Me, too. The introduction (which is really good and informative) features a fantastic 1895 review of poet Arthur Symons's most recent book of verse. (Symons literally wrote the book on Decadent and Symbolist poetry, which I read last year.) Isn't that wonderful? And then we turn, perhaps, to "Stella Maris," the most controversial of Symons's poems, and the one that most aroused the above reviewer's, um, ire. I don't know about you, but I felt, reading that, as I felt listening to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring after learning that its first performance sparked a riot from the enraged audience. Do I live in an age of such depravity, I ask myself, that I can barely see what all the fuss is about?

The four volumes of Memoirs of Vidocq reflect the "seasons" of Eugène Vidocq's life; volume 1 is his life as a young criminal; volume 2, as a police informer; volume 3, as the founder and director of the crime-detection agency le Sûreté Nationale. I think the fourth volume will be his post-resignation life as the head of the first private detection agency. It's all very over-written in the usual early-18th-century style, but engaging, and it's only too bad that a more modern English translation isn't available. (Wikipedia tells me that Vidocq himself kept it short, but Balzac, Hugo, and Dumas, who knew all about the correlation of verbosity and income, persuaded him to let it be ghostwritten to four volumes.)

Working on volume 3 of Memoirs of Vidocq. Took a break this week to read, under compulsion, YA novel God King by somebody. Also starting Great Expectations; Wee Girl just finished her abridged Penguin edition so it's once more through the adventures of Pip for me, and then the BBC production. Family Dickens, hurrah. And continuing Decadent Poetry, which is wonderful but not as exciting as the title might suggest.

Ha! Sweet kid. Middle Girl first saw a snowflake at about 6 or 7. She was so excited when the forecast was for snow. And then she was bewildered by the little soft things floating down. Years of making paper snowflakes had left her with the impression that they were around 8"x8". I asked her later about what she thought was going on in movies that showed snow falling. She'd thought that hail was gentler in other parts of the world.

I haven't read that since college. Next time I see it at the bookstore I should get it. It fell out of favor for a couple of decades because the Catholic Church that Merton converted to was so different from the post-Vatican II Church, and Merton himself got a bit weird (defied the rules of his Order, got oddly syncretistic with Zen Buddhism); but I feel like Seven Storey Mountain has been coming back into favor a bit. Thanks for the review from an 'outside' perspective!

I'm confident you've read David Foster Wallace on the subject.

Coast! In fact we spent last weekend in Galveston, enjoying the sand and seashells and birds straight out of Audubon. What's a mountain?

Nothing finished this week; still reading Memoirs of Vidocq. Vidocq's criminal life seems to have wrapped up with the first volume, and he's now acting as an occasional informant for the police. 700 pages to go! Middle Girl picked as my next random book Five Books on Consideration: Advice to a Pope by St Bernard of Clairvaux, but it turned out to be less interesting than I'd thought and I bailed after the first book. She replaced it with Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul. So now I have 5 books going: Vidocq, another poetry collection, Graham Greene, Great Expectations (with Wee Girl), and Lautreamont's Maldoror, because I can't get enough French weirdness.

Or "Train of Death"? I can think of three classics that involve death on (or under) a train. Though naming them would require plot spoilers. (I know Strangers doesn't actually have the death on the train.)

Oh it's all right now. Every mother gets to impose some book she loves on her children; heaven knows I'm doing that for my own! (Here, dear; you'll love this little thing by Henry James. No, really, read it.) Anyway I get to tease her about it now! I am glad to hear LW et seq. were not wasted on other young ladies. I've quite liked some of her other writings.

Question: Is there anyone here who read Little Women, at any age, and liked it? All of it? My mother forced me to read Little Women. Bought me a lovely hefty hardcover, nagged me until I trudged my way through. I avoided Bunyan for years just because the girls play "Pilgrim's Progress" in an early chapter. (Turns out I love Bunyan.) When the wretched thing was at last finished, she told every relative we had that I'd loved Little Women and wanted nothing more for Christmas than the sequels. I got nothing that Christmas from my extended family except Little Women sequels. I refused to read any of them. Still bitter. Can you tell? :) ETA: Oh dear, I may have uncovered the roots of my aversion to female authors.

Congratulations! It's important to reset the bar from time to time. That's my goal this year. Some good thousand-pagers should help with that.

If I read Emma after Vidocq I'll be up to 1/8. In 2019 it was ... let's see ... 5/72. Isak Dinesen, Emma Tennant, Elaine Dundy, Emily Brontë, and St. Clare of Assisi.

It's anything you want. I started it but have been a little overwhelmed by Dickens and felt the need for some non-England reading (thus the Muir and Vidocq). And as usual i needed to go back and make up an index card-cum-bookmark with the characters and the names of their homes, so I'm more or less on the second chapter and holding. But ready to go at any time.

Checking in late. This was standardized testing week, and if there is anything duller than proctoring a test room all day for a bunch of well-behaved kids. I don't know what it is. You can't do anything other than proctor, and other than respond to the occasional confused child with the scripted "Some of these are tricky, aren't they? Just give your best answer," and oversee restroom trips, there is nothing but to gaze out over the silent bubble-filling and watch the timer tick down and despair. But that's all done now for better or for worse, and I have two (two!) finished books to report. Poems of Geoffrey Grigson Poems of Edwin Muir These are from the '70s Penguin Modern Poets series, which little volumes are worth their weight in gold. Low page count but high time investment, and I've been working on them for a while, so I have no shame about counting them for BaW. The Muir gets me three 10x10 categories: Plucked From the Air, Scots Wha' Hae, and Lyric, Dramatic, and Epic (though I've got way more than ten in that category now). Currently reading Memoirs of Vidocq, of whom I learned from Joyce. Check out his Wikipedia page! Another from the Crime and Punishment 10x10. A fantastic read, if you can lay your hands on a copy.

Robert Louis Stevenson. So much more than Treasure Island.

It's Candlemas for us today, and while the guinea pigs definitely saw their shadows whilst gamboling on the lawn, it was an early spring for sure at 80+ degrees. Finishing the Robert Louis Stevenson collection South Sea Tales. These are all set in the Pacific islands, where RLS and his wife settled, and the only sign of Scottishness is the tendency of all the characters to quote spontaneously from Robert Burns. I started it for the sake of the first story, The Beach of Falesá--part of Middle Girl's English curriculum--which makes an interesting contrast piece to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but RLS is an excellent storyteller and I've gone on to read and enjoy the rest. The Isle of Voices is a rewriting of Shakespeare's Tempest, but from the point of view of the islanders; The Bottle Imp is a Pacific island version of a German fairy tale which RLS wrote specifically for translation into Samoan. After RLS, my modern poetry book and then Emma and a very obscure book I found mentioned in Dubliners which I can't wait to read.

Amy -- I did not know that about unicorn blood. Sorry you're all down with Evil Germs and Side Effects. I would bring you chicken tortilla soup but you're very far away.

Frank Norris's (author of The Octopus and McTeague) younger brother, Charles Gilman Norris, was also a novelist, popular in his time but largely forgotten now. Better remembered is C. G. Norris' wife, Kathleen Norris (Frank Norris's sister-in-law), who wrote scads of best-sellers in the first half of the 20th century. Kathleen and C.G.'s son, Frank Norris (named for his literary uncle) was a gynecologist and obstetrician who seems to have been delivering babies in San Francisco in the '60s and '70s. Did he mention to your mom that besides a very literary family, his niece (granddaughter of C.G. and Kathleen) married a Romanov prince?

What timing! I just finished David Copperfield myself. Entering it on my book timeline I saw that I'd last read it in 2015; five years since I taught it to Middle Girl & Teenage Co. as part of a little seminar I ran for a while. It was more fun reading it without thinking about plot arc or Dickens's methods of characterization. My favorite character is still Miss Mowcher, who transmogrifies from pandering Madame, in league with Steerforth, to oppressed but feisty heroine, in the blink of a defamation lawsuit. One more in the Literary Duress 10x10 category. Soon I need to lay my 2019/2020 list before me and figure out which categories I'm done with and which not. I'm reconsidering the Shame List category: 10 books I don't want to admit I haven't read. Middle Girl suggests I fess up to not having read Emma and get it done.

I liked McTeague better than The Octopus (the first in Norris's unfinished trilogy). It's a good read, if you like depressing books about the sordid lives of awful people. Which I do. The reader is somewhat distracted by amazement and wild envy as she realizes these wretches are living, ungratefully, in a San Francisco location that would now cost several million dollars.

Amy, hope everyone feels better soon.

Thank you for that Tolkien excerpt, Robin! I'm not familiar with it, but it looks like Tolkien was alluding to Bede's "Parable of the Sparrow": (from The Ecclesiastical History of England) Almost done with The Golden Goblet. A worthier book than Mara, for sure. I'm going to suggest Wee Girl read it. Then I'll try to finish my Stevenson and my modern poetry and of course David Copperfield. And then the book I had dh check out from the library, before they start whining about wanting it back. More on which, if I get to it any time soon.

Mountain cedar is a tool of Satan and a scourge upon the earth. It's not even real cedar. To use it as stays for barbed wire fencing is to ennoble it far beyond its merits. I've never read The Semi-Detached House, so I'll have to find out from you. :) ETA: What is wrong with the quote function lately? ETA2: I finished Dubliners. And what will replace it? Yet another YA novel, The Golden Goblet. Sigh. Middle Girl likes Joyce, but had to go through that beginner's experience where you turn the page, see that the next story is starting, and are momentarily convinced that a page must have been torn out because that can't possibly have been the end of the story. "Under-resolved" as they say.

How did I miss this??? Amy, that's awesome! Congratulations!!! Can't wait to read it....