Sussex is the location of Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons's parody of the earthy, rural novel full of doomed peasantry with authentic accents, a type that Thomas Hardy fans will recognize. (Possibly the title would meet this week's challenge?) Gibbons is lined up for when I finish John Henry Newman's Loss and Gain for Oxfordshire. Newman is best known of course for his theological and homiletical works, poetry, and autobiography, but he loved Trollope and wrote a couple of novels himself; Loss and Gain, the story of an Oxford undergraduate wrestling with questions of faith, being the most successful. Earlier this week I finished Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, and Wordsworth & Coleridge's 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, with its famous preface (enlarged in 1802) which became the manifesto of the Romantic movement. Thus the birth of English Romanticism and the death of Neo-Classicism. As Lyrical Ballads was my Randomly Chosen Reading, Middle Girl used the True Randomizer to pick another book for me. Her first pick was The Hundred Best Latin Hymns, which, while having much to say for itself, says it all in metrical Latin. So she picked again, and this time chose Jean d'Ormesson's The Glory of the Empire: A Novel, A History, "the rich and absorbing history of an extraordinary empire, at one point a rival to Rome" (from the cover blurb), which while detailed and scholarly is entirely fictional. Very strange and French. So we'll see how that goes.

Yes I found this to be true also; I can eat at most half a "serving" of food (which really makes sense as I'm about half the size of most adult men), and eating more makes me feel uncomfortable, so I don't. Similarly I feel terrible if I go more than a day without real exercise; and very sugary food now makes me feel sick. I admit to being initially scared by the thought that I'd have to keep up these habits the rest of my life, but my body and tastes adjusted over time. Three cheers btw for your accomplishments!

At the risk of us being off-topic for this thread, as we're talking here about smaller amounts of weight loss ... I simply don't believe the "starvation mode with any amount of weight loss!" and "you'll be miserable the rest of your life!" claims: at least not for everybody, and certainly not for everybody losing smaller amounts of weight. When I decided my weight had crept up too far, I spent one year losing about thirty pounds, using the classic "Eat less, Exercise More, Cut way back on sugar and starchy foods" approach. I lost about half a pound a week, got down to middle of the healthy BMI range (5'2", 118 lbs.) and haven't regained it after two years. I'm not starving, I'm not hungry, I'm not miserable, really I feel awfully good, and it wasn't/isn't that hard. YMMV and all that. This is meant to be encouraging; if it's not, please disregard.

Hurrah for employment! Yes, let the book go. Or read the last page and count it.

Keep us updated on this one? It's been on my TBR shelf for literally decades, to the point I worry that it's now dated. But maybe not?

Robin, thank you for bringing John Gay to everyone's attention. Of course Gay is most famous for writing The Beggar's Opera, the most popular play of the 18th century, updated by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill as Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) with immortal songs such as "Mack the Knife." No books finished in this busy week: near the end, though, of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, which was apparently the basis for a Terry Pratchett novel, a thing I had not known. Also finishing Wordsworth & Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, which would also have counted for Somerset if Sheridan hadn't got me there first with The Rivals. BritTrip: Kent was checked off over the summer by mega-medieval-chunkster The Canterbury Tales, including "The Tale of Melibee" and "The Parson's Tale," which no one ever reads. Took considerably more than one week but fortunately there were a lot of train trips. I do believe I can catch up with the Bus by October. Anyone else still reading her way along the Roman Roads...?

1. Appliances: coffee maker, electric kettle, toaster oven 2. Kitchen-y stuff: Sonos speaker, cookie jar, oil bottle, jar of wooden spoons/spatulae 3. Clutter: car keys, wallets, coffee cup in use, unsorted mail, bike pump, change jar 4. Other: (1) small statue of Socrates (patron saint of homeschool) gazing down upon dining table as if to say, "Know Thyself. Or at least know thy Greek declensions." (2) Mexican folk art ceramic statue of garishly painted mermaid on garish fish on garish lizard on garish tortoise, which distracts the eye from the dirt.

We have the same kind of electric can opener as Kareni: it's ambidextrous, pushing down over the top of the can and uses a horizontal cutting blade to slice off the lid right under the rim. Not disabled, but I'm so dominantly lefthanded, and dh is so dominantly righthanded, that it's the only way we can have a single can opener. Dh bought it after watching me one day trying to open a can upside-down using the manual opener. (Of course if I were a better person I'd never ever eat anything out of cans, and all my beans and chili would be fresh and homemade, and Wee Girl would prefer fresh fruit to the wretched fruit cocktail. Oh well.)

Again choosing books for homeschooling needs, I just read Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals, featuring Mrs. Malaprop, which character gave her name to a form of lexical error. Conveniently for this week's BritTrip, the play is set in Bath. But Georgian literature needs a rest now, as do lengthy novels, and I can't quite bring myself to read 500 pages of Sarah Fielding for the sake of Week 34's London. So instead, journalist Henry Mayhew's 1849-50 series of articles comprehensively detailing the lives of the London poor, now an invaluable resource for understanding the real lives of the impoverished class in London. It was collected into four volumes as London Labour and the London Poor; I'll be reading the Penguin 500-page abridgement.

Congratulations on your adorable new granddaughter!

My Irish maiden name, which I wanted to use as a little boy's first name since my youth, when I read it used as a first name in an O. Henry short story. It would even have fit the -en/-an trend for boys' names (Aiden, Kaylen, etc.). But I married into an unusual last name that, put after my maiden name, made an amusing and unfortunate phrase. And then we had all girls anyway. Goodbye, Little ----an who never was.

Homeschooling is really putting a crimp in my reading lately. Last week I read St. Augustine's The Confessions for the third time so I could discuss it with Middle Girl: historical, literary, theological, philosophical, and hagiographical aspects. Once more with Wee Girl, in five or six years, and I think I will be all done. This time at least I had the sense to make up a crib sheet for myself which I will tuck inside the cover when we're done. For myself, I read George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, which I know for a fact I read in college but remembered absolutely nothing of, except that there was an important section called "The Red Deeps," the obvious Freudian significance of which our professor belabored. So much for Lincolnshire and the Fosse Way. On to Akeman Street, which the BritTrip bus is apparently just leaving, with The Adventures of David Simple, the first novel of Sarah Fielding, sister to the more famous Henry. Now that could be a bingo square: authors overshadowed by more famous relatives. Poet laureate C. Day Lewis could make that list; Dorothy Wordsworth and her journals; who else? Do we dare suggest P. B. Shelley? (How happily I would join in with the Kristin L. read-along, if only there were some prospect for adequate time; but it's back to Book a Week for me.) Lunch break over; back to the salt mines.

When Great Girl showed The Princess Bride to Wee Girl a few years ago, GG was shocked by the frame narrative: "Hey! His grandfather is Columbo! ... Hey! That's a volume of our Book House set Columbo is reading!" How different movies look as a young adult. She didn't even mind the kissing parts.

Finished Sheridan Le Fanu's sensationalist Victorian thriller Uncle Silas. It starts out with a plot device so hard to swallow it almost ruins the book: the motherless teenage heroine's adoring father dies, and in his will leaves her in the custody of his reclusive, impoverished, ne'er-do-well brother Silas, whose reputation was ruined when he was credibly accused of murdering hs bookie for his (Silas's) gambling IOUs. He also leaves his whole estate to the daughter, and, if she dies, to his brother Silas! ... and does this as a public statement that he believes his brother Silas to be innocent. Because if Silas is a murderer, it's a completely insane idea. And yet, once you choke that down, it's really pretty good, and moves along at a brisk pace (for a Victorian novel) to a gripping conclusion. Set in Derbyshire, with the Derbyshire dialect in a starring role, in the mouth of Silas's poor daughter who, like Eliza Doolittle, can never hope to be a lady until she can talk like an upper-class Londoner. Finishing up Wordsworth and Augustine this week, I hope, and then on to Lincolnshire with The Mill on the Floss, unread since college.

Nice job Loesje!!!

Dh just wrote a book (self-published on Amazon; OUP is interested, though!). It's the genre of Self-Teaching Formal Proof Construction. Via a sort of Yu-Gi-Oh-type game. All beasts-with-attributes illustrated by Middle Girl. It's expected to sell literally tens of copies; mostly to students to whom it's assigned. So you could try that...

Nothing finished. Glued to internet all week, contrary to my usual rule of life--it's like HBO did a prequel to The Young Pope, and I'm binge-watching--plus birthday celebrations (mine & dh's).

Robin, happy anniversary! It's possible that today is my (cough) 50th birthday. Huzzah! Somehow I'm overcome by a wave of no longer caring what people think about me. Now I need to get a dozen more cats.

Yes, can you imagine Marilyn Monroe, with her womanly figure, being considered sexy in Hollywood today? If "famous people" doesn't mean just actors, my award in this category goes to Lyle Lovett. He even had a song about it.

To add: at that age, everything takes 5x as long as it should. Actually my teenager took 3 hours to replace a Quickset doorknob, a 20-minute job. Don’t ask how long it took my oldest to do her own taxes (with much parental help) this year.

We believe in consequences that are, you know, consequences. If parents have to do all the work, then there's no time to do fun things with the kids. Did I say we were going to the pool? I know, but I had to clear the table and wash the dishes instead, sorry. Oh look at all the laundry you folded, I bet I have time for a game of Sorry with you now. Another natural consequence is that older sisters will be very irritated at having to pick up your slack. But when you join them in getting the living room picked up, they treat you like you're a big kid and not a baby who can't help out. The ultimate consequence is that doing chores is being part of the family, and getting lots of family affirmation for that.

Well, this is probably the opposite of what you're looking for, but [ ... ] Iota Unum by Romano Amerio, which is long and difficult and not cheerful but very convincing. Since I'm not here to evangelize, just to share my experience, I will leave it at that.

There’s going to be a lot more lapsed Catholics in the immediate future.

Yeah. Words really fail.

No books finished this week, as I was distracted by a gripping if repellent chunkster (1300 pages!) called The Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report. Not that one could have the stamina or stomach to read it straight through; but an old friend of dh's and mine, it turns out, had an entire page of it devoted to him, so that held interest for me. As dh observed, funny how people you know pop up in the places you least expect. Adult content. All that excitement and misery having calmed down, I'm finishing up Celine's Journey To the End of the Night, and moving forward in my re-re-re-read of Augustine's Confessions for discussion with Middle Girl. Ah those pears.