it?" (And I would convince myself that "gibberish" could conceivably mean "thing I choose to remember as gibberish because it wasn't meant for me.") Then she'll realize her error, not be embarrassed, and easily cover for her mistake by telling you she accidentally copied you.

Great Girl found them boring. Middle Girl can't stop re-reading them. It seems to be all or nothing.

Robin, thank you so much for your gracious hosting. Looking forward to another year of your leading us in our reading! No books this week: a stomach bug struck down the family, and there's barely been time for the most basic housework. Christmas? Is that soon? 1) How many books did you read this year? - Twenty. 2) Did you meet or beat your own personal goal? - I would have liked to have managed a book every other week. Try harder in 2013! 3) Favorite book of 2012? Yes, you can list more than one and even break it down by genre if you choose. - Tie: Tolstoy, War and Peace Gogol, Dead Souls 4) Least favorite book of 2012 and why? - Polidori, The Vampyre. I can see how Stoker would have read it and said, "I can do that better." 5) One book you thought you'd never read and was pleasantly surprised you like it? - Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country. It was assigned my senior year in high school and I hadn't bothered (senioritis...), and then this year a South African friend was so horrified that I hadn't read it that I had no choice. Of course, it was incredible. 6) One book you thought you'd love but didn't? - Verne, Around the World in 80 Days. Meh. Though I did like the chapter where the train has to cross an imminently collapsing bridge, and the crew decides to barrel across at maximum speed and hope they can get across before it falls apart under the train's weight and they all die; when Passepartout, the Frenchman, suggests everyone except the engineer walk across the bridge safely first, the Americans are first puzzled then horrified at his lack of daring spirit. And being Americans, they go with Plan A. 7) One book that touched you - made you laugh, cry, sing or dance. - Well, Balzac's Droll Stories made me blush. 8) Any new to you authors discovered and you can't wait to read more of their stories? - This year was my first foray into Balzac and Ariosto. I plan to read more of both. 9) Name the longest book you read? Shortest? - Longest: Augustine, City of God Shortest: Shakespeare, Macbeth 10) Name the most unputdownable book you read? - Tolstoy, War and Peace. Who knew something so long and Russian would be such an addictive page-turner? 11) Book that had the greatest impact on you this year? - Edward Gordon, Centuries of Tutoring. I no longer see homeschooling primarily as parent-led education, but as a common variant of tutoring, which throughout history in the west - except for the outlier that was the Twentieth Century - was considered the normative, and unquestionably preferred, form of education, and was done by whoever was the best qualified tutor the parent could afford. I'd never realized how utterly out of the mainstream of history it was for a western society to think it was not just normal, but obviously best, to have children taught in large classes. 12) What book would you recommend everybody read? - Centuries of Tutoring. A shame it was published by a vanity press; it's just unfindable. It needs a good proofreading and a real publishing house. 13) Share your most favorite cover(s) - All my books had very dull covers. 14) Do you have a character you fell in love with? - Handsome, wealthy, easygoing, kind and considerate Christopher Newman, the hero of James' The American. Poor Newman. In Europe, nice guys finish last. 15) What was your most favorite part of the challenge? Did you do any of the mini challenges? - Getting to read what everyone else was reading. I love the literary diversity of this group. 16) What are your goals for the new year? To read more non fiction? To dip your toes into a mystery or a urban fantasy or horror or romance? - This was a stressful year, and as a result featured more escapist fiction reading than I usually prefer. The only poetry I read was Ariosto (Orlando Furioso, vol. 1), and I'd really been wanting to spend more time in poetry than that. What book are you most looking forward to reading in 2013? - I don't know - they all look so good. The GLBT challenge makes me want to dig out the Genet we hid when Great Girl learned to read. Also read this year: Faulkner, As I Lay Dying Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! James, Selected Stories Borges, Doctor Brodie's Report James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories Forster, A Passage to India Forster, A Room With a View Leslie Alcock, Arthur's Britain Greene, Our Man in Havana

That's exactly how I've been enduring the read-aloud of A Tale of Two Cities. At the end of the most recent chapter, Middle Girl asked, "Did Dickens write it to be ironic like that, or was that just you?"

Google Maps tells me I drive 3.7 miles to get to church. I'd drive a lot further than that for the Latin Mass, though; I'm just fortunate not to have to.

Glad to be of service. :)

Thanks! Maybe people will be inspired to team up some reading with some screen time.

The first school shooting as far as folks around here are concerned has always been the UT Tower Sniper. When Columbine happened, that was what everyone immediately compared it to.

And Maureen O'Hara! Right then, I must swing by the video store pronto. Thanks for the tip!

I knew a guy in college who called his car 'Nosferatu' after two people had backed into it, since it couldn't be seen in mirrors. Is this the thread where I get to share the exciting fact that dh's friend/colleague is Claire Danes' father-in-law? No, really! I expect TMZ to be stopping us on the street any time for an interview.

Some very light reading: 20. Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana http://www.amazon.com/Our-Man-Havana-Penguin-Classics/dp/0142438006 An amusing send-up of the spy-thriller genre. A scene where a British agent, meeting with his superior, begins to realize that the vacuum cleaner salesman he's recruited to spy on the Cubans may not be sending such reliable intelligence: "I want photographs, Hawthorne." "That's asking a lot, sir," "We have got to have them. At any risk. Do you know what Savage said to me? I can tell you, it gave me a very nasty nightmare. He said one of the drawings reminded him of a giant vacuum cleaner." "A vacuum cleaner!" Hawthorne bent down and examined the drawings again, and the cold struck him once more. "Makes you shiver, doesn't it?" ------------- Fluffy mission accomplished. Back to Ariosto.

Thanks for the additions! And some non-Shakespeare ones, too.

Praying.

Sure! Thanks!

Fantastic! I am so excited for your ds's victory, and yours.

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Parts I & II My Own Private Idaho (1991)

May Christ send James' angel to guide him in safety and return him quickly.

Jane in NC: love the photo. Stacia: Thanks for that article by the translator. Literary translation is a fascinating subject. And I highly recommend Beckett; while I was reading your linked essay, I thought about how Beckett wrote in a non-native language (French) precisely to avoid stylistic nuances that a native speaker would have present in his writing. ETA: Guilty pleasure confession: I used to watch Quantum Leap in college with friends, and whenever Sam Beckett would portal somewhere, we'd shout at the screen "I can't go on, I'll go on!" Yes, we had no lives then. I recommend reading Krapp's Last Tape while watching Quantum Leap on Netflix.

Woke up this morning not sick with the flu. What a wonderful and novel feeling. Meanwhile, having been horizontal for a week, I read quite a bit more than usual (though falling asleep while reading, and the intermittent attacks of dizziness, not to mention small people who strongly felt being in bed meant I should be reading to them, interfered occasionally). Anyhow, last night I finished 19. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, vol. 1 My initial take on this - as if the Arthurian romances were written by an Italian with ADHD, and maybe some help from John Cleese - is unchanged. Here's a scene where Duke Astolfo (good guy) has to fight Orrilo, who can rejoin severed bits of his body and can only be defeated if a certain hair is plucked from his head - but which one? Astolfo has a plan: Orrilo's fist is severed, club and all; Both arms Astolfo chops, complete with hands, Now with a transverse stroke, now vertical, He slices and truncates and flying sends Orrilo's limbs; but whereso'er they fall, He picks them up and instantly their ends Re-join the parent stump and so once more His members function as they did before. The duke, dismounted, after many blows, Slashes Orrilo through from nape to chin; And quickly, for he has no time to lose, He leaps back to the saddle, grasping in His hand the bloody scalp, on which there grows The magic hair which he must pluck to win. He gallops off towards the river Nile, To stop Orrilo finding it; meanwhile, The stupid monster had not understood And in the dust was groping for his head; But when he realized that through the wood The Duke Astolfo on his horse had sped, He flung himself as quickly as he could Upon the saddle of his thoroughbred. He would have liked to shout: 'Come back! Come back!' But of his mouth he felt a grievous lack. ... and so on. Few of the adventures go on for more than a page or two - except for the siege of Paris, the central action - and no sooner does one of the many, many heroes, heroines, or villains gallop off from one adventure than he stumbles, sometimes literally, across the next. The pacing is frenetic, the romance is PG-13, the violence is lavish but cartoonish, and the whole first volume clocks in at 827 pages, counting the worthwhile introduction and the absolutely necessary (and really helpful) appendices that let you keep all the characters and action sorted out. Five stars. I'm going to take a break and try some of that fluffy reading I hear so much about, then on to volume 2.

... and then the federal authorities pointed them at a copy of the First Amendment, shrugged their shoulders, and said "unless you can show fraud or interference in a criminal investigation, good luck going after internet speculation."

:)

Agreed. But that's a rational analysis that the general public may not be interested in making. The gun control issue is intractable. The mental health care issue has been made intractable by the current health care wars. New regulations on homeschoolers, in the name of "something must be done"? Not so intractable.

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-adam-lanza-newtown-shooting-1216-20121215,0,2311968.story?page=2&obref=obinsite "I want people to know he wasn't always a monster," Foy said. "He became one, but he wasn't always that way." Foy said she and other students accepted his shyness because, she said, he had been home-schooled and "hadn't really been socialized." ------------------- I'm not convinced that non-homeschoolers are going to analyze this the same way we are.