You are awesome. Finishing off with Murakami is nice style. I finished 27. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1 And hope to get in one more before the new year: 28. Amerio Romano, Iota Unum I'm on page 600 out of 762, and it's very dry. :tongue_smilie: But I can do it! All in all, what with the endless drama of Wee Girl and Great Girl (who thought having a teen and a preschooler at the same time would be a good idea?), I'm quite pleased to have read a book every other week on average this year, and I'm excited about 2012. And it's been fun seeing what other people are reading. This is the best kind of book group; everyone reads what they like, the group nature of it encourages others to keep going, and we can share reviews and ideas, but with no obligation to match reading lists. Thank you so much for setting it up! And thanks to all you wonderful participating moms! 26. Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors 25. Tolstoy, Master and Man and Other Stories (Father Sergius, Master and Man, Hadji Murat); S. Rapaport and John Kenworthy, trs. 24. Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul. 23. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War; Rex Warner, tr. 22. Gerald Hanley, Drinkers of Darkness 21. Henry James, What Maisie Knew. 20. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native. 19. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton. 18. Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. 17. Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm. 16. Terence, Phormio & Other Plays. Betty Radice, Tr. 15. Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here. 14. Goethe, Faust: Part One. Philip Wayne, Tr. 13. Robert Musil, Young Torless. Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser, Tr. 12. Chris Wright, Dr. Wright's Kitchen Table Math: Book 1 11. John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor 10. Fernando de Rojas, The Spanish Bawd (La Celestina); J. M. Cohen, Tr. 9. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil; various tr. 8. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House and Other Plays (The League of Youth, A Doll's House, The Lady From the Sea); Peter Watts, Tr. 7. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind* 6. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France 5. Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case 4. Aeschylus, The Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides); Robert Fagles, Tr. 3. Camara Laye, The Radiance of the King 2. St. Augustine, Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany 1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Gold (chocolate) coins and nuts. Nutcracking was good for an hour around here. Usually there's a tangerine, too, but St Nicholas wasn't on the ball this year. Shoe fillers are pretty low-key, as the day falls right after Middle Girl's birthday, and dh's family does Santa in a big way at Christmas.

Thank goodness for a place like the WTM forum where I can hang out with people like Rivka and Tibbie and let their erudition rub off on me! And thank goodness (even more) that there were some other people who didn't know what these words meant, either. Maybe I should have read more of my grandma's Reader's Digests and Increased My Word Power. See what public schools did to me? Yes, that one came from Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King. Camara was from Guinea. I've been trying to do the Book-a-Week Challenge, but it's been roughly book-every-two-weeks really, and then only because I've started counting individual Shakespeare plays as "books." Hey, I'm reading the introductions and notes! It should count! 27. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1 26. Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors 25. Tolstoy, Master and Man and Other Stories (Father Sergius, Master and Man, Hadji Murat); S. Rapaport and John Kenworthy, trs. 24. Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul. 23. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War; Rex Warner, tr. 22. Gerald Hanley, Drinkers of Darkness 21. Henry James, What Maisie Knew. 20. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native. 19. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton. 18. Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. 17. Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm. 16. Terence, Phormio & Other Plays. Betty Radice, Tr. 15. Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here. 14. Goethe, Faust: Part One. Philip Wayne, Tr. 13. Robert Musil, Young Torless. Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser, Tr. 12. Chris Wright, Dr. Wright's Kitchen Table Math: Book 1 11. John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor 10. Fernando de Rojas, The Spanish Bawd (La Celestina); J. M. Cohen, Tr. 9. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil; various tr. 8. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House and Other Plays (The League of Youth, A Doll's House, The Lady From the Sea); Peter Watts, Tr. 7. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind* 6. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France 5. Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case 4. Aeschylus, The Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides); Robert Fagles, Tr. 3. Camara Laye, The Radiance of the King 2. St. Augustine, Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany 1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes I knew its straightforward meaning "inhabitant of Boeotia," but I didn't know its secondary meaning "stupid, backward, dull." Who was to know? Texas badgers are plain-livin' folks who make do with holes. ;) So the big winners seem to be bint and atavism. I feel no shame for not knowing the former, as my fault seems to lie in insufficient viewing of vampire dramas, but apparently I really should have know the latter. I even had a brief conversation with dh about it. "You really didn't know what atavism means?" he said. "Shut up," I explained. Thanks to all who made me feel less stupid (or stupider--it drives me on!). On to 2012!

Very nice. 800 on the Verbal section, I would assume? ;)

The biggest chunk of the list came from The Sot-Weed Factor. Barth seems to take special joy in showing off his command of obscure English. Most embarrassing was finding later that sett was a vocabulary word in the first chapter of Middle Girl's second-grade Language Arts textbook. Apparently little English children are supposed to be familiar with badgers' lairs.

Compound my shame. How many words of the list below do you know already? This year, since Middle Girl has to look up words she doesn't know when she reads, I decided to do the same. Here's my list of words I didn't know from my 2011 book list. My private rules: I didn't include words so obscure that they were noted in the text itself (thus I didn't have to look up anything from Shakespeare); and I included words whose meaning I had an idea of (like atavism) but wasn't sure of. Please feel free to tell me which of these words you wouldn't have had to look up. My oldest daughter apparently was familiar with bint from Monty Python, confirming the value of her classical education. wadmal cisalpine atavism caravanserai boubou clart mantic cafard pirogue gabelle poetaster Boeotian feculent debouch brummagem puccoon pucelage wittol farded sett ranunculus corybantic pelmet estaminet agalma chibouk palter megrims curule peltast pullulating matutinal endimanchee bint lie doggo yashmak jalousie cracknel hames besom peculation

Why thank you. Easy. Book choice factors: (1) I figure life is too short to read books that aren't extremely likely to be good. The more decades/centuries something has been generally admitted to be worth reading, the more likely I'll read it. (2) I pay attention to the Victorian notion that novels are a frivolity, and try to make sure that they only comprise half my reading list. (3) I'm cheap as dirt, and so if something that's supposed to be good shows up in the bargain bin, I'll buy and read it. This is how I ended up with at least half of this year's book list: someone sold several hundred old Penguin Classics to our local Half Price Books, and rather than sort through, price them individually, and try to find room on the shelves, they put them all on a carrel for almost nothing. Dh was a little annoyed when I showed up at home with bags full of old Penguin lit.; annoyed that I hadn't phoned him so he could join in the feeding frenzy. :D (4) Bringing me to factor #4, an enabling husband with a wide-ranging taste in literature. The Barth, Murakami, and Aeschylus on my list this year were all dh's suggestions when I couldn't decide what to read next.

I do hope that you whip it open suddenly and shout "Thar she blows!!!"

This is too hard. I'm going to have to have a 5-way tie: St. Augustine, Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany These were beautiful and inspiring, and just right for the season. There's a surprising and heartening passage on why a foster/adopted father is more truly a father than a merely biological one. John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor Historical fiction for grown-ups, about colonial Maryland, with a cameo from someone who may or may not be Lord Baltimore. Who knows what really happened? Caveat: lots of, um, content. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs de Mal/The Flowers of Evil A re-read, but even better post-college. "My love, do you recall the object which we saw/ That fair, sweet, summer morn!/ At a turn in the path a foul carcass/ On a gravel-strewn bed...." They just don't write love poems like that anymore. Fernando de Rojas, The Spanish Bawd Medieval hilarity. If you like Chaucer, try de Rojas. Henry James, What Maisie Knew I regret having read The Turn of the Screw in high school, because I didn't understand it and it put me off James for over twenty years. Now, with plenty of life experience to draw on, the understated psychological drama that all depends on understanding the motivations and reactions of the characters is much easier to grasp. I read this and The Spoils of Poynton this year, and while the plot of Maisie hit a little too close to home to be a thoroughly pleasant read, I plan to read much more James in 2012, working my way up to The Wings of The Dove.

Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul. If only I had learned my lesson from A Burnt-Out Case earlier in the year: don't read anything written after Our Man in Havana. Interesting how Greene had some good work while he was losing his faith; but when he lost it altogether, his writing talent seemed to go with it. ETA: Honorable Mention for Henry VI, Part 1. Shakespeare shouldn't bore. And I hope the first thing he did when he got to heaven was apologize to Joan of Arc.

:grouphug: I am so sorry. Many prayers, through the intercession of the Immaculate.

We do Latin (Artes Latinae) and Greek (Hey Andrew & Athenaze), and will introduce French (Skoldo, Galore Park, & Rosetta Stone) in January. Great Girl switched from French to German, and dropped Greek, but otherwise the plan has gone well. We use whatever program for each has seemed best.

Taking the fruit to be an apple isn't just ignorance, though. Renaissance artists used an apple in their depictions of the Fall as a visual pun (made available by Jerome's Vulgate Bible) on malum, evil, and malum, apple. The idea of an apple was reinforced by the Christological reading of the Song of Solomon ("As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons," etc.) Not trying to rationalize the parents' weird behavior (though I desperately want to believe that they all rehearse this little drama at home and perform it for the benefit of strangers); just saying that the forbidden fruit-apple association has some precedent worthy of the interest of classical homeschoolers.

I asked dh to take a look at it (he's put in years of teaching Intro Logic). His take: >Teller's a good philosopher, and this is a good undergraduate logic text. I don't know that there's anything that really distinguishes it from a dozen other similar logic textbooks (other than being freely available on the web), but it's a fine book. Probably pretty hard for someone making their first entry into the subject.

We do many of the same things as the posters above, with a Twelfth Night party at the end. It would be nice to wait on the tree until Christmas Eve, but there aren't any left to buy that late* and if we buy it early and keep it outside, it gets very buggy. So we keep it inside but bare until Christmas Eve. Then Christmas tree trimming, lights, Christmas music, etc. for the next 12 days, plus all the lovely feast days in between! *I've tried convincing the girls that if we waited one more day, we could have our pick of trees from the neighbors' curbs, some already with tinsel; but they haven't gone for it.

We bless the wreath the first night, and from then on we pray the Collect from the appropriate Sunday of Advent and sing the antiphon of the Rorate Caeli, each in our own key. :D During the Golden Nights we throw in the appropriate verse from Veni Veni Emmanuel and pray the Christmas Novena.

Breath-mint green. I quite like it, but it just happened to be the color of the car at Carmax that fit both our needs and our budget.

I finished 25. Tolstoy, Master and Man and Other Stories (Father Sergius, Master and Man, Hadji Murat); S. Rapaport and John Kenworthy, trs. and, from various sources (and which I'm going to all count as one book), 26. Leon Garfield, The Comedy of Errors (from Shakespeare Stories II) [read-aloud] Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors Plautus, Menaechmi (from The Pot of Gold and Other Plays); E. F. Watling, tr. As explanation, I'm doing some Shakespeare with Great Girl, so she and I are reading (and then seeing, if we can get it) various plays together with ancillary materials; Plautus' Menaechmi, for instance, being the source for The Comedy of Errors. The Leon Garfield version meanwhile gets read aloud to Middle Girl and Wee Girl (who keeps interrupting to demand a thorough explanation of what's going on). Next up, Titus Andronicus.

I'm sorry not to have noticed this thread until now. I have a 4-year-old girl with selective mutism. One thing that's working fairly well for her is a once-a-week homeschool choir class for preschoolers. She's willing to sing, and once she gets going singing, she's willing to speak to the teacher, though only as one-word answers to questions directed specifically at her. Our main approach right now is to keep her anxiety levels down. Which means continuing to homeschool, and respecting her requests not to do things or go places that make her anxious, even if these are situations or people she's seemed comfortable with in the past.

Ha! Warned you. I've been singing it in Latin to at mass for two years now. And I still get little fragments of The Indelible Spanish Version running through my head.

There's been much discussion in recent years about the mysterious, absurdly high pricing of OOP books that aren't in much demand. One explanation is robo-pricers that look at how much a used book is selling for, then offer the book for sale at a higher price without actually owning the book. The theory is that (a) the existence of a lower price for the same book indicates that that book can be found for a lower price somewhere; (b) somebody will pay a slightly higher price for your book than the price that's already out there (for instance, because the cheaper copy gets sold); and then © after an order has been placed for the book at the higher price, the dealer has a few days to find the book cheaper (see (a)) or cancel the sale. If you get more than one pricing bot doing this, you end up with some insanely high prices and some reasonably low prices. I've seen used books listed (via Bookfinder) at $10 or less for the first dozen, and then one or two for over $100. If the cheap ones get bought up, you only see the absurd prices, it gives the impression that someone out there is willing to pay that crazy price. But I would bet you that none of the sellers listing the crazy price actually own a copy of the book.

Middle Girl got a 6 last year, but a 14 this year. :party: Most importantly, she went from being anxious and certain she'd do poorly last year to being calm and having fun this year.

Middle girl: Dropped Spanish (Salsa & Spanish for Children); starting French after Christmas. Dropped spelling; middle girl seems to have gotten over whatever block she had on spelling and is improving quite well on her own now Dropped Baltimore Catechism; just reading aloud from Morrow's My Catholic Faith & discussing Dropped attempt to use Rod & Staff textbook's exercises while substituting my own (oral) grammar lessons for theirs; creating my own structural grammar curriculum (very excited! no more humongous threads looking for someone else's curriculum!) Dropped Saxon for review & drill; now using AoPS Prealgebra for review & Standard Service Arithmetics for speed & mental math Wee girl: Dropped readers; just reading regular books now. Added Skoldo French, to Middle Girl's intense jealousy Great girl: Dropped Latin, all on her own; replaced it with Tolkien apparently :glare: Conversations will be had.

It's good to draw a distinction between a priest being laicized (or, as they say in the papers, "defrocked") and a priest being suspended. The latter is usually a better approach, as laicizing a priest means that the hierarchy no longer has the ability to impose disciplinary sanctions on the malfeasor, because now he's just a regular layperson. In fact, usually laicization is something that a disaffected priest requests; it's rarely considered a punishment. Sort of like a judge granting a request for a divorce would not be considered a punishment.

I would want such a curriculum to include a clear warning for North Americans that, in many Spanish masses in the U.S. and Mexico, the Padre Nuestro is sung to the tune of Simon & Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence," and that you should really not attend a Spanish-language mass unless you are confident that you have sufficient self-control to maintain a reverent demeanor throughout. Unlike my husband. Also that, having once heard this, you will never be able to purge it from your brain.