There is a fine Blackadder episode, Nob & Nobility, sending up The Scarlet Pimpernel, with the dimwitted prince played by Hugh Laurie, who is Wooster in the Jeeves and Wooster tv series. See? Conjunction. Recommended. Also recommended: the Samuel Johnson episode and the Regency actors episode: a full plate of literary-referential humor. ETA: Where is Amy, anyway? This "busy with real life" excuse is unconvincing.

If I keep going on Balzac I'll get to Père Goriot, of which I remember nothing; but my French hasn't been up to sustained novel-reading level for a long time, so in English.

Haven't posted in a while; catching up now. Since the bluebonnets first appeared, I've read: 23. Emma Tennant, The Bad Sister. Modern re-take of the classic James Hogg novel, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, taking up the themes of class, witchcraft, and identity confusion in a 1970s feminist context. Category: Scots Wha' Hae. 24. Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock. Noir, as written by a poet, and very good, though ending abruptly. Category: Crime & Punishment. 25. Gerard de Nerval, Selected Poems. Dual language. Late Romantic, or early Surrealist? Maybe if my French were better, I could tell. Category: Dramatic, Lyric, & Epic. 26. Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me. American girl in London, looking for ... love? sex? revenge? Not as wonderful as The Dud Avocado (American girl in Paris), but awfully fun. Category: Little Oval on the Spine. 27. S. T. Bindoff, Tudor England. A Pelican history, unfortunately now badly dated due to later scholarship on the English Reformation; also taking for granted the reader's Englishness and Protestantism, which make Bindoff both frustratingly under-informative (taking too much English historical knowledge for granted) and irritatingly chauvinistic. Category: Plucked From the Air. 28. Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette. One can't get too much wallowing in La Comedie Humaine. Balzac laments and moralizes on the awful behavior of the French of all social classes in the decadence of the Restoration Period, shaking his authorial head sadly as he spoons up more for his greedy reader. Bette is as bad as they come; but she has a lot of competition in this novel. Virtue really should overcome, but what can you do? Category: Brexit Special. 29. St. John of the Cross, Poems. Dual language. I actually did quite a lot of Lent-appropriate reading, it's just most of it wasn't the kind of books that one reads all of. But I did read the mystical poetry of San Juan de la Cruz, and about time. Too bad I have no real Spanish. Categories: Dramatic, Lyric, & Epic; Brexit Special. 30. Trollope, Is He Popenjoy? Okay as a Trollope novel, though somewhat recycling the plot of He Knew He Was Right, a superior novel. Ripped from the headlines of 1870s London, a Marquis who is possibly Trollope's most thoroughly nasty, vulgar character ever wreaks havoc on his family as he may or may not be passing off an impostor as his legitimate infant son, Lord Popenjoy. The scandal doesn't age well, the action never quite rises to a crisis at any point. and the thing is 600+ blessed pages long. I know Trollope wrote primarily for the money, but it rarely shows quite so much. No 10x10 categories, even. Currently reading Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and simultaneously reading the children's version to Wee Girl. It's a little surreal, reading the original of each chapter and then the bowdlerized version. I keep wanting to pause and say, "You know, sweetie, this part is really about the Treaty of Utrecht and the English betrayal of Oxford and Bolingbroke." But I don't. I do think they shouldn't have edited out Swift's scatological passages; it's just the kind of thing kids would like.

Mine is for "The City of the Violet Crown"; the cultural center of civilization; the finest place on earth to live. No, not that one ... the other one.

My opinion is your opinion. We've never found a separate grammar program to be necessary. We use a Latin program that teaches English grammar as it goes, and have found that to be easily sufficient. It is useful to be able to refer to parts of the language (e.g. subordinating conjunction; personal pronoun; compound predicate) just because it's useful to know the names of anything you might want to talk about. And if you're not going to teach how English operates in the course of studying a foreign language, you should probably teach it separately. But that doesn't seem to me like a thing that has to be done every single year. Middle Girl is taking an introductory linguistics course and learned in a short time anything she missed when learning grammar via Latin.

Brief post; Wee Girl and I are down with head colds and are watching Blue Planet 2 and sharing a box of kleenex. Miserable yet snuggly. This week read one of the great 20th-century Texas novels, Edward Anderson's Depression-era noir, Thieves Like Us. Re-read James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Classic and deeply strange exploration of identity and duality in a hyper-Calvinist context. Now reading Emma Tennant's 1978 gender-switched version of Hogg's famous novel, The Bad Sister. Jenn, I have not read any Ossian, though now and then I feel I ought to get to the library and dig it up.

deleted; getting too emotional & ranty, sorry

This happened to us with our non-verbal child. We promptly got a couple of Road ID wristbands saying: "NON-VERBAL / Mom: [phone] / Dad: [phone] / No known allergies". And we quietly cursed the TSA and their officious expansion of their mandate beyond preventing terrorism. But the wristband is a good idea in general with a child who has trouble verbalizing. What if she gets lost?

Dh and I buy used books online all the time, but rarely books for homeschooling. The only time there's been an inaccuracy in condition involved a seller that turned out to be a homeschooling family. It was a blank timeline, listed as "like new," but arrived with all the Sonlight timeline stickers glued into it and lots of events written in. When I insisted on a refund, I was told to send the original back at my own expense. When I explained to them what I was actually going to do, the seller immediately refunded my money and explained that her kids handled the sales and it was their fault.

First, it's not very likely that subject matter expertise will affect discussion. My daughter's group will be reading William James on psychology soon, but even if one of them had special training in psychology, there's not much to contribute other than "by the way, modern psychology isn't much interested in the same ideas James was interested in." Second, if the discutants want to step outside the (firm) rules of Shared Inquiry, of course nothing can stop them. But when her group has, despite the rules, allowed a girl who studied a writer's works previously to give lots of information extrinsic to the text, they've discovered that the free exchange of ideas quickly turns into sitting at the feet of the "expert." And nobody actually enjoys that.

*Crosses Bel-Ami off Quill Recommendation List*

I should add that it was super-easy to get other kids for the groups. Homeschooling in our community is very STEMmy, and many of the parents speak English as a second language, so there's a consequent anxiety about literary education.

Middle Girl learned about them and badly wanted to be in one: so I started one with her and half a dozen of her friends. It's something of a hybrid between the adult and children's forms: after the first session, which I led, they led it themselves, rotating the leadership, and for a while using the booklets of interpretive questions; after they got the hang of it, coming up with their own questions. (Teenagers) Later I started one for Wee Girl, which I lead in the traditional manner. I find the hardest part is to Shut Up when they head down the wrong path altogether, and wait for one of the kids to point out other possibilities, instead of taking over and "teaching." It's been amazing. (Late elementary) Both groups are girls only, which I worried would be controversial, but has been both successful and popular.

To be fair, one of my children specializes in sitting there silent and terrified-looking if anyone talks to her. One of the many reasons not to put the poor kid in a school. But I've heard way too many people blame her anxieties, OCD, and (previous) muteness on her being homeschooled. My favorite anti-homeschooling remarks are about how I'm helping wreck the public school system by keeping my kids out of it ... and I'm helping wreck the Catholic school system by keeping my kids out of it. Two school systems at once! My superpower.

The Junior Great Books "shared inquiry" is IMO worth looking at. I dislike most forms of "Socratic questioning" because it so readily turns into "try to read the teacher's mind/ interpret her responses instead of the text." Middle Girl is part of a Junior Great Books group and it's been a really fruitful method of investigation. https://www.greatbooks.org/what-we-do/what-is-shared-inquiry/ They have videos at greatbooks.org showing Shared Inquiry in both Junior Great Books and adult Great Books groups.

Years ago, when I called the police and the officer needed to talk to my teenage daughter (she had been the victim of a hit and run), he refused to enter the house: "Just ask her to come out here on the porch." That's made me wonder ever since about the motivation of any official who requests, however nicely, to come into my house. Listen to Aethelthryth.

Thanks! Ticket submitted.

Once again, Traditionalism is vindicated.

My old Earthlink account is effectively defunct and I'm changing to gmail. But when I go to my Account and have the option to click on "change" for email, it just kicks me to a screen telling me I can do things with my account dashboard.

@Susan Wise Bauer Here's a link to a giant emoji in the Book a Week thread: https://forums.welltrainedmind.com/?app=core&module=system&controller=content&do=find&content_class=forums_Topic&content_id=684450&content_commentid=8326108 (I'm typing from my desk top, as I haven't been able to sign in on my phone or ipad for over a week.) ETA: I had one pop up in one of my posts, where I'd quoted some text that included a normal-sized emoji; it turned giant when quoted in my post. This was from my creaky desktop computer.

The only Zweig I've read is Beware of Pity, several years ago. More books on my to-read list. Speaking of which, are you going to tell us which OOP books you've ordered? Inquiring minds want to know. Swapping out Mann for Beard is hard to criticize. Juvenile thing to know about Paradise Lost: you can sing Milton's famous opening phrases (telescoped) to "The Flintstones" theme. From memory: Of Man's first - disobedience - and the fruit of that forbidden tree Whose mortal - ta-aste brought death - into the world and all our woe With loss of - Eden till one greater man Restore us - and regain that blissful seat Sing, Muse - hea-venly Muse - a-and justify the ways of -- -tify the ways of -- the ways of God to Man!

I've only read Scott's Guy Mannering, one of the Waverly novels. I started How Late It Was, How Late, but gave it up. Must get going.

Hopeistheword, welcome to BAW! Nice to have an expert on children's literature aboard! This week I finished Larry McMurtry's book of essays about Texas, In a Narrow Grave. Like me, it's 50 years old and I'm tempted to say a little dated ... but it was so intriguing to read his thoughts (cultural, literary, historical, social) on the Texas that existed when I was born. Of special interest was the account of the filming of his first novel, Horseman, Pass By as the classic Texas movie Hud. The vulture wrangling anecdote is itself worth the price of admission. I really need to read more McMurtry fiction. 10x10 Challenge category: Don't Mess With Texas. Also read some more Henry James: a collection titled In the Cage and Other Stories. "In the Cage" is a novella from his later years that I hadn't read before, about a telegraph operator who pieces together the insufficient and cryptic information she garners from the telegrams she sends and constructs a narrative of more or less (less) accuracy. The reader notices that this is of course the precise position he's left in by James, writing in his diffuse "golden cloud" manner. Also new to me was the story "The Jolly Corner," about a man whose childhood home is haunted by his potential self: that is, the ghost of the man he would have been if he hadn't left England for thirty years. James sure does unusual ghost stories, when he does them. 10x10 Challenge category: A is for Amy who...., with possibly Edward Gorey's most boring cover art ever: a photo of the older James and Gorey's nice hand-drawn type font. Currently reading Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson.

Lovely painting!