We love you anyway.

So a capital city with a population of a million gets too much rain and, oops, the water treatment system can't handle it and we have to boil all our water for two weeks? Crowds of panicked hipsters at the grocery store yesterday, lunging for the remaining (rationed) bottles of Premium High-Electrolyte Water. What is going on?

Thank you, Jenn! I feel much better about hating Rebecca now. I was tricked into reading it by Alfred Hitchcock, who made a proverbial silk purse out of it. (Teenage Middle Girl hated it, too.) ETA: And she disliked (hated is a little strong for both books) We Have Always Lived in the Castle; went right back to Maugham and Faulkner.

Awesome! Bookfinder.com (an aggregator search site) is always my first place to go for dead-tree books: it shows me if the book has a different title in the UK, and I can re-run a search using the ISBN, sometimes picking up otherwise unlisted copies. (I have second, third, and fourth places to go after that.)

We were able to find a reasonably priced tutor for her when she finished grammar and the usual Caesar, a grad student who is super-excited about poetry and has started her on Lucan. I really think it's his infectious enthusiasm that's doing the trick.

The sequel (Katherine's Marriage) shows a few used copies for $8-9 (including shipping from UK) through bookfinder.com . The US version (The Marriage of Katherine) costs more.

Warwickshire twice: Middle Girl and I have just gone through Othello scene-by-scene (but since I did a quick pre-re-reading earlier this year, I'm not counting it a second time for 2018). All done with Shakespeare for a while; ready to read The Duchess of Malfi with her. For a book set in Warwickshire, I'm halfway through Adam Bede. Eliot sure believes in leisurely plot development. I wonder if Martin Amis may have been right in thinking Middlemarch to have been her one readable novel. Also some of LeFanu's ghost stories. What I ought to be reading is Book XIX of Civitas Dei for Middle Girl's homeschool Confirmation reading list; but I keep finding other things to do. Like clean the toilets and litter boxes. I don't know, I like Confessiones so much, but once through CD was enough for me. Middle Girl keeps not getting to it also, for the (caution: mom-brag) reason that she has this semester suddenly turned the corner to being able actually to really read Latin, and has lost patience with translations. Unfortunately she's not yet up to that much Augustine at once.

To be fair, Christmas trees and Advent wreaths, so far as I can determine, started in Lutheran Germany, and Catholics are completely culturally appropriating those. Sorry Lutherans!

Ainsworth, yes that one. I just bought a $1 dead tree version, arriving soon I hope. UK residents list their own birth locations for passports? The on-line application didn't give me any choices; and it differed from the Registrar of Births about what town Great Girl was born in--so, another family passport that doesn't match.

Admittedly this is a little off-topic, but why do people keep talking about Easter as if it's generally admitted not to be Christian, or at best has murky origins, lost in the mists of time? It's possibly the earliest Christian feast day, dating to the 100's at latest and probably to the first century, and is well-documented. Its date was observed in relation to Passover for obvious reasons, and it's still called "Passover" (Pasch) in every language other than English and German. The only controversy over Easter was over whether the Jewish calendar should be used in determining its date, or whether the date determination should be tweaked (the latter view won). As far as I can tell, the "really pagan" argument stems from Bede's seventh-century guess that the month it was celebrated in England, called "eostremonath," was named for a pre-Christian deity; kind of like arguing that Ascension Thursday must have started as a Norse pagan festival because, you know, Thor's Day. Go read Eusebius of Caesarea and Melito of Sardis, and come tell me Easter is really an early medieval Anglo-Saxon fertility festival that was taken over by second-century Mediterraneans. That's some impressive appropriation!

I was going to read Woman in White for Cumbria, and Gaskell's Cranford for Cheshire, so I will keep looking. Checking out the availability of an 1849 novel called The Lancashire Witches.... The city dh was born in was swallowed up by a larger city, so his birth certificate and passport don't match. Not quite as severe though as one's entire county vanishing.

Planning ahead ... I have at last solved both my "Georgette Heyer" Rebel Rank problem and my Shropshire problem: Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop is set in 1825 and has a significant bit set in Shropshire. So now all of Watling Way except for Lancashire (Lancashire! What's in Lancashire? Someone help with Lancashire!) is planned out. Speaking of, finished this evening W. H. Auden's Collected Poems 1933-1938 for Worcestershire--I think I even understood more than half of them, maybe--and getting a head start on Warwickshire with George Eliot's Adam Bede.

"Abstain from all meat, eat one meal a day after 3 pm, pray intensely, read the Scriptures and the lives of the Saints, examine your conscience, repent and confess your sins, and give alms generously to the poor." Possibly they won't ask again. They weren't adopted, adapted, or appropriated, as they do actually have Christian origins. Why ever would one think otherwise?

Hapy Birthday! Yeah Tyne & Wear was tricky.

Look! Worcestershire! Caught up! Probably the most famous Worcestershire texts are Langland's Middle English allegorical poem Piers Plowman, set "on a Maye mornynge on Malverne hylles," and Radclyffe Hall's ground-breaking lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. But they'd both be re-reads, and I've had a lot of those lately, so for Worcestershire I picked Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, 1933-1938. Auden taught English at a private boys' school in the Malverns from 1933 to 1935. Last week I finished two books picked in True Randomness by Middle Girl: Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier. Loved the first, loathed the second, all done with women's novels for a while. So I made her pick again, and she randomized for me a collection of Sheridan LeFanu's ghost stories, edited by M. R. James, who gets around my reading list this year. So there will be further Spooky October London it seems. Good luck! There ought to be punitive legal consequences for back covers, introductions, and early end-notes that give away plot points. I have a personal grudge still against the editor of the Penguin edition of The Wings of the Dove, who gives away a crucial plot twist in one of the first end-notes, as if nobody would be reading it who didn't already know what happens. Snarl.

My recommendation to anyone interested in good literary ghost stories for Spooky London would definitely be The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. Less than $5 from bookfinder.com. It includes Henry James's "The Friends of the Friends," a story that is in every way the opposite of "The Turn of the Screw."

Amy, glad you're liking Powers. I don't know how, while Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy are so popular still, Powers has vanished. Ran across a quote from writer and critic Martin Amis today I thought I'd share: (He then goes on to say that he "loves" Don DeLillo's stories.)

The Glory of the Empire, interestingly weird as it is, has been abandoned as more suited to dh's reading tastes than to mine. It was my second Truly Randomly Chosen book this year, and has been replaced by Also Truly Random book The Custom of the Country. (Actually it took four attempts: the first three were 1. W. H. Auden's lectures on Shakespeare, which can't really be read at one go: 2. A book of Titian prints; 3. Orlando Furioso, which is 1400 pages and I read it a few years ago. So Mostly Truly Randomly Chosen.)

Thanks for another good thread, Robin. The 14th century was the best century for literature. Boccaccio's Decameron was written then, too. And if anyone feels a hankering for the high middle ages with Piers Plowman, it's Worcestershire's literary pride, useful for next week's BritTrip. I finished three books this week: Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (Wiltshire); Casting the Runes & Other Ghost Stories by M. R. James (Spooky London) and Othello (again) for homeschooling discussion. From Brideshead Revisited, the scene where the priest in charge of instructing the hapless Rex Mottram, who's converting to marry Julia Flyte, learns that Rex's fiancée's little sister, Cordelia, has been helping out: This week: continuing The Glory of the Empire, plus some W. H. Auden, and, if efficient, Adam Bede.

Well … here I am doing AP English prep with Middle Girl, and I'm telling her how the Regency era is best understood as a sub-era of the English Romantic movement, which has an official launch date of 1800, with Wordsworth's Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. Surely no one here can read "Tintern Abbey" without picturing William in tall hat and swallow-tail coat, gazing at the ruins with sister Dorothy in Jane Austen-style high-waisted dress and parasol? And frankly it took me so long to get around to finishing LB that I'm game to count it for something, so "extended Regency" gets the nod. There's nothing objectionable about Cold Comfort Farm -- the word "sex" is mentioned a few times -- but it gets all its humor from familiarity with the particular genre it parodies, so I wouldn't bother giving it to anyone who hasn't read a few such novels. But if your daughter has, I wouldn't hesitate to let her enjoy it. (Last week I gave Middle Girl, who has read a little James now, Max Beerbohm's parody "The Mote in the Middle Distance"; she was entertained.) I've mentioned that I keep a timeline of my reading, and I was amused to see that Cold Comfort Farm shared a publication date (1932) with Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song, the popular Scottish version of the Doomed Rural Peasantry novel.

Which James is that? Turn of the Screw? Google Translate wasn't helpful. Penguin, hope your mom's house isn't too damaged.

This week I caught up a bit on BritTripping with John Henry Newman's quasi-autobiographical Loss and Gain. A famous passage in which the protagonist departs Oxford, in which Newman presumably reflects on his own forced departure: Also finished Cold Comfort Farm. This week reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the most famous fictional manor house in Wiltshire; and then I will be all caught up, as I earlier read, and counted for Surrey, Oliver Twist, which of course is in London, except for the important scene where Oliver's new colleagues in crime take him out to a house in Surrey in order to rob it. For Spooky October I'm reading (slowly) M. R. James Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, entertaining little tales in a possibly sui generis genre of Victorian Academic Horror. As they're set in various places in England (though really mostly in Oxford and Cambridge...) I hope to count them for Spooky London, if only in a wild card-ish way. Question for Those Who Judge: The 'Georgette Heyer' Rebel Rank requires one book set during the Regency Era. Does that mean the actual Regency (only 8 or 9 years I think?), or the wider cultural era?

Oh this is hilarious. How did I not know about this book?

Nice new family acquisition! If I were an exchange student I would want to be adopted into the Amy family. Actually I think I just want to be adopted into your family. Middle and Wee Girls do, too. So glad to hear you've read Cold Comfort Farm. It's very witty so far.

Very good! It's been a strange pleasure this year to discover a book takes place in a useful county. And to think I never used to much notice where exactly in England most novels were set. Any suggestions for upcoming Worcestershire? Another read of Piers Plowman would be too much right now.