domestic_engineer had questions about specific books in the other thread, so I thought I'd ask people's thoughts more generally. What about children's versions of books? Once upon a time I was a purist, and have become gradually less so. Some examples: We're doing a family reading of Dickens this year, and Wee Girl is using the Puffin abridged versions. These have the editing Dickens should have done himself, are a more convenient size for holding, and have slightly larger, clearer type with more white space. Frankly I wish I were reading those instead of the Penguin eyestrain editions. Middle Girl's French teacher assigned Michel Tournier's Vendredi, to my great alarm, but it was a young person's version of the (full of inappropriate content) French novel. And the adaptation was written by Tournier himself. So that seemed good. We read PIlgrim's Progress as part of our homeschool English curriculum, but a children's version that is neither adapted nor abridged but has all the spelling, capitalization, etc. modernized for readability, and again with slightly larger type, more white space, generally more readability. Oh and nice illustrations. Alfred Church retellings of Roman & Greek classics seem completely acceptable to me now. Some part of me still feels like any of this is "giving in." And I have some sympathy with the position that if the child isn't ready to read the real version, one should just wait, as there's plenty of appropriate and high-quality literature around. Opinions on adaptation? abridgment? modernization? bowdlerization? retelling?

Well done! The fruits of hard work.

We study grammar structurally, so the first question would be "What phrase would replace 'why' in a declarative sentence?" Since that would be a subordinate clause ("There are no horses because this is downtown Manhattan"), you would presumably diagram it the same way you would diagram a subordinate clause. This is more obvious if you reorder the sentence as "There are no horses why?"

I'm just going to add -- being married to a professional philosopher -- that this goes also for the list of philosophical texts. Only someone specializing in the history of philosophy, or in a related field, needs to read "Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, ... Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Husserl, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Comte, Mill, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre." Yes, dh read from most of those as part of his major; but philosophy is now a highly technical field (the Continentalists having lost the war against the analytic philosophers). Philosophy is issues-oriented; it's not a matter of reading and appreciating Great Works of Philosophy, but of tackling various philosophical topics -- which may involved reading some or all of the "great works," but more usually will involve reading modern philosophical writings. I'm currently reading Kierkegaard's Either/Or. I wouldn't recommend tackling it without some understanding of Hegel's ideas ... but you don't have to have actually read Hegel. (Also you really need a good familiarity with Mozart's Don Giovanni.) And if someone were very interested in aesthetics and ethics, while at some point she would end up reading at least some of Either/Or, it would not be the way to start out studying those areas of philosophy. Dh adds: One worry about the near-fetishization of "classics" in a field, whether one is speaking of philosophy, or math, or art, is that it runs the risk of making students feel that they can't be contributors themselves to the field, or that the field is not currently a living area of study ... because it seems as if it exists in a literary museum. My own addition: Middle Girl took a course this semester that included Euclid (read in Greek), and wrote a paper for it that analyzed Euclid's geometry. But she had to already understand the relevant geometry thoroughly -- as well as Greek -- in order to analyze Euclid and try to figure out what he was trying to convey. She would never have tried to learn her geometry from Euclid.

Isn't that the truth? If she ends up at Big State U., which she can easily bike to but not so easily park at, we may never get her to learn to drive.

We haven't done any online; just bought the textbooks for the courses we've used and done it ourselves. The trick is to get texts for discontinued courses, so the books are cheaper. So, for instance, this course, "Discovering Science" Currently finishing "Reading and Studying Literature" -- which looks as if it will be available online in 2022.

I should read more Lawrence, too. Send up a flare if there's one you're considering? Back from Christmas services, stockings emptied, presents opened and being enjoyed, potato soup and tamales warming ... time to enter the new books into LibraryThing and plan upcoming reads. Wee Girl got a selection of Puffin Abridged Dickens and a set of corresponding (more or less) BBC Dickens DVDs, and we're all committing to family reading of Dickens novels and then watching the BBC version. Also dh got me a NYRB book-of-the-month subscription. He is currently holed up on the bedroom, gazing at his new Compton-Burnett novels of dysfunctional English family life. Middle Girl read us Martial from her new book of Roman Satire until we made her quit.

Yes! Thank you.

I never go to the blog. Except yesterday in a failed attempt to find the Bingo square. I was doing BAW on TWTM for a long time before I even realized there was a blog.

I've said it before, but Brit Tripping was one of the best literary experiences I've ever given myself. All the English counties feel so familiar now. Somehow I can't find the right link to the 2020 Bingo.

Flu if you've had your flu shot and now you have a super-mild case.

Biggest hit for my 11th grader: Intensive summer Greek class. 3 years of college Greek in one summer, all day every day all summer. She already had one college year's worth, slowwwly acquired over the previous few years, so the first portion was easy enough to give her time to settle into the intense work schedule. Then she hit the new material, and her bike got stolen by the university bike theft ring while she was in class, and there was Deep Unhappiness. But she got her feet under her, found a 1970s-era fixer-upper English-made bike on CraigsList and a copy of Richard's Bicycle Book from that decade, and to this very day she is intoxicated with (a) the classics and (b) bicycles. Also a huge success: Open University English Literature course. This is the last subject where I'm still able to teach her, and it's been wonderful having that mom-daughter tutoring, "just like when I was little and you used to teach me things." Open University course materials have never let us down. Not so great: AP-prep Latin. Somehow I didn't realize until the beginning of the year that the sole surviving AP Latin exam is now half Caesar, and she resents returning to the Gallic Wars to the point that she's not really studying for that. She's on top of the Vergil, and her non-American tutor who looks askance at the AP process is taking her through the relevant portions of the Aeneid (though with some unauthorized diversions). And I introduced her to a retired classicist at church who taught high school AP for years and commiserated with her disdain for the current exam, and then worked her around to agreeing to prepare for it. Some. Disastrous: Driver's Ed from parents. No cajoling can get her to go over 20 mph and frankly she's a hazard on the road. Good thing she's so enamored of bicycles.

Excellent choice! And watch the movie if you can.

Literary, 20th century, available, short/readable, eh? John Updike, Graham Greene, Eudora Welty, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Ernest Hemingway come to mind. For really short, maybe some modern drama?

I have never successfully finished a book by Woolf. To the Lighthouse got literally thrown across the room. Are you sure there's not some other modern literature you'd rather read?

At the risk of over-posting ... This week I finished, forever, Mara, Daughter of the Nile. Also a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's "fugitive" writings, titled The Unknown Poe, which included homages to Poe from his weirdly obsessive French Symbolist and Decadent and Surrealist admirers. And Molière's Tartuffe. 10x10 categories Literary Duress (thank you Junie), Enfants de Baudelaire, and Plucked From the Air, respectively. Currently reading Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or (both Plucked From the Air and A is for Amy) and William James's What Maisie Knew (A is for Amy).

2019 Book List: 1. Isak Dinesen, Anecdotes of Destiny 2. Philip Lawler, The Smoke of Satan 3. George Peele, King Edward the First 4. Owen Wister, The Virginian 5. Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People 6. James Hadley Chase, No Orchids for Miss Blandish 7. Christoper Marlowe, Edward II 8. E. E. Cummings, 50 Poems 9, Bertolt Brecht, Edward II 10. William Gresham, Nightmare Alley 11. (various Anonymous), The Wanderer: Elegies, Epics, Riddles 12. Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering 13. Thomas Szasz, The Age of Madness 14. (Anonymous), Edward III 15. Nikolai Gogol, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories 16. Henry James, Watch and Ward 17. Edwin Brock, [from Penguin Modern Poets 8] 18. Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters 19. Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave 20. Henry James, In the Cage and Other Tales 21. Edward Anderson, Thieves Like Us 22. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 23. Emma Tennant, The Bad Sister 24. Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock 25. Gérard de Nerval, Selected Poems 26. Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me 27. S. T. Bindoff, Tudor England 28. Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette 29. St. John of the Cross, Poems 30. Anthony Trollope, Is He Popenjoy? 31. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels 32. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets 33. Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio 34. Plautus, Amphitryo 35. William James, Psychology: Briefer Course 36. Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall 37. Cornell Woolrich, I Married a Dead Man 38. Willam Bligh, The Mutiny On Board H.M.S. Bounty 39. Miguel de Cervantes, Exemplary Stories 40. André Gide, The Vatican Cellars 41. Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts 42. Charles Edwards, Up To My Armpits: Adventures of a West Texas Veterinarian 43. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot 44. Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire 45. (Anonymous; Seamus Heaney, trans.), Beowulf 46. Perry Miller, ed., The American Puritans 47. Terence, Phormio 48. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent 49. William Perry, ed., 21 Texas Short Stories 50. Arthur Symons, The Art of Aubrey Beardsley 51. Oscar Wilde, Salomé 52. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature 53. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between 54. Ben Jonson, Volpone 55. Sophocles, Philoctetes 56. David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus 57. Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely 58. (Anonymous; Ciaran Carson, trans.), The Táin 59. St. Francis & St. Clare, The Complete Works 60. Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 61. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair 62. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Dynamiter 63. John Updike, Rabbit, Run 64. Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Writings 65. Thomas Tryon, The Other 66. E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot and Other Tales 67. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights 68. Hugh MacDiarmid, Anthology: Poems in Scots and English 69. Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century 70. Edgar Allan Poe, The Unknown Poe 71. Molière, Tartuffe Bold indicates my sole completed 10x10 category, Dramatic, Lyric, & Epic: Poetry of all kinds.

Yes! Get to those girls early. And speaking of OOP children's books, your mentioning Charlotte Corday made me think of Bellerophon's Paper Dolls of the French Revolution, which I would love to get my hands on. They do feature Corday in their Infamous Women Paper Dolls, still in print.

I so want that book. What is it, one of those monographs that only half a dozen people are going to read, but it's crucial for the dissertations of all six of them? Must look it up. The book Middle Girl really wanted this year is Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Which is in the above category, and all I can find is a used copy for $25. So I guess we're going for that as a Twelfth Night gift.

No - Purgatory purifies the soul through drawing it ever-closer to ecstatic union with the Refining Fire which is the Eternal God. That only happens when I read Henry James.

Oo those are both good.

If only you knew my low-brow viewing habits....

I thanked you because suddenly I felt less guilty about work time eating out my reading time. It took me a month to read my last book, and currently I'm reading Mara, Daughter of the Nile for my sins. I'm not supposed to be negative about the curriculum but I'm anonymous here and I'm just going to say I hate this book for so many reasons and will never allow Wee Girl to read it. On to chapter 17. ETA: Hey I think my new 10x10 category has to be "books I read because I had to teach them and not because I particularly wanted to read them at this moment or possibly ever." Anyone have a pithy, witty phrase for that?

Husband: Every title by Ivy Compton-Burnett in reasonable condition that I can get my hands on and that he doesn't already own, all of which are out of print. Google Fu! Great Girl: various science fiction choices Middle Girl: Bolchazy-Carducci had a great Cyber Monday sale, and she picked out several titles: The Latin Epic Reader, Roman Verse Satire: Lucretius to Juvenal, and Res Gestae Divi Augusti. Felicem natalem Christi! Wee Girl: Lots of NYRB Children's Collection books. Every choice a winner. Me: Perhaps someone will notice my deperate need for the Library of America editions of Henry James's novels that I haven't been able to find second-hand ... if they've been paying attention. ETA: Middle Girl just had her birthday and got more readable titles then. We're not that hardcore.