Actually 1980 seems to be the key boundary. Post-1980 fiction I've read since 2013: Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver (1982), Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote (1982); The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (1983, but published posthumously; Pancake died in 1979); George Mackay Brown, Andrina & Other Stories (1983); John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989); Jose Saramago, Blindness (1995). I liked the Jansson, the Pancake, and the Mackay Brown. The only post-2000 books I've read at all since 2013 are Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) and Phil Lawler, The Smoke of Satan (2018). The Rose was good.

That's good enough. I read Horseman, Pass By (aka Hud) and quite liked it. Which else?

Meanwhile, this week I finished nothing, but got about 2/3 of the way through Dostoevski's The Idiot, which I'm finding frankly incomprehensible. Fortunately I have a book of Critical Essays on Dostoevsky of the 20th Century and I'm going to read the article on The Idiot when I'm done and maybe All Will Be Explained. Hard week in general has led to insufficient reading: bearing up under difficult family news, and at the same time a Small But Noisy faction of my worship community decided to shame us all in front of the wider church community, which unseemly incident needs no details because the Clique of the Pure is probably familiar to anyone who has a church. Sigh. I really prefer my drama in novels. Also reading some of J. H. Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons, an underappreciated book which I was gratified to find specifically mentioned in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (it's one of the books kept in a safe by Head Bad Guy, if I remember right). I'm going to see if I can get a Newman's Sermons reading group going at church. Can't help noticing that none of The Pure are avid readers.

Do list them! I have more J. Frank Dobie and Roy Bedichek lined up for my 10x10 "Don't Mess With Texas" category, and some non-Texas cowboy things, but I can always use more titles. My favorite is an adult/child pair: Cabeza de Vaca's Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition (older readers), and Walk the World's Rim (younger). Anti-Herriot is right! You remember the part where the tourist asks the gas station attendant how this can be cow country, when there's no grass? And the guy says, Moss grows on the undersides of the rocks, and the cows lick it off. So the gullible tourist turns over a couple rocks and says There's no moss under these. And the guy tells him he needs to head up into the mountains to turn over rocks 'cause the ones down here have already been licked clean. Gorgeous pictures, Negin! Dh got to see those on a business trip to Madrid, oh the agonies of the working world. Prayers for your family at this difficult time. How good that you all can be together. Now that you're back, time to cough up some opinions on Texas reading. Oh yes. A folder, with lined notebook paper, with "2019" (or whichever) at the top and a numbered list of books written in number 2 pencil. And an old SonLight spiral-bound timeline, cannibalized for writing each book into its appropriate year. That way if I ever read a book written after 1970, I'll definitely notice. Have you read The Last Man? It's a pretty powerful book about grief, disguised as a post-apocalyptic novel, and really sad when you realize she wrote it after everyone she cared about had died. (((Junie))). High school, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Everyone does. Having a good time on vacation with your husband hardly counts as a reason to neglect your interweb friends, does it? 😄

Still haven't gotten to last week's thread. More life stuff coming fast and furious. But meanwhile, I read a book loaned by Middle Girl: Up To My Armpits: Adventures of a West Texas Veterinarian, by Dr. Charlie Edwards. Great reading! Pretty much unedited, so rough in places, but keeping lots of West Texas vernacular, super-dry humor, and charm. Edwards practiced from the late '40s through the '90s, and saw the devastation of the 1950's Big Drouth (which Middle Girl first learned about in Lois Lenski's Texas Tomboy, which I make everyone read as part of their Texas History unit) and the many changes brought by weather, demographic shifts, technological improvements, and the gradual passing of the last of the Old West. Favorite story: Dr. Edwards is applying pesticide to a herd, where the hands shove the cows into a chute, Dr. Edwards pours the "Ivomec Pour-On" all over the cow's back, and then, released, she dashes forward into the pen to lose herself among the already-treated cows. One cow balks, and the vet's assistant touches her with the electric cattle prod. She springs forward. "We watched in amazement as she burst into flames, the solvent in the Ivomec burning. She was headed for the bunch of cows.... We stood helpless, fearing the worst. Only Topper [the ranch manager] had the presence of mind to shout instructions, 'Lie down and roll, you dumb cow!' I don't guess she heard, because she didn't even slow down." Fortunately the stuff is super-volatile and scorches the cow's hair without burning her skin, and goes out before she sets the other cows alight. The hands, being cowboys, then attempt to re-create the flaming cow incident for the benefit of their friends who missed it. Dr. Edwards is only able to make them stop by pointing out how expensive the Ivomec Pour-On is. 5 stars. 10x10 category: Don't Mess With Texas. Back to Real Literature (TM) with Jonson and Dostoevsky.

Sorry to be late, again, and I'll go back and read. Yesterday was filled with excitement: Middle Girl was confirmed at long last, and had a lovely reception for which she made and decorated the cakes. The Bishop's Pentecost/Confirmation sermon was on the Holy Spirit coming into our lives as a great wind that renews us. In the evening we cowered in the central hallway with the cat and two guinea pigs, as the tornado-level winds ripped up our neighbor's big ash tree and dropped it on our roof. Thanks, Bishop. Dh got back home Saturday, so my reading should pick up a bit now that I'm not single-momming. Meanwhile last week all I got finished was Gide's The Vatican Cellars, which was good French farce. Trigger warning for those triggered by bedbugs, fleas, and/or mosquitoes; but the Hapless Traveler passage on its own made the book worth reading. Currently reading some Nathanael West and Dostoevski's The Idiot. With chainsaws in the background.

Not too strange. But a reader should set aside modern expectations for short fiction.

Sandy gave a description and link, so I'll just give, as an example, my ten categories in which I hope to read 10 books. Possibly someone will add some extra months to the year so I can do that. The Brexit Special: 10 European countries, not including the UK (7 books so far) Scots Wha' Hae: Scottish books (3) Don't Mess With Texas: Texas, cowboys, or both (3) Plucked From the Air: chosen via the atmospheric noise Truly Random generator (4) Little Oval on the Spine: published by New York Review of Books (2) A is for Amy who...: cover art by Edward Gorey (2) Bad Catholic: the sort of books they read at that parish you don't go to (3) Dramatic, Lyric & Epic: all the poetry (7) Crime & Punishment: mostly noir (6) The Hollow Crown: Tudor and Jacobite chronicle plays (4)

"Coronation." <snort> So glad I wasn't the only one with that reaction to The Immoralist. However now I'm wondering if I wasn't being sufficiently sensitive to Gide's understated satire, as that's definitely a thing going on with The Vatican Cellars. Will report back....

Late late late. Last week I finished Miguel de Cervantes' Exemplary Stories, the last of which was a strange dialogue between two dogs suddenly gifted one night with speech and reason. One tells his picaresque adventures, while the other waits impatiently and tries to cut off his friend's frequent digressions into social and political philosophy, in the forlorn hope of getting his own turn before the sun comes up. 10x10 categories: Brexit Special (Spain); Plucked From the Air. This week Great Girl is visiting for a few days, having accompanied Middle Girl to an out-of-state math camp (GG coached), so not so much reading. In spare moments, André Gide's novel The Vatican Cellars, which so far is a bit like "what if Dostoevski had been a French Symbolist?" 10x10 category: Bad Catholic.

I have no solution. I found Wee Girl reading "Freeing Your Child From Anxiety" in her bed, when I thought it had been squirrelled away from prying wee hands. She's been explaining OCD best practices to me since. And yesterday Middle Girl asked casually who Jean Genet was. I said, Someone you can read when you're 21 and not living here. So much for double-shelved, in the back, bottom corner.

Sandy, I'll check with MG and see if she'd be interested. Thanks!

Congratulations Matryoshka on 52! Junie, tell more about your taste for French literature. Any recommendations for the young beginner? I ask because Middle Girl has started reading French lit in earnest; it's too bad they don't offer the AP anymore. I'm casting around for readable texts besides the usual high school warhorses (Voltaire, Racine, Flaubert, Sartre, Duras, etc.), but my French is too weak to think of much. She's enjoying Bernanos right now.

I put aside Volpone temporarily, and this week read instead Cornell Woolrich's thriller I Married a Dead Man, which was made into a movie (as was his novel Rear Window, filmed by someone or other). Fun crime fiction for those of us who like that genre. For just one more entry in the "Crime and Punishment" category -- this time, malfeasance on the high seas -- I read The Mutiny On Board H.M.S. Bounty, by William Bligh himself. Not to be confused with the 1932 fictionalization, nor the great Charles Laughton film, this is Bligh's own 1791 account of the events. Not a spoiler, I hope, to tell you that Bligh comes off rather better in this account than in the contemporaneous account by Fletcher Christian's lawyer brother, on which the novel and movie were based. Madteaparty, did you see that The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily was just made into a film? It seems like everything I'm reading these days has a movie version. Currently reading Miguel de Cervantes' Exemplary Stories. Turns out he wrote a lot more than Don Quixote. They take some getting used to; the short story structure of 1613 was very different from that of today.

New York Review of Books reprint. I am a NYRB junkie. 9 out of 10 of their reprints--adults or children's--are reliably good reads. I highly recommend checking out their children's collection (and then buying them used through Bookfinder).

We just bought a 2017 Outback, rather than replace the suspension on my beloved Mazda5 a third time. Consumer Reports may be worth looking at. Subaru remodeled the Outback in 2010 after lawsuits over the head gaskets and their record is supposedly very good since then. Best of all, the back cargo fits a full-sized cello without having to put the seats down.

Total agreement on Lady Chatterley. A book more important for its legal and cultural impact than for its literary quality. (It can share that stage with Uncle Tom's Cabin.) Wee Girl just read The Bears' Famous. I think it's a little too violent to ever get on those lists, but it should get its own special list of Disturbing Children's Lit. Let's see, we can put The Spider's Palace on the list too. Which btw you might like, come to think of it. (Just don't accidentally read Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica to a child.) Completely agree on the Nabokov, too. Pale Fire quickly felt like Nabokov showing off his literary cleverness and I got tired.

A new time of life for everyone. I hope you're still going to be posting to BAW.

Robin, keep updating on the house. We have to start repairs/renovations and are still procrastinating; you are the Good Example. Kareni, Wouk really was a "books your dad reads" author, wasn't he? You clearly come from a family of readers. Amy, sympathies for strep and stress! Wishing you good luck on your book. tuesdayschild, you blow me away with how much you read. And the variety of it! Finished William James this week. For something completely different, followed up with Evelyn Waugh's hilarious, but doubleplus un-pc, debut novel Decline and Fall, about a young man at Oxford whom Fortune pushes up and down the ladder, at one point landing him in prison at hard labor (which is easier on him than on the lower-class prisoners, as he was prepared by having attended an English public school). Currently reading plucked-from-the-air book Volpone, Ben Jonson's most well-known comedy. It's easy to keep everyone's character straight as they're all named after appropriate animals.

B made a halfhearted attempt at our original visit, but dropped the subject immediately when we declined. T and J made no attempt. So points for that. But J was definitely trying to talk us out of the car. Yes.

Final update: Poor B is sufficiently at death's door to still be out sick, and C----x wanted us to come get the car. So we made an appointment, came in yesterday evening, and met with T briefly. He pulled up our file on the computer, announced he'd had a long hard day, and disappeared. Some other guy--"J"--then appeared, took us out to test-drive the car and finished the sale. J was less complainy than T but, oddly, spent the test drive explaining to us that that make of car burned oil badly, all of the models did, leaky head gaskets, expensive repairs, oh he'd owned several--he knew--and when we got back to his cube he pulled up a google search for us on the terrible leaking oil and engine problems. It was very odd. (We'd done the research, and the problem had been fixed in 2010 following some lawsuits; the engine was now really good.) We have a lovely new-to-us car in our driveway now. I wonder how many ways they split the sale? Thank you all for the great input!

Good advice. Called sales manager, explained situation, keeping it positive. He said B would call me when he was available, but insisted T was "just one of our guys covering for his co-worker." Whatever; as long as we're dealing with the guy we know is dependable.

At this point it's mostly that I don't want to work with T, who has done nothing but fail to show up for the initial appointment, fail to enter necessary information into the computer, and fail to let us know our car was ready. His not getting half the commission would be a bonus; but the main thing is that he doesn't seem very useful. I've texted B and told him more or less the above, and asked for his manager's contact info. We'll see what happens.

We have the deal we want; we just don't want to work with T, who has been appointed to finish the sale. He'll be gone for a few weeks. The problem isn't that we don't have time to finish buying the car; the problem is that we're being foisted off on a salesman (T) whom we have never met, who didn't help us in any way (as B did), and who so far has failed at everything he was supposed to do for us.

Any advice from the automotive hive mind? We're just about to buy a car from C----x (name elided for pretense of anonymity). Background: We found the car we (thought we) wanted on their website; I phoned to set up an appointment; "T" answered, set up an appointment time, and put a "reserved" card in the car. Dh and I showed up at the appointment time. T had gone home; none of our information was entered in the computer; he hadn't told anyone about the appointment. "B," a really young guy, was handed the appointment (in retrospect, probably because everyone knew T was entitled somehow to the sale). B was really helpful, didn't try to upsell us, and was basically the kind of salesman C----x boasts of. B got all our ducks in a row and made another appointment for the trade-in and purchase. The next day, dh found a car better fitting our requirements, at a C----x in a nearby city. There was some hassle, in that it needed some interior work, and would have to be transferred, but B handled everything. He told me that T would handle the final sale since B would be out the day the car was expected to be ready, but I didn't want to change horses in midstream and told B we'd wait until he was in. The interior work took longer than expected. I hadn't heard from B since last week, so this morning I texted B to ask about the car. He was surprised, said it had been ready Monday, and T was supposed to have let us know, but dh and I could come in any time and T would handle the final sale. Unimpressed by T (and picturing my own Millennial daughter being pushed around) I told B we preferred to complete the sale with him, and asked why (the so-far unimpressive) T was involved at all. B admitted that he and T were splitting the sale. Dh figures C----x's policies for splitting commissions is their business, which I guess is right. But (1) I am not interested in dealing with T, whose record of failure has now inconvenienced us (Tuesday would have been a good day for us to buy the car; we're now under some time pressure because dh leaves the country this weekend, and both our names are/will be on the titles); and (2) it annoys me that he's going to "split the sale" with B because he answered the phone and talked to me for 60 seconds (and then failed to enter my info in the computer). Any suggestions? I'm particularly interested in hearing from someone with a better idea of how car dealerships work. I don't want to make trouble for B; but I am displeased.