It's interesting to see how people's choices for important books tends to divide with varying degrees of neatness between books with important ideas and books that are primarily important as literature. (Of course there's overlap, fuzziness, and exceptions.) But it seems like the reasons for choosing -- to pick two books mentioned -- Moby Dick and To Kill a Mockingbird would be importantly different. Should there be a step back to ask, Why should people read certain books? What presumably universal good do we want them to gain?

Thanks for that article! It notes that Gorey got his start doing covers for Doubleday's imprint, Anchor Books. Less known are his cover drawings for Doubleday imprint Image Books, many of which have recognizable Gorey art but usually without crediting Gorey. For Merseyside I'm reading Melville's Redburn, with a fabulous Gorey cover: I'm all for happy endings! But Bel-Ami had a happy ending, and yet Some People disagreed, so who am I to judge. Richard who?

This week finished The Old Wives' Tale, Henry IV Part I, and St. Anselm of Canterbury's Proslogion, which featured dh explaining the Ontological Argument to Middle Girl and me (again). One of those things where it all makes sense while it's being explained, but then you can't explain it yourself. Currently reading for Cheshire Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, which I like better than North and South (which is getting a lot of love in the thread about Books Everyone Should Read, so I feel guilty not liking it that much). Cranford is a series of sixteen sketches set in the eponymous Cheshire town, based on Gaskell's home town of Knutsford, portraying the lives of mostly older English village women. A much subtler touch than in North and South, I thought. Much of Cranford consists of the elderly women reminiscing, and there were enough anecdotes from the Napoleonic Wars that I think I'm going to count Cranford for the Georgette Heyer rank ("Must include one book set during Regency era").

Ha! No I have reason to suspect it's mostly Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, and Dorothy Dunnett. He keeps his books on a massive case in his office though, and reads them at work, so there's no telling for sure.

A quick canvassing of the other inhabitants about their re-reading habits: Middle Girl: All the Dumas novels; all the Sherlock Holmes stories; the Alfred Hitchcock ghost story collections Wee Girl: All the Astérix books; the American Girl advice and quiz books Dh: won't say (awfully suspicious)

If you're in the market for such an anthology, The Oxford Book of English Verse and The Penguin Book of English Verse are portable, inexpensive (especially older editions), and well-edited. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, while less portable, is available cheap at bookstores in college towns at the end of each semester.

The broader question -- which books everyone should read -- seems uncontainable, so I've chosen the sub-question of which books I do, in fact, choose to re-read, in toto or in partibus. The Gospels, the Psalms (Authorized Version) Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Milton, Paradise Lost Blake, Poems of Innocence and of Experience A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal Tolstoy, War and Peace J. H. Newman, The Development of Doctrine Romano Amerio, Iota Unum

He confessed that he didn't like it. He liked the first section, about the Cultural Revolution, but said it then turned into standard science fiction fare with nothing to make it stand out, in concept or writing. But he's a very picky reader. Back to Edith Wharton for you, dear husband! (For his recent 50th birthday I got him the Library of America 2-volume set of Edith Wharton's short stories.)

Critics have remarked that Kafka's short fiction is superior to his long. I haven't met anyone yet who disagreed. But I did like parts of The Trial. Robin, thank you for all those poetry links. Odd how there doesn't seem to be so much World War II poetry in English. Middle Girl has a collection of WW2 poetry in French, which she tells me is hard to read as it's very modern (besides being in French...). It seems like the American and English poetic efforts went into the Lost Generation. Angela, so good to see you! Please, take off your coat, stay a while. Loesje, fingers crossed and most hopeful thoughts for your daughter's exams. I'm blown away by how polylinguistic so many Europeans are. Kathy, what a treasure that diary is. Yes, transcribe it! I don't know what it is about Jeeves and Wooster. I love the tv series. The books are unreadable. I tend to think of "guy" books as oriented around problems arising from traditionally masculine contexts, and their solutions. The problems can be technical or relational: the problem in The Caine Mutiny, for instance -- a quintessential guy book -- involves the professional and personal relations between the sailors and their captain, but arise from a naval context. I don't know about identifying with protagonists; so many great novels that spring to mind have protagonists that nobody (I hope) could identify with: Maupassant's Bel Ami (male protagonist), Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds (female), Thackeray's Vanity Fair (female), James' The Wings of the Dove (male & female). Although on reflection I'd say none of these are either guy or girl books; they don't feel written for a particular sex. I think I generally agree, except I strongly suspect the sales figures do show a difference in readership. I really have loved the BritTripping. It's become obsessive. I've been making myself read the counties in order (best as I can), choosing books that have a strong and significant connection to the county in question. I'm actually a little sad that it's wrapping up. Usually I don't do the Bingo because my field of reading is just too narrow for the different genres (I know, the whole point of Bingo is to stretch one's reading preferences ... but I don't want to stretch!). BritTrip has made it possible to join in, in a way that lets me stick to pre-1970 fiction and poetry but still try books I might not have read, or at least read any time soon.

A new refrigerator, which doesn't drip rusty viscous liquid and freeze half the food.

While the OP would probably like her thread to stop being derailed, I think yours would be a great first post in a separate thread on alternative news sources. Obviously certain stories are going to be of too little interest to the big news providers to be covered, and will be found in sources where the readership will have a more or less common outlook that will be reflected by the editorial outlook and by the framing as well as choice of the stories covered. To use your example, Reason presumably reported that story because it had interest to their libertarian readership ("fit their narrative" we say somewhat condescendingly today); it would be unsurprising if the story was itself framed to a libertarian perspective; yet a reader who found the story interesting wouldn't necessarily be a libertarian in philosophy. It's hard to see how you can have niche news sources with out-of-the-way or less-reported news without that source having a bias of some kind. But it would be crazy to dismiss the story as "fake news" (whatever that means these days) just because one disagrees with libertarianism: sure the source has that bias, and possibly shapes the story accordingly, but if no one other than libertarians cares, it may not be reported anywhere else at all. <Goes back to reading her latest issue of The Remnant>

We seem to be in a golden age of good translations. Anybody have any theories about that? Anyway speaking of The Three Body Problem, dh just finished the used copy I found for him and is ready to pass it on ... so pm me anyone who wants to read it but is having trouble getting hold of it. A trip yesterday to the Library Discard Store yielded a stack of "guy books" that I realized I'd never read and should. Sir Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah; Truman Capote, In Cold Blood; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes; C. P. Snow, Strangers and Brothers; and Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer. Now don't go telling me those aren't guy books because some women read them: I've read two other Snows this year and it was Jane in NC who first put me on to Snow. But nevertheless these are deeply masculine books. Welcoming now arguments over what makes a book a 'guy' book or a 'girl' book. ?

Dh and the girls are vegetarian, and fond of TVP vegi-meat, but it gives me abdominal cramps if I eat more than a small amount. Wee Girl was having recurring abdominal pains so we recently cut the soy for her to a minimum and she feels much better. I can't think it's an allergy as she and I eat small amounts with no trouble; nor a hormonal issue as she's pre-pubescent. I think some people just don't digest soy very well.

This week I finished a re-read of Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy (523 AD) for Middle Girl's home Confirmation prep. (I only made her read the 4th and 5th books.) This week I'll start Anselm of Canterbury's Proslogion (1078), with its famous Ontological Argument. Finishing up Staffordshire with Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives Tale. Not quite managing the hundred pages a day I'd need to get it done in a timely fashion; but I hope to finish by Tuesday. For this week's BritTrip I will ditch the chunksters for Henry IV Part I, with the Battle of Shrewsbury conveniently occurring in Shropshire. Two non-mystery Shropshire recommendations: Housman's justly famous poetry collection A Shropshire Lad, which I would have gone for if I hadn't already read it a zillion times, once rather recently; and dh's recommendation, Leave it to Psmith, by someone named Wodesomething. Also Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop apparently has an important scene in Shropshire, but I'd have to read it and I don't think I could endure the death of Little Nell.

Thank you. I call it, "Welcome to California."

I had to sue a crazy landlady for my deposit. She had never vacated the property; instead of touring the country in her huge RV as planned, she lived in it in the driveway and spent much of the day on the phone in my (& housemate's) living room--"her" living room, even though we were paying her mortgage now with our rent--shouting profanities and threats at her poor insurance agent daily. Whom she blamed for the mess over the RV's title, which she (crazy landlady) had sketchily acquired in Mexico. While her Doberman lived in the house and tried to eat my cat. When I "broke" the (never-commenced) lease and found another place to live, I pondered what I would say to my lovely prospective landlady about why I'd moved out. Yes, I walked out on the lease of my previous crazy landlady whom I'm currently suing. Would you like to rent to me? In a metropolitan area of 7 million people ... my new landlady was the insurance agent. Oh I won in court and got my deposit back.

I'm in the market for a weghted blanket too, so I'm interested in anybody's experiences or reviews.

An excerpt from The Old Wives' Tale apropos the BritTripping: Thus Staffordshire. The entire first chapter is a meditation on the county, the Potteries, and the Five Towns (Hanbridge [Hanley], Bursley [Burslem], Knype [Stoke], Longshaw [Longton], and Turnhill [Tunstall]).

You mean you enjoy them at the time but wake up full of queasiness and regrets, as if you had eaten all your smallest child's malted milk balls from her Halloween bag? Oh dear I feel unwell again now.

This week I finished George Eliot's Adam Bede (Warwickshire) and Henry Green's 1929 debut [edit: sorry, second] novel Living (West Midlands). Reading these back-to-back was an amazing experience. They were written seventy years apart and are set one hundred and thirty years apart, both of them about skilled and unskilled laborers of the Midlands and the complexities of their personal relationships amid the hard work of their lives as part of a tight-knit community with its joys and dangers, some of the dangers inflicted only half-understandingly by their social betters. In Adam Bede these laborers are rural; in Living they work in a Birmingham ("Brummagem" to its inhabitants) iron foundry; but their lives (and dialect!) are essentially the same. Reading one after the other leaves you wondering what the Industrial Revolution really changed. From Living: No those are not typos; Living is an experimental novel and the narrator "speaks" in an unusual style that takes some getting used to. For Staffordshire, I'm planning on Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, about life in the Staffordshire Potteries (which Robin mentions). Also this week I need to re-read Boethius' sixth-century classic The Consolation of Philosophy and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, for Middle Girl's homeschooling. Hint for the curious: read the Behn.

Suddenly reappeared in the news after a week's blackout: guilty, life without parole. EDIT: Which, I should make clear, is a good thing. He is a serial killer (though the jury wasn't told about the other killings) who got a mistrial the first round, apparently because he's intelligent, educated, and well-spoken.

I have no patience for "purists" who discount the way most people read books from Antiquity to the spread of the printing press: by hearing them read out loud. Charlemagne had Augustine's Civitas Dei read to him while on campaign. Augustine himself was surprised to witness Ambrose reading silently--a thing that Augustine, with all his patrician education, had never encountered. Oh yes, just a failure of our water treatment system to cope with weeks of torrential rains. Our clueless mayor, may he be unseated next week (oops, no political posts...), held a press conference informing us that we must reduce water consumption by ceasing to water our lawns.

Kathy, happy (late) birthday! Tuesday, fervent wishes for a speedy convalescence. Can I say how blown away I am by how many books you (and others here!) manage to read? I've just finished only my 82nd, and that's with having been pretty successful at staying off the internet this year. Jenn, I'd scold you for not zipping through the Capital on your way through Central Texas, but our water last weekend was non-potable (there were even highway signs warning the incoming tourists) so you were arguably better off. Also we were having a monsoon. With heat. And the worst mosquito season in memory.

Well I have fallen behind on BritTripping again, as Middle Girl's literature-heavy high school curriculum required my attention. So this week I failed to get out of Warwickshire with Adam Bede; but if I do, for West Midlands I'll read Henry Green's 1929 debut novel Living, set in Birmingham. Meanwhile I read John Webster's 1613 play The Duchess of Malfi. It's good to read non-Shakespearean Elizabethan drama, if only to get some perspective on how restrained Shakespeare was. If you find perplexing the early scene in Hamlet, where Hamlet jokes with the ghost of his father underneath the stage floor (a scene often cut in modern productions), you'll get a better idea from Webster how really mild that was. Surprise waxworks of a murdered family, a poisoned Bible, a bit of lycanthropy, and much stab-stab-stabbing keep you going through the otherwise bewildering motivations of the characters that move the plot of Malfi along. That's the end of our English Renaissance section, so on soon to the more familiar (to me) ground of the English eighteenth century with Aphra Behn's Oroonoko.

A question for anyone who knows how these things work, and/or how trials are reported. A capital murder (though with the dp off the table) retrial, in which I have a strong personal interest, began Monday [edit: rather, Wednesday]. I can't attend in person because of Wee Girl, but I followed on twitter. 5 pm Wednesday it halted to restart Thursday; there's been no reporting of any kind since. What could have happened?