Likewise. Want to share a Scottish challenge? 10 books set in Scotland, and/or by a Scottish writer?

In our rite, Christmas Eve is a fast and abstinence day, so we have a lightish vegetarian meal with relatives, and save services and feasting for Christmas Day (and the eleven days after that...). I think your instincts for a cold dinner, already prepared, at home, are good and reasonable; if you could move the big meal to Christmas Day, it sounds like it would take a lot of stress off of you. That's one busy and joyful-sounding Christmas Eve you have going!

Last week I finished Harrison Ainsworth's justly neglected Victorian sensational novel The Lancashire Witches, which has the look of one of those two-volume novels that a procrustean publisher forced into three. This week I'm reading Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere, also a three-volumer, but vastly better in writing and topic. It's in the tradition of the Victorian "crisis of faith" novel, one of the most famous of which, Cardinal Newman's Loss and Gain, I re-read earlier this year. (In fact Ward's last section is provocatively titled "Gain and Loss," obviously referring to Newman's novel.) Excellent so far. And set substantially in Westmorland, which with the old county of Cumberland was combined into the modern Cumbria, next week's BritTrip county.

You can't go wrong with W. B. Yeats. He was recently the cause of a spirited discussion at our dinner table regarding the number of syllables in "Byzantium." If you don't care for his poetry 😧 he also wrote plays and (with Lady Augusta Gregory) wrote/anthologized Irish folklore. Also French writer Marguerite Yourcenar is worth attention. How pleasant that Xenophon wrote so many things, and that such good translations are now available. And now I'm reminded that I have Arthur Quiller-Couch's Cambridge Lectures buried in my tbr shelf.

No idea. Though I always enjoy major characters meeting their doom in the denouement, so I'm not a reliable guide. The drownings at the end of The Return of the Native were quite satisfying.

Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere

Well done, Tuesday! You lend me determination. I loved looking through your list of reads. Wilkie Collins is a tempting pick for Cumbria/Cumberland, rather than the 600-page alternative.

Now I feel like I need to get a copy yesterday! Off to Half Price, and failing that, see if our library can get it for me. (I rarely use libraries, in part because I'm very hard on books; they disintegrate in my hands.) You two should start an Advent reading thread. I'd join in.

Wee Girl has them less often than she used to, but I learned to (1) as Freesia says, recognize the early stages and intervene then; (2) immediately remove her from the situation (or remove the situation from her, e.g. by saying, "No, he's wrong, you don't have to do that"; (3) tight hugs without talking until breathing and heart slowed down.

I think you're exactly right. As mothers, we know that an infant demands the sacrifice of our lives, our hearts, our worldly goods, our free time that we had jealously guarded and suddenly finding ourselves eagerly, if tiredly, giving up for the tiny stranger. It's not about too much devotion to the Holy Infant; it's about not offering our hearts rightly, such that the devotion takes us out of our self-love and turns us to the love of Christ, and then naturally to the love of neighbor. From St. Bonaventure's Life of St. Francis: Here's St. Francis beginning with his personal devotion to the Child; then offering sacrifice to God on behalf of the faithful; then turning outward in charity to the people themselves. It's not devotion displacing piety and charity, but piety and charity springing from personal devotion.

Thanks, that made sense; though I think I disagree with him.

Good plan!

TexasMom/Aethelthryth, I'd love to hear your thoughts on The Benedict Option. I've only heard descriptions of it, but it sounds much like what my little faith community is doing, and I keep thinking I'll have to read it ... if I find it cheap. 🙂

Katie, I think this is a great thread, and very thought-provoking. But I don't understand this: I really don't get how it follows that we risk an "infantile Christianity" from a devotion that goes back to the Magi. Can you explain what he means? Just in my own experience, focusing on the Holy Infant is a great help toward letting go of the demands and expectations of everyday life, especially at this time of year. When I had a baby at the beginning of Advent (16 years ago!), it was so freeing to just focus on her and know that, next to the humble epiphany of this new little life, shopping and cooking and holiday events were unimportant could all just be left to take care of themselves, because they pale into insignificance. Isn't this what the Infancy is meant to teach us? Spiritual poverty, humility, seeing externals in their right proportion. This is surely what St. Francis was trying to direct his flock toward when he cultivated devotion to the Holy Infant.

Well! And here I had to wait for my battered 1976 edition (it's been OOP since 1980) to arrive by slow boat and mule train from the UK!

Righty right, O my brothers, I viddy that it's another Sabbath of some good govoreeting about books and veshches with my starry droogies. Erm, sorry. I mean, here we are again and this week I read Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, set in a future city which Burgess described as "a sort of compound of my native Manchester, Leningrad and New York." Which is good enough to count for set-in-Manchester in my book. I haven't read it in (counts fingers) thirty-five years -- since I was the narrator Alex's age, though not so much given to the old Ultra-Violence as he -- and it took a while to remember the Slavicized English that is his "nadsat" (teen) dialect sufficiently to read the book with any speed. Finishing Manchester early gave me time to get going on The Lancashire Witches for next week, which is six hundred pages of Victorian potboiler. In-between finishing Redburn and Burgess I re-read Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave for Middle Girl's English course. I'm up to 92 books for the year completed, which will fall short of my hopeful but unrealistic goal of two books a week.

A brief posting before driving the last relative to the airport. Not much reading time this week but finished St Bernard of Clairvaux's De Amore Dei (12th cent,) and am halfway through Melville's Redburn. The good ship Highlander has just reached Liverpool and young Wellingborough Redburn is trying to navigate his way through the city, determinedly using his deceased father's decades-old (beautiful but useless) guidebook, an episode chock full of symbolism as you would expect from Melville. Highly recommended. The St. Bernard, an epistolary treatise explaining the seven levels of Love of God, was good to read for refocusing during the hectic holidays. There's nothing like the medieval fascination with precisely enumerated degrees of the spiritual life: the appeal of "levelling up" is universal it seems.

Middle Girl and I ran our city's "Turkey Trot" 5 mile run this morning. The goal isn't so much to race as to be festive: there were people dressed as turkeys and slices of pie and sexy pilgrims. Many of their dogs were dressed, too. A couple of Good Ol' Boy Texans near us, forty-ish and built like oak doors, in tutus. I wore my tackiest holiday leggings. Then we came home and ate four times as many calories as we ran off. Now we digest. I am loving digesting with Melville: anybody who enjoyes the Master and Commander series should try Redburn. Melville's prose is so hypnotic. And it helps if you already know a stun' sail from a belaying pin. Edit: Robin's query: I am thankful my mother-in-law was at the table and not in the hospital today! We all fed her pecan pie and teased her.t Edit 2: Oh, books. I'm thankful for the Brit Trip books that have made me dust off at last some English literature I'd been meaning to read or re-read but wasn't getting around to. I'm looking forward next year to some French literature (romantic, naturalist, decadent, avant-garde) I haven't gotten to.

Happy Tomorrow Birthday Robin!

Right, while I'm poking my nose in recommending authors, I assume you've read E. D. Hirsch? If you haven't, you'd like him. His ideas about cultural knowledge have a lot of resonance for homeschoolers.

The department where I did my undergrad studies was dominated by (post-)New Criticism and Barthes. Your idea of self-creation of the "author" (Barthes would say "scriptor") seems to have something in common with Reader Response Criticism, where the constructed intention of the author is a significant part of interpretation. You might find Stanley Fish interesting to read, if a little dated (not that I think "dated" is a bad thing necessarily).

I'm passing that on to Middle Girl, who was just assigned the abridged Les Misérables. See kid, you're up to maybe third or fourth grade level! StellaM, I really like that bit about recognition and expansion of the self. But my training made me allergic to including the "author" in there anywhere.

You didn't study under Harold Bloom by any chance?

Right. But I've never heard anyone seriously suggest Harper Lee as a first-rate literary talent. Likewise, though there are certainly important ideas in Moby Dick, its enduring value lies in its literary merit. So again, why "should" a certain book be read? (I'm not coming down on one 'side' or the other; just suggesting we pay attention to the underlying unresolved question.)

Dickens had a slew of Christmas writings; Penguin has them collected in a nice volume.