Tamales!!! And pie and eggnog. What else do you need at Christmas?

Joyeux Noël (2005), based on the Christmas Day Armistice, is really good. Pretty sure it’s available in English.

Good plan.

I wish we had some kind of ecumenical Benedict Option reading group, or social group, or something.... I'm probably not (full dosclosure) going to read the book as I've seen enough excerpts to form a firm idea what's in it, but an Orthodox Jewish friend and I have been discussing things that seem deeply related to what the book is talking about, and I see here interest in the ideas from Sandy (Anglican) and Æthylthryth (Orthodox-leaning if I recall?) that make me think there's a pan-religious chord being struck.

Not much reading this week, as dh was out of town at another conference (I hate December) and there just wasn't time what with cooking, cleaning, homeschooling, and some sort of big holiday coming up that demands lots of preparation. But I'm half-way through Robert Elsmere, my Cumbria read, and hope to finish it shortly as I need to read Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis in Deum with Middle Girl this week. My translation is from the '70s with a picture of St. B. on the cover, done in that groovy style that was so popular for church art back in the day. MG is amazed by it.

Dh is making vegan mushroom risotto. He also makes a vegan asparagus risotto. They're tasty. I'm sure there's a recipe on-line.

Looking up a few possibilities for your category, I was surprised how many important books from the 1960s were from the 1950s.

I like those categories. For 1960s, are you thinking broadly anything written in the '60s, or books characteristic of the era?

Canongate Kirk is where the poet Robert Fergusson is buried; there's a bronze statue of him on the pavement in front. ETA: That totally didn't count as a recommendation, right?

Excellent! Do you know where in Scotland?

Phil Lawler's new book was just amazoned to me, and it takes a lot to get me to buy a book new. I'll be starting it as soon as I'm done with BritTripping. And I want to re-read Brian Moore's cult classic Catholics next year.

I love this gift idea!

After much angst, I've got my 10x10 categories for 2019 determined: The Brexit Special: 10 European countries, not including the UK Scots Wha' Hae: Scottish books Don't Mess With Texas: Texas, cowboys, or both Plucked From the Air: chosen via the atmospheric noise Truly Random generator Little Oval on the Spine: published by New York Review of Books A is for Amy who...: cover art by Edward Gorey Bad Catholic: the sort of books they read at that parish you don't go to Dramatic: plays or books of plays, whichever Lyric & Epic: poetry The Shame List: "Really? You've never read that?"

Everyone likes Grassic Gibbon. Though his books aren't mysteries, it's true.

Some Scottish writers dh and I have enjoyed reading (and who are neither Robert Louis Stevenson nor Sir Walter Scott) with some of their books: John Buchan Catherine Carswell, The Life of Robert Burns Elspeth Davie Arthur Conan Doyle Elizabeth Grant, Memoirs of a Highland Lady Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song Alasdair Gray, Lanark James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner Robin Jenkins, The Cone Gatherers David Lindsay, Voyage to Arcturus Eric Linklater, Magnus Merriman J. MacDougall Hay, Gillespie Nancy Morrison, The Gowk Storm Margaret Oliphant John Prebble, The Highland Clearances Muriel Spark Orkneyinga Saga Of these, my favorite obscure Scottish fiction books were Margaret Oliphant's very strange Calvinist ghost stories, the gothic Gillespie, and Hogg's lesser-known novel The Three Perils of Man. The Cone Gatherers and Sunset Song are the books most people seem to like best. And Scottish poets other than Burns: Robert Fergusson Iain Crichton Smith David Lindsay George Mackay Brown Edwin Muir Hugh MacDiarmid William Soutar Norman MacCaig ETA: Dh would like all to know that Lanark is a cult classic, and that he also liked James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late, which won the 1994 Booker Prize. So now you know.

Dang. Sorry; best hopes for after Christmas.

Since there's interest in Scottish books, I'm going to put in a plug for Canongate Books, an Edinburgh publishing house specializing in Scottish writers. Lately they've branched out into books by other writers, so you have to look carefully at their catalog, but it's great guide to what's old and what's recent in Scottish literature. A search for "Canongate classics" retrieves lots of classic titles. Now their shipping is from the UK and so expensive; but I find a search for a title on Amazon or bookfinder.com generally gets good results. Hm ... maybe we should throw together a list of Scottish writers/titles.

Good. Nice avatar.

True Randomness, courtesy of random.org, uses atmospheric noise to generate an integer for you. If you happen to have all your books numbered on a spreadsheet (ahem), you can use it to pick your reading. If you have a teenager given to random mood swings click on "generate" for you, all the better. NYRB is indeed New York Review of Books. Which information a hypothetical master book index might include.

That's it. I haven't seen either the 1967 or 2002 series. Any good?

Very good to see you popping in! Looking through my endless tbr shelf, some thoughts on categories I might/could/should read 10 of in a year: - Scottish - nonfiction (travel, biography, history) - old Penguins - Gorey-illustrated covers - Bad Catholic - drama - Truly Random - poetry - translated from French - Texas/cowboys - noir - NYRB - Henry James - nautical "Scottish" definitely makes the cut.

On a literary tangent: the horror and brutality of marital rape is central to John Galsworthy's classic A Man of Property, written over a century ago. It contributed to his eventual Nobel prize.

Yes. Just as there's a human tendency to look at the direction of current trends--the "arc of history"--and extrapolate forwards, there's a matching tendency to look at the recent past and extrapolate backwards. So the 19th century, which in many ways was a low point for women's legal rights, is assumed to indicate that women must have been even worse off in prior eras.

Well, while I'm lodging historical objections.... "Western Civilization" covers about 2500 years and, maximally, the continent of Europe plus non-European parts of the Mediterranean and, from the 17th century, North America. When and where, exactly, were women considered "property" qua women (excluding chattel slavery, which didn't distinguish sexes)? And to make that question meaningful, what precisely is meant by "considered property"? A normal reader I think would take it to mean enjoyed the same legal status as, say, a horse or dog or tree or other living thing that we would speak of as property in the legal sense. I would like primary sources on this, as I can find links to people making the claim easily enough.

I don't want to join in on this topic (though did anyone note that there's already been a case of a husband being prosecuted for raping his wife, who apparently gave actual consent, because authorities and adult children from her first marriage decided the wife was incapable of consent?). But I do want to make a historical objection here: the Puritans were in fact noted for their theology of "companionate marriage." Like "the Dark Ages," "Puritanism" sometimes gets reflexively blamed for things of which it's guiltless. The acme (or nadir) of "the woman belongs to the man" legal concept in the West was arguably the Napoleonic Code of 19th-century France.