The down side to the 10x10 Categories Challenge is that now instead of being part-way through two or three books, I've got ten of them in the queue. Less when there's category overlap; but still. Robin? Bug, or feature? Stacked by my bed: The Brexit Special: Nikolai Gogol, Diary of a Madman Scots Wha' Hae: James Kelman, How Late it Was, How Late Don't Mess With Texas: J. Frank Dobie, The Voice of the Coyote Plucked From the Air: Nikolai Gogol, Diary of a Madman Little Oval on the Spine: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune A is for Amy who...: Thomas Szasz, The Age of Madness Bad Catholic: Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters Dramatic, Lyric & Epic: Gawain and the Green Knight Crime & Punishment: Edward Anderson, Thieves Like Us The Hollow Crown: Anon., Edward III

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Middle Girl has been on a Dumas kick and recommends reading through the entire d'Artagnan series. Oxford World's Classics reprinted them a few years ago and they're super-cheap from bookfinder.com .

This week--and last week--I finished three books: William Gresham, Nightmare Alley The Wanderer: Elegies, Epics, Riddles Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering Guy Mannering launches the Scots Wha' Hae 10x10 category. It's classic Scott, and the source for Meg Merrilies, the Amazonian gypsy who instantly became one of his most beloved characters. Keats wrote a famous poem about her a few years after the publication of Guy Mannering while getting over-excited on a trip through Scotland. From Lord Houghton: Quite the fanboy, that Keats. Nightmare Alley was at one time something of a cult sensation, about a swindling carny who makes it big before the wheel of fortune makes its inevitable revolution. Crime, madness, con artistry, religious zealotry, vice, corruption: there's something for everyone in this excellent and very dark novel. The author was the first husband of poet Joy Davidson, who left him and married C. S. Lewis (Gresham was easily the better novelist but probably the worse husband). Republished by NYRB, it goes into both the Little Oval on the Spine and Crime and Punishment 10x10 categories. My first foray into Crime and Punishment, a few weeks ago, was No Orchids For Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase, a 1939 crime novel given an extra boost in its sales by being vituperated by George Orwell, who condemned its sex and violence as American fascistic degeneracy (despite its British author), inferior to the polite English thief "Raffles." Unfortunately the only copy I could find was the rewritten later version, not the the '30s version that so horrified Orwell; nevertheless I was pleased to see that the publisher brazenly selected a few words of Orwell's essay (Orwell calls it "a brilliant piece of writing" in a semi-ironic way, before explaining at length why it's not only "sordid and brutal" but politically problematic) for a back-cover blurb. Also my 1970 printing has wonderful Yellow-Submarine-era cover art: A fluffy read, in a way. Recommended for those who like that kind of thing; but not as good certainly as the Gresham. Currently reading (speaking of awesome cover art) The Age of Madness by Thomas Szasz, of which more later. An odd book by a man with a mission.

... no. Actually I can think of exactly one major James character whom any sane person would want to know in real life. She drops dead well before the end of the novel.

These all seem like variations on choices of Hell. I would rather 4. live in the downtown of a city, 3. in close quarters with at least half a million people I don't especially like, 2. with good public transit (or free parking), 1. and as invisible as everyone else. Heaven!

Wow! What an amazing book corner. And what talent, Sandy! Sorry not to have reported in. Will try harder this evening.

Thoughts on other books of this week. Marlowe's chronicle play Edward II (1593) is masterful; I definitely would believe him to be the author of Shakespeare's plays if he hadn't inconveniently gotten himself killed in 1593. It's as if Shakespeare had gotten rid of the prose, philosophizing, and subplots, and been willing to depict someone being murdered on stage by having a hot poker ... well never mind. Then I read Bertolt Brecht's version of Edward II (1924), which is something like what you'd get if a German with no English watched the Marlowe play, had a friend explain what was going on, then went home and re-wrote it. While drunk. It's fantastic. Gaveston's opening monologue, Marlowe: Gaveston's opening monologue, Brecht: I'm sorry to be going back to Shakespeare for my chronicle plays, really.

Artes Latinae, using the American Scholastic pronunciation, gives "port-u-um," three distinct syllables with both u's lik the vowel in "put."

Armchair Books. Set aside a good long time for browsing. Walkable from the tourist area, though I wouldn't linger in the neighborhood after dark (Edinburgh can be pretty sketchy just a short distance out of the Tourist Zones ... though traveling with children of course makes one more paranoid.) Somewhere I posted a list of Scottish writers and books, though I can't quite find it now. I realized later I forgot a great Scottish read, The House With the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown, revolutionary for bringing an end to the "Kailyard School" of sentimentalist Scottish fiction that reigned from Scott to Barrie. A very good read.

Oooo! My next read from The Hollow Crown category! I've already met him as a parricidal tyke in Marlowe's play. The first book finished last week was The Virginian, for my Don't Mess With Texas cowboy category (no Texans actually in this one though). Much better than I thought it might be. Wister was a friend of Henry James (and even had some criticism of James' style...), and took his writing seriously. If the plot to The Virginian seems hackneyed now, it's because it was the model for so many later "penny dreadful" westerns and movies, which recycled its basic elements: the gentleman cowboy with his rough code of honor; the school-marm from Back East who steals his heart as she discerns him as a diamond in the rough; the mortal enmity with the cattle-rustling villain of no honor who shoots people in the back; the show-down gunfight on the main street of town. Famous quote: "When you call me that, smile!" Next up in this category: J. Frank Dobie's The Voice of the Coyote. .

And speaking of poetry, this week I finished E. E. Cummings' 1940 collection, 50 Poems. Here's "46", possibly not his most accessible poem: Anglo-Saxon was definitely easier. Anyway, that was for my 10x10 Dramatic, Lyric & Epic category. Also this week, finished: Owen Wister, The Virginian Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People James Hadley Chase, No Orchids for Miss Blandish Christopher Marlowe, Edward II There's much to say about these books--they were all great reads, but in utterly different ways--but that will have to wait for another break in the homeschooling.

One of the books I just started this week, as it happens, is The Wanderer: Elegies, Epics, Riddles: Poems from England's ancient origins. This is part of my extra-categorical challenge to keep up with Middle Girl's reading, and the Anglo-Saxon poems "The Dream of the Rood" and "The Battle of Maldon" (in translation) are her first reading assignment for her British Literature course this semester. I'm reading through the whole book though, as most of these are familiar, and a couple I even read in A-S back in the day, when my brain hadn't dissolved yet. Here's a beautiful Anglo-Saxon elegy, text partially destroyed, called "The Ruin." It's a meditation on the remains of a Roman city, probably Bath, which the Angles and Saxons found three centuries after the Romans had left, and which these Germanics credited to the efforts of "giants." (Note: "wierd," which the editor leaves untranslated throughout, meant (roughly) a Fate, like the Norns or Shakespeare's "weird sisters.")

I've only used their French textbook, which I think is very good... but yes, it's explicitly anti-Catholic. However that's limited to the "French Culture" sections, and I use those in reverse to explain a subset of American culture to my kids. And they know what "On va distribuer des traités" means, which I guess is something. So for what that's worth. I'd expect much more of that in their history curriculum, and any history of science in their science curriculum. I wouldn't use the former, and not being a Creationist (in its American Christian meaning), wouldn't use the latter, either. How about TOPS science? We love it.

Interesting read. It makes me want to do a little mental inventory of who would be gone from the shelves if publishers enforced a post-mortem publishing ban for private immoral behavior. Without googling ... Chaucer, Ezra Pound, Céline, Milton, Némirovsky, Wm. S. Burroughs.... Could O. Henry be published after his embezzlement conviction? Should Edmund Spenser's treatment of his hapless Irish Catholic tenants get him kicked out of the canon? The book of poems I'm currently reading is dedicated to Ezra Pound. Should that get that editor blackballed?

Absalom, Absalom. Latin is one of my 2019 resolutions, too! Though I'm not brave enough to sign up for the NLE.

Last week I read Phil Lawler's recent* book, The Smoke of Satan, which was I thought a good and accurate summary at the beginning of the minutiae of the current scandal from a conservative Catholic point of view. The rest of the book, though, in my opinion only serves to unintentionally underline the bankruptcy of conservative "John Paul II" Catholicism that the current papacy has made manifest. More thoughts on that in the Theologica Reads Club social group, if I may shill for it for a moment. Also read, as a start on The Hollow Crown 10x10 category, King Edward the First by George Peele. This is a "retroform" -- a reconstructed play -- as the original version is lost, and Peele re-wrote it disastrously incorporating the ballad legend of Queen Elinor's unfaithfulness. Only this later version survives, and the editor of my edition removed the clumsily added material and rearranged a little for chronological consistency, but of course couldn't replace material that had been removed, making the play somewhat short with a hurried ending. From Scene 1, the Queen Mother's speech: Odd in so many ways when you're used to Shakespeare, but in a way familiar when you read other Elizabethan/Jacobean plays, Edward I features Welsh rebels who, defeated, go off to play Robin Hood in the Welsh greenwood. I mean literally, calling each other "Friar Tuck" and "Maid Marian" and such. Also, there are three characters named Elinor, which gets a little confusing. Next up for this category: Marlowe's Edward II, followed by Bertolt Brecht's rewrite of Marlowe. But first, some Don't Mess With Texas cowboy reading, with Owen Wister's classic western The Virginian. *ETA: My records indicate this is the second book I've read in the last five years that was written in the current century. Yay me!

On board with the "be healthier, feel better" approach. Also sympathetic to Pawz4me; we the vertically challenged have to ignore a lot of conventional wisdom about pounds, calories, and BMI, don't we? 2019 just-turned-fifty goals: 1. Maintain weight. 2. Bone density scan. 3. Back in the No-S saddle; sugar has started slipping in with the holidays, and coffee-and-kings-cake was not a good breakfast choice. 4. Daily exercise, not just "I feel terrible so let's go running." 5. Better spiritual health, via the things I know to do but don't.

I want to say a quick Hi and Thanks to anyone who found me on Goodreads and followed me or sent a friend request. I took myself off Goodreads, Instagram, and just about everything else Internet, so it’s not that I’m ignoring you. I’d go around and delete accounts but I’m too lazy/ tech-incompetent/ pick one.

Many years ago I read Tale of Two Cities aloud to Middle Girl. I only survived by fantasizing an ending where Lucie Manette goes to the guillotine.

Already one of my categories fails me: The Shame List. Dh was listing books that Everyone Has Read But Me -- Harry Potter, Romeo and Juliet, Lonesome Dove, The Color Purple, The Catcher in the Rye -- and I realized that I don't want to read any of them. So I'm replacing it with two new categories, on the assumption that there'll be another category failure at some point: Crime and Punishment: Crime fiction, noir, and possibly the Dostoevsky. Reading with Middle Girl: the books MG is reading for her teenage book club and upcoming English class.

Ambitious! I like it.

I didn't think Ehrengard (a novella) was as good as the stories in Anecdotes.

Today I finished the Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) story collection Anecdotes of Destiny. Blixen was an amazing storyteller. Highly recommended. Middle Girl randomized another one for me: Caesar's De Bello Gallico (in translation). Hm... not quite in the mood for Caesar yet. So I'm reading instead, for the Bad Catholic category, Phil Lawler's verrrrry recent book The Smoke of Satan: How Corrupt and Cowardly Bishops Betrayed Christ, His Church, and the Faithful. Which subtitle pretty much tells you what you need to know.

Great list, Penguin.