Please someone explain to me the difference(s) between LibraryThing and GoodReads. My books now exist on the former, and I see there are discussions of some sort. Is it that GR is primarily for reviewing books, and LT for keeping one's home library curated?

With the exception it seems of dead languages with a fixed canon. When I type in more than one Latin word, I generally get an accurate translation that often enough includes words I haven't yet typed in. Very convenient!

I vote to keep the name, but that's probably just my traddy instincts. "A Book a Week" is recognizable, familiar, and gets across the overarching challenge to read more, in an accountable way. It's true that it requires some explanation for the new and anxious that it's not a requirement for being part of this project, and that there are sub-challenges. Maybe you could add more "levels" or variations, such as Book of the Month, or Uncountable Reading (e.g. poetry, magazines, etc. for those who prefer less bookbound reading)? Maybe a quarterly/seasonal invitation to the WTM Board at large, with an explanation of what exactly the thread is about? I want to add that I'm grateful for the continuing public nature of this thread, both in its general visibility and in its continuing presence as part of the larger WTM community. These last few years there has been great temptation in my ecclesial life to ditch the grand public project, and thinking it all through has convinced me that Here Comes Everybody is the better choice of principle for most things in my life.

It's the logo for the New York Review Books. They're so reliably good that whenever dh or I see "the little oval on the spine" at Half Price or the library discard store, we get the book. If one of us doesn't like it, the other will. Oh, look! They're having a 40% off sale!

Isn't that all just fantastic? There was definitely something in the air in that century--think of Fourier and his utopian Phalansteries and the oceans turning to lemonade because Man is finally in harmony with Nature. I must read that book of Alcotts. Why did we not learn these things in American History class? Think how different the APUSH could be. ETA: I have to assume you've read Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance. Why do schools assign The Scarlet Letter instead?

Nice 10x10 list, Sandy! I'm only going to have one of my categories finished by the end of the year: Dramatic, Lyric, & Epic (poetry). Probably I'll just keep adding new categories as I finish old ones. Better work on The Brexit Deal (10 European countries not including the UK): time may be getting short.

Lots of catching up to do..... But this week I finished selected poems of Hugh MacDiarmid (10x10 category: Scots Wha' Hae) and The Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes (category: Little Oval on the Spine). The latter is an account (from the 1920s) of some of the less well known of the fads, cults, new religions, and communist utopia attempts of the American mid-19th century. Did you know that Louisa May Alcott's father helped found a utopian commune that lasted all of seven months before they had to disband in order not to starve to death? Alcott wrote an account of the whole absurd endeavor that I should look up at some point. Still reading Mara, Daughter of the Nile. That is, I should be finishing it. Also reading a new acquisition, The Unknown Poe. It's a collection of his generally uncollected writings--juvenalia, marginalia, letters--and filled out with writings on Poe by Baudelaire and the French Symbolists and Decadents who followed him. Back to read two weeks of threads.

+1000.

I'd never heard of it but just looked it up on Wikipedia. The fifth movie in the Alien series?? I didn't know there had been more than two. [crawls back under comfy rock]

At the risk of bouncing the rubble, the hoary "copulative verbs require pronouns in the subjective case" rule seems defeated by the fact that if a grammatical rule has to be consciously acquired by all native speakers of a language, there is no sense in which it is a "rule." (I did enjoy 3rd grade grammar class, listening to our Language Arts teacher struggling not to use our regional dialect's second person plural form throughout the week in which we were being taught that it was Ungrammatical, Dang It! What a relief for everyone when that week was over.)

For writing poetry, I like Rose, Where Did You Get That Red for younger students (though its principles really will work for any age), and The Triggering Town for older ones. Neither is curriculum.

Well that was unimpressive. After days of waiting, LibraryThing imported my spreadsheet of several thousand books as 324 books, with only the first name of each writer. We ordered several books in Latin and Greek for Middle Girl on cyber-Monday, as 40% off is a good deal on classical titles. Good to see you, Æthylthryth. I've been remiss myself as work cuts into reading time. Lovely photos, Negin. The opposite of boring. Re-watching Alien with Middle Girl, I realized for the first time that the industrial ship it takes place on is called the Nostromo. Now I need to go read some Conrad. ETA: Wait ... the number of books is going up ... but still no last names. We now have an awful lot of books by "John." ETA2: And the names have appeared! Happy now.

Last week I finished Wuthering Heights, and am making good progress through Gilbert Seldes's The Stammering Century, about the minor religious movements and fads of the American 19th century. Also still reading from Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons. Soon though I will have to pick up Mara, Daughter of the Nile and read it for teaching. I have read more YA books this year than in the previous three decade and I can't say they're growing on me. Great Girl convinced me to try storing my book spreadsheet on LibraryThing, so I will give that a try if I can only get the spreadsheet to import. Either it's been waiting in queue for two days or it just isn't importing at all. Has anyone else put her book list on LT?

Happy birthday, Robin! Since I last posted, I've read another YA book (two in one year!) for teaching: André Norton, Shadow Hawk. Probably I would have enjoyed it more at a younger age. Later I read The Golden Pot and Other Tales by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann's best-known story was "The Nutcracker," but I read it for discussion of "The Sandman" with Middle Girl (and the other stories to gain some familiarity with Hoffmann before discussion). German Romanticism is way, way out of my familiarity zone, so his strange dreamlike "fairy tales" were a new experience for me. According to MG's textbook, Freud was very taken by "The Sandman" and psychoanalyzed the heck out of it. Now I'm on to Wuthering Heights, of which I am very fond but which I'm reading for MG's English course, not because I thought it was time for a re-read. Honestly I'm thinking I need a 10x10 category for Books I've Read In Order to Discuss With Children. Probably I won't try the challenge this week, as I've barely time for a book a week these days. But in case it gets me points, books I've read since starting BaW that were published in my birth year are: Charles Portis, True Grit; Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; and Iain Crichton Smith, Consider the Lilies. For bonus credit, books I've read that were published one hundred years before my birth year are: Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn; Cardinal J. H. Newman, Verses on Various Occasions; and Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot. Now I have three weeks of threads to catch up on.

You can buy them anytime. That sounds to me like having access.

Warm bed. Coffee. Drive to rosary & Sunday school. Home. Coffee. Bible. Lesson planning. Coffee. Drive back for mass. Coffee. Make dinner. Warm bed. ETA: Working up the will power to move past #1 ... any minute....

Just throwing in that my 4th graders would have thought "what would be an easier number to quarter than 196?" (200), and correct the answer (50) by a fourth of the added 4 (1). Dh likes the approach of "solve an easier problem in your head instead." The single digit products and the squares through 16^2 are easy to have memorized at that age without learning the terminology about square roots (dh liked to use the word "unsquare" instead). So 49 immediately yields 7. I never really understood the Singapore bar approach, but this looks like a good problem for starting with drawing the rectangle.

WW Jr seems to be for middle school age. There was once a thread on how to use the books and when I have access to a better device I'll try to find it, & type up how I use them.

For addition/subtraction, the most useful thing for us was cutting index cards into triangles and having the student write the numbers in the vertices and the operations in the middle of the sides. (Idea from Kitchen Table Math, which is chock full of useful early elementary math ideas.) The student covers a number and tries to solve it. For multiplication/division, weirdly all my girls had magnificent retention with these flash cards. I can't really explain it, but having the visual of a distinct colorful fish associated with each multiplication fact made memorization almost effortless. To this day we all associate clown fish with the number 56. We played concentration, war, whatever; any game that would get those cards in front of little eyes. When they got the multiplication facts down well, we played "factor fish," where I would name a product and if the other player guesses the factors she wins the card. We also used alphabet blocks for multiplication, so the commutative property and calculation of area were intuitive later.

Wood! I'd've switched her to violin. No I got a sweet deal on a pre-owned Bobelock, made in the Phillippines, much nicer than the Bam cases which are plastic for the same price new. There was a significant scratch but Wee Girl added her own promptly.

For things like this I usually use my dead lawn.

No it's essentially fiberglass but much sturdier. It makes the cello case light enough to carry, flexible enough to absorb shocks, and strong enough to survive middle schoolers.

Perfect. It's Priming my way at this moment.

Ha! My go-to adhesive, too. Wee Girl says Nix. I think she should sew it on. I mean it's carbon fiber, right?

Never posted to the Ignore Thread before. But where, I asked meself, shall I post this question? It's too trivial for its own thread. I know... So I have a badge, patch, you know the thing one sews and/or irons onto jackets. Wee Girl wants it, reasonably enough, on her cello case, which is carbon fiber. What's the best way to affix it? Which adhesive am I looking for? Tell me.