I might shame myself in the eyes of my fellow homeschoolers?

Thanks all for the further input. A follow-up question, though: the knives have plated handles but stainless steel blades. How does that work then? Handwashing is still not in my near future. Live with pitting/discoloration? Actually these are on the yellowish side anyway (still nicer-looking than what we have going right now ... yes my housekeeping is of that standard) so I wonder if dishwashing would really harm them much more. Maybe for Thanksgiving I'll try polishing them and shock everyone. Meanwhile I can put away the old stuff and run these through in splendid isolation.

Good. Thank you both.

The question: Would you/ should I run silver plate flatware through the dishwasher? The backstory: Noting the usual attrition of our (cheap, used) flatware -- I mean, who is eating the tablespoons and knives? where are they going? never mind -- I bought for $5 a big batch of flatware at the thrift store. Turns out most of it is silver plated. Nice. But I don't buy cheap-and-used to make more work for myself handwashing it. Thoughts welcome.

Just a note that free on-line copies of A Beleaguered City may be just that one story; which, while a good story in itself, is better in a collection with her other supernatural fiction. I note that either the Oxford World's Classics collection, or the Canongate Classics collection, (the one I read) is available in good condition via Bookfinder.com for a fiver....

I realized my above post made it sound like Sophie's World was by Iris Murdoch, but the Murdoch mention was me off on a different train of thought regarding philosophical literature. Amy, you might read Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea some time and see if it would be suitable for Sophia.

Sandy, glad you're enjoying Voyage to Arcturus! Speaking of Scottish reads, if you haven't already read Margaret Oliphant's short story collection The Beleaguered City, I think you'd like it. Fits the Spooky October theme. I had a genuine frisson a few years ago when I read it and realized one of the eerier tales was set in the town I was living in, the next street over, in a place I could actually see when I read upstairs. Made me not want to whip out to the Tesco Metro after dark. (Fortunately dark was at eleven or so, but still.) For Halloweenish reading dh thinks I should try Thomas Tryon's The Other, which would fit my Little Oval on the Spine category. Cover claims it's "a landmark of psychological horror" in the tradition of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson, which gave me a moment's hope that Tryon was a Scot, but he's from Connecticut. We'll see. Amy, dh recommends Sophie's World. Which I haven't read but is supposed to be good. Iris Murdoch was a professional philosopher as well as a novelist, but I don't know how philosophical her novels are, and it's been so long since I've read her that I'm hesitant to recommend, not recalling the appropriateness of the content. ETA: Middle Girl picked out a new Truly Random Read for me: Hugh Macdiarmid, Anthology of Poems Scots and English. Which is a 10x10 threefer: Plucked From the Air; Scots Wha' Hae; and Lyric, Epic, and Dramatic. So lots of books on this week's to-read list.

Checking in late ... finished Vanity Fair, all thousand pages of it (category Plucked From the Air), and swapped it out for the ultra-recent John Updike novel Rabbit, Run, which fits zero of my 10x10 categories, but I keep meaning to get around to Updike and so here we are. At this rate I calculate it will take me three years to finish the 10x10 challenge. Go me! Also reading the occasional Apollinaire poem. Same experience with every poem, thinking I've certainly mistranslated some of the words because this line can't possibly say "O flaming Templars, I burn among you," but I look at the translation and it does indeed mean that. Ah surrealism! Best kind of vocabulary quiz.

I've read Karamazov twice, and felt guilty both times that I didn't like it more; like if I were just a better and more deeply spiritual person, it would be my favorite book. But it isn't.

The thing I love about Vanity Fair is that Thackeray is very honest about his anti-hero, Becky Sharp. Even though she starts out poor and despised, near the bottom of the early 19th-century English class system, and claws her way up to the height of society by her wit and determination; and even though there are definitely scenes that make the reader cheer Becky on, she isn't a con artist with a heart of gold. She's just a grifter, incapable of actually loving anybody (despite some moments of nostalgic sentiment, quickly passing), and even though it seems to have been her poverty and maltreatment that made her that way, she's nevertheless not sympathetic. Thackeray deplored social injustice and needless poverty as much as Dickens, but he refuses to sentimentalize the poor, and recognizes that poverty doesn't usually improve people's character. I also, by the way, love Thackeray's illustrations; particularly his initial letters for each chapter, which often have a symbolic meaning that becomes clear only as the chapter progresses. For instance, one shows a flying Greek goddess carrying a torch and sword, whom I learned (after a little digging) was Bellona, appropriate to the chapter's events. Another illustration shows two lovely little girls of the upper class in their mansion, reading a book together tenderly under a heraldic shield; one notices in a moment that of the swords arranged behind the shield, one is pointed directly at the innocent girls beneath it: the sword of Damocles, poised above children whom the reader learns have insanity in their near family and are likely to fall prey to it as adults. It's very hard to find a copy with his illustrations, almost certainly due to the added expense: neither the Penguin Critical Edition nor the older Oxford Edition had them. The new one does but I can't afford it, so I'm making do with my old Everyman with very very old and worn type plates, but with the illustrations. Don't read an edition without them!

Have I ever strongly recommended a book to someone and had them like it? I don't think so. But I've had better luck with my own kids. Shusaku Endo, Silence; Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom; Melville's Moby Dick were all hits; and I just convinced Middle Girl to read Henry James's The American. Next I need to dig out Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds, which I think she'll love (she enjoyed Vanity Fair and Bel-Ami, so she's good with the anti-hero thing). Anyway, if you liked two or more of the above books, maybe you'd like the others. Or the converse.

On the third week of reading Vanity Fair, which is really wrecking my weekly book average. But I had to say hi to Amy! Amy! Be around more! - she said selfishly. I also read, again, Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater so I could discuss it with Middle Girl, as it's part of her English curriculum. This English course we're doing is so fun, and she's learning so much - best high school English literature curriculum I've ever found, hands down - but it's not contributing to my weekly average either, as this section has been mostly Romantic poetry. I loved reading Shelley with her, and helping her with close readings of Skylark and West Wind (and realizing that, three decades after I studied it, I still have no idea what Mont Blanc is about) - but none of that really counts for Book a Week. Anyway de Quincey was good, and this time I read the 1821 original instead of the 1856 revision and thought it better. On with anti-hero Becky Sharp. 300 pages to go!

A. Conan Doyle, Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard Wm Thackeray, Vanity Fair Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami

Three children, eighteen years. Used (or soon will be) for all three: Primary years: Reader Rabbit's Reading 1/ Reader Rabbit's Interactive Reading Journey Artes Latinae: Level 1 Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Teaching Great Poetry to Children Miquon/ Key To Scribner School Paperbacks TOPS Science Phonics of Drawing My Path to Heaven A Child's History of the World (Hillyer) Word Wealth Junior Secondary years: Art of Problem Solving* Open University S103 Discovering Science Artes Latinae: Level 2 Sound & Sense (Perrine 1st ed.) Word Wealth So many of these are now out of print, or don't work with modern technology. Sigh. Surely, I think sometimes, if people knew these were the best curricula ever, they would be back in demand...

Golden Press published a lovely book called Tales of India (stories from the Mabharata) that's still available used.

Robin, Thank you for Proust week! I'll try to make some progress, as he counts for my Decadents/Symbolists/Surrealists 10x10 category, but my new teaching job is really eating into my reading time. I hope prep time decreases as we go into the year. This week I failed to make enough headway in my two chunksters, Thackeray's Vanity Fair (category Plucked From the Air) and Romano Amerio's Iota Unum (category Bad Catholic), both of which I'm enjoying but had better pick up the pace with, or I'll be reading them into December. A brief whine: September is when I write checks for All The Things People Are Signed Up For, but also the month our dishwasher and air conditioner decided to die, and we needed to purchase a full-sized cello for Wee not-so-wee Girl. And a hard case. And a cello bow, which thin piece of wood-and-hair cost you don't want to know how much. No problem, we've already had the new car a couple of months, good time to drain the bank account. Maybe I can get into an accident while the cello is in the back.

Get well soon Robin! (Note to self: flu shots pronto...) This week I finished The Complete Works of St. Francis and St. Clare, chosen from my stacks at atmospheric random by Middle Girl (10x10 category "Plucked from the Air"). These two saints worked tirelessly and accomplished much, but didn't write very much, so quite a lot of the book is historical background, explanations, discussions of determination of authenticity, etc. An interesting point is that, while the one Franciscan writing that he definitely didn't write is the famous "Prayer of St. Francis" ("Make me a channel of your peace..."), our most certainly authentic writing of St. Francis is a series of rebukes of sinners, particularly those who don't show adequate reverence to the liturgy and to the holy vessels used at Mass; these are not the aspects of the faith most usually associated with Franciscans. The writings of St. Clare are even fewer, but include her Rule, which has a list of days when the Poor Sisters are to receive Communion which I found personally helpful, as I've been uneasy lately with the "Communion at every Mass" approach usual even among Traditionalists. It feels like Clare herself tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, "Why fret? Just commune on these days of the year, and let the rest go." Middle Girl picked a new book for me, which is underway: W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Also have Guillaume Apollinaire's selected poems (thank you Robin! Hey, this is the time to see if Apollinaire makes more sense when you have a fever); and perhaps the time has come to try Proust at last. He started out publishing Symbolist pieces in the journal Le Banquet (sort of a French version of The Yellow Book), so maybe I could count him for my Symbolists/Surrealists category. Anyway the Moncrieff translation of Swann's Way is in my car, just in case.

I don't know what this phrase means. Beautiful canal photos. One of the loveliest of many lovely walks in Scotland was along the Forth and Clyde Canal towpath.

What a timely thread. Our 10+ year-old Whirlpool died yesterday and I'm looking for a bottom-of-the-line replacement. So far Whirlpool, LG, and Bosch ~$500 models are contenders. Anyone have experience with the Bosch 100 series?

Labor Day's greetings: "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will." (1817) ... if what you will happens to be more work, that is. (2019) I finished Ciaran Carson's translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, "the cattle raid of Cooley," Ireland's great prose epic of the battle between the Irish, led by Queen Mebh and King Ailinn, and the Ulstermen of the north. The latter are under a periodic divine curse and so incapacitated, and so the Ulster hero Cú Chulainn takes on the Irish warriors singlehanded. 10x10 category "Brexit Special," and appropriately too, as the fighting is all done at the border between Ulster and Ireland.

Everything is quiet in the City of the V. C. Thanks for checking!

Kathy, here's hoping the hurricane leaves you and yours unscathed. Teaching prep, with the need to really firm up my Latin, is eating up my time something fierce - qui, quae, quod; qui, quae, quae - but I finished Raymond Chandler's noir mystery Farewell, My Lovely for the Crime & Punishment 10x10 category. Starting now, in between annoying future tenses that look like present tenses of other conjugations, The Táin Bó Cúailnge.

Thank you for the Apollinaire, Robin! It's a great poem; and I should be getting to Apollinaire soon as part of my non-realists category. I love Océan de terre. If you have any French at all you should read it in a facing edition so you can enjoy the wonderful sound of "Octopus stir all around" in French: "Des poulpes grouillent partout," and the word-play in "Attention on va jeter l'ancre/ Attention à l'encre que l'on jette." This week I finished David Lindsay's 1920 science fiction Voyage to Arcturus, which apparently inspired C. S. Lewis in his decidedly inferior science fiction series. I'm not at all sure I made sense of it all, but it's something like Scottish Calvinism meets Swedenborgian Gnosticism in the Twilight Zone. Now reading the much more comprehensible Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, which is substantially less philosophical I can tell you. Philip Marlowe doesn't waste any time pondering the nature of the Will.

I don't recognize any fairy tales in particular, and I've never played this game you refer to, but could 'staryk' be related to the Russian word 'stariy,' meaning old/ancient?

He's in a long-abandoned house and finds the tea, but since there's no milk he does the obvious thing and cuts it with whiskey. Right before he goes out for a nighttime coastal walk to peer over the cliffs. Because Scotland! No mention of jaffa cakes or chocolate digestives, both of which, I was recently informed, were shockingly absent this summer.