Beautiful. Thank you for sharing those.

I would have been all caught up on BritTrip but three pages into Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, suddenly I couldn't bring myself to read another Victorian novel set in the English countryside. Instead, a book the polar opposite of that: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, set in the mean noirish streets of San Francisco--and I do mean set in the actual streets, which are so crucial to the plot that if you don't know how Bush Street and Stockton Street (for instance) intersect, you're going to have trouble. I worked some in San Francisco a lifetime ago and I kept pausing to think, Wait, Geary, that's east-west, so Spade must be... near Market?.... and getting myself lost. San Francisco done, but unready to return to England, I started Louis-Ferdinand Celine's notorious 1936 classic Journey to the End of the Night, one of the first anti-war novels. It reminds me a great deal of the Czech classic The Good Soldier Svejk in its absurdity, vulgarity, and refusal to take horrific events of the author's lifetime with any degree of seriousness. A controversial book by an even more controversial author, and probably enough to send me back to the calm and order of Victorian England when I'm done. Also still reading Wordsworth.

I finished C. P. Snow's Time of Hope, the first (in series order) of the Strangers and Brothers series, telling the first twenty-nine years of Eliot's life. Conveniently he grows up in Leicestershire, which means at last I'm caught up with the BritTrip bus. Continuing with Lyrical Ballads: I've finished the 1798 first volume and am ready for the 1800 second volume and the famous 1802 Preface -- the manifesto of the Romantic movement. I find myself trying, as I read, to put myself in the place of a reader two hundred years ago, experiencing these poems and Wordsworth's revolutionary ideas for the first time. On then to Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, briefly described by the editor as "a Victorian sensationalist novel set in Derbyshire." Just the ticket.

Kathy, I was going to recommend C. P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series, but I keep forgetting that "this century" doesn't mean the 20th anymore.

That is one fantastic fossil!

I have to re-roll occasionally, too. Sometimes I get one of dh's books, like A Brief Introduction to Some Elementary Considerations in Meta-Propositional Analytic Theory, or A Compendium of the Most Bewildering Experimental Science Fiction, or something in untranslated Greek, and I try again. After spending a few moments wishing I were smarter and better educated.

I would have to put Valium in their iced tea.

I finished Mayor of Casterbridge just the other day. Couldn't help noticing that, just like all of Hardy's mature work, it's full of spying and eavesdropping. Notice how many times people are peering at, or listening in on, other characters? Hardy also loves his allusions that are much deeper than they first appear.

This is how I chose my most recent non-BritTrip book. Dh and I have all our books -- more or less -- in a database, and now and then I have Middle Girl choose a new book randomly using random.org. You just enter the number of books you own, let's say 2416, into the True Random Number Generator, and you have a new book choice. MG picked for me Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. This version is the 1798 original and the 1800 second volume, plus extensive notes, including commentaries on the poems by the poets. Several poems were substantially changed over the next two decades, so old familiar favorites like Rime of the Ancient Mariner and We Are Seven are different here than in their anthologized versions. Almost caught up with the BritTrip bus, having started through Leicestershire with C. P. Snow's Time of Hope, the first in the Strangers and Brothers series of novels. At this rate I may catch up with the bus this week, Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas being slated for Derbeyshire.

I'm not rural enough to know about grain farming either, but a lifetime in the cradle of Whole Foods has left me knowing something about sprouted grains, and let me tell you what Henchard really needed to do was explain to the people complaining about the poor quality of the bread-- --that, in fact, sprouted grain features a variety of amino acids; it contains anti-oxidants galore, whatever those are; and the malty flavor and shoe-like quality are actually "an earthy taste and a rough, nutty texture." (Later another villager describes the bread as tasting of mice: I'm sure John Mackey could turn that sow's ear into a silk purse, too.) So what's going on with sprouted grain is that the embryo has started to metabolize the starch. Sprouting grains have lots of the enzyme involved in metabolism (which is a protein and so made up of amino acids). The reduced starch content makes the grain unsuitable for flour or meal, and is unfixable. You can't turn the sprout back into starch. Whatever miraculous process Farfrae came up with, it's been lost to Man and today farmers who are so negligent as to let grain in a wet season reach more than 15-20% moisture without early harvesting, just have to use it as animal fodder. I suspect there is some artistic license going on here with Hardy.

That works for me. I can usually read 50-100 pages/day, so I should be tracking with you. So do you get the impression that despite the sensational wife-selling aspect, the book is really going to be about the horror of the Corn Laws? Trade protectionism is such a timely topic.

I will too, then. Finished last night Trollope's super-chunkster He Knew He Was Right, and am taking a tiny Lake District break with Wordsworth & Coleridge's immortal and revolutionary collection Lyrical Ballads. Water, water everywhere.

Mayor of Casterbridge at the end of the week it is, then.

650 pages of the way through Anthony Trollope's 950-page novel He Knew He Was Right. Trollope takes on women's rights, divorce reform, marital cruelty, and the ordinary flaws of husband and wife magnified by fear into tragedy and madness. Conveniently set in Exeter, Devon, with the Cathedral Close playing a significant geographical role. Earlier this week I read Evelyn Waugh's entertaining but very minor novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, or How I Took a Cruise While Doped on Bromide and Alcohol and Hallucinated the Whole Way, Then Wrote a Novel About It. While most of it takes place at sea, it embarks from, and disembarks at, Waugh's BBC-harassed home in Gloucestershire. My parish priest and I drew aside before Mass to discuss Trollope; he's read the Barsetshire series and is almost done with Can You Forgive Her?, the first in the Palliser series. I had felt CYFH was a little dated, with so much social opprobrium falling on the heroine for jilting her lover (cancelling her engagement), but he was raised in an insular Christian community in Pennsylvania and felt the dynamics were true to what he experienced as a young man. Anyway I recommended He Knew He Was Right, especially for the early chapters that draw a convincing portrait of how a cascade of minor failures to communicate or to let things go allow what should be a small marital conflict to escalate into disaster. Trollope sure knew his marital dynamics. Next Hardy will be for Dorset, either The Mayor of Casterbridge or Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I have both and am happy to read either, so feel free to pick. So is Yorkshire Bracken anything like Dundee Cake? Which I rather like, but then I would sell my soul at Christmas for a Corsicana Fruitcake. Staying off the internet in all forms is my best method of maximizing reading time. Also good is carrying my book with me wherever I go. Best of all would be if these children would just homeschool themselves.

You’re not wrong; but on the other hand, the day you posted this it was 110 degrees in Central Texas. ?

Finished Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes, and rather than plod straight to Devon with another Victorian novel, let's take a quick taxi to Gloucestershire to catch up with the Bus and the 20th century. So next is Evelyn Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.

Fox Mulder? Who knew. Started on the Fosse Way part of BritTrip this week with Thomas Hardy's first official novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, set in Cornwall. It was written serially and the writing improves dramatically as it goes on, though even later in the book there are some laughably bad literary moments. In the famous scene where Knight (really) is hanging from the cliff (literally) at the end of the installment: Dum-dum-dummm! But namelessness is not the worst of the terrors of the cliff from which our hero dangles: It's not just that he's hanging from a tuft of heather 700 feet above the ocean; it's that the cliff is so very black. Like a grape. Honestly though it's a good enough read, and I gather he recycles some of it for Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which ought to be up soon. Perhaps for the revisit to Dorset. If I ever get to this week's Gloucestershire, it's Evelyn Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Unfortunately there's a 1000-page Trollope standing astride the road through Devon that needs to be dealt with first.

Before AC, that was part of the solution: take a siesta in the hottest part of the afternoon, have dinner very late.

"It's a dry heat."

Re-reading, I didn't mean to sound like "your analysis is wrong, mine is right." And it does read a bit like that, sorry. (Btw not so much Middle Girl's attention span so much as her delight in arguing; she was the one holding out for the "hand" being the sculptor's.)

Whoops, correcting now. If in the course of work you encounter dh, who insists on biking to work despite one stint in the ER for heatstroke, tell him I told him so.

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed; We found the first key to deciphering the "hand that mocked them" was realizing that the grammar, somewhat tortured, of the sentence requires "survive" to be a transitive verb, the subject being "those passions" and the objects "The hand" and "the heart." The heart feeding (feeding off, feeding on) is clearly Ozymandias': but the hand can hardly be his, as the "them" which the hand mocks must grammatically be "those passions" which the sculptor read, and it makes no sense for the tyrant to mock his own passions. That is: The sculptor (of Ozymandias's visage) read certain passions well. Those (Ozymandias's) passions survive (both) the hand that mocked (those passions) and the heart that fed (on its power, or the subjugation of others, or whatever). So the grammar leaves us without much choice than to assign the hand to the sculptor; no other referent for "them" makes grammatical sense, and we can't just import a hypothetical referent (his subjects, ethics, etc.) into the poem sensibly. But this doesn't seem like it could be right, because mockery is surely something suited to the tyrant and not to the nameless sculptor tasked with reading the passions and transmuting them into frown and sneer. This is where we resorted to literary detective work. First we checked to see if "mock" could have had a different meaning in Shelley's day. But no luck: it originally meant "to make fun of," without necessarily implying satiric imitation, and later the sense narrowed to imply "... through imitation." By Shelley's time this is what it always meant. But! It turns out that not only was "mock" one of Shelley's favorite verbs, but he used it not just in the sense of "ridicule through imitation" but also in a purely idiosyncratic sense of "imitate closely and accurately," with no apparent negative connotation. From "Prometheus Unbound": And human hands first mimicked and then mocked, With moulded limbs more lovely than its own, The human form, till marble grew divine; Here Shelley uses "mocked" to mean imitated so perfectly that the sculpture of man surpasses even the original, with no hint of ridicule or derision attaching to the verb. He uses it the same way in other places, but this seems like a very close analogy to Ozymandias. So that was our conclusion: "the hand that mocked them" means -- in Shelley's idiosyncratic usage -- "the passions of Ozymandias (which we read in the shattered visage) have outlived both the sculptor who perfectly captured those passions and Ozymandias himself." Whew.

The high temp this week for us will be 42-43 C [corrected!]. Our electricity bill should be exciting. I washed our glass doors the other day as part of summer cleaning. If I washed more than one small pane at a time, quickly, the soapy water would evaporate faster than I could rinse it off. BritTrip link: I just finished a collection of Robert Louis Stevenson's travel essays. While I got it for the essay about lovely picturesque walks in the Chilterns (Buckinghamshire), I much appreciated the essays about his sojourn at a sanatorium in the Alps. You could almost feel the chill breezes off the mountains.

To think that just a few weeks ago we wore warm hats and extra layers against the North Sea breeze. At least it dissuades some of the Californians from moving in. ? We love you Texas!

Dorset! So far behind. Since I missed the half-year round-up, I'll just do that now for the BritTrip reading. Ermine Street George Gissing, New Grub Street (London) C. P. Snow, The Masters (Cambridgeshire) T. S. Eliot, Four Quarters (Huntingdonshire) John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (Bedfordshire) John Clare, Selected Poems (Northamptonshire) Francis James Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Nottinghamshire) Snorri Sturlason, Harald's Saga (East Riding of Yorkshire) Laurence Sterne, The Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy (York) Dere Street Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship (North Yorkshire) Anonymous, The Life of St. Cuthbert/ Venerable Bede, The Life of St. Cuthbert (Durham) Geraldine Jewsbury, The Half Sisters (Tyne and Wear) Robert Fergusson, Selected Poems (Northumbria) Ichnield Way John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (Isle of Wight) Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd (Dorset) Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'Arthur (Hampshire) William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor (Berkshire) *Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Travel (Buckinghamshire) [held up indefinitely in customs] Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (Hertfordshire) Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (Essex) David Wilson, The Anglo-Saxons (Suffolk) Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich (Norfolk) Fosse Way *Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (Cornwall) [getting from library tomorrow] *Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (Devon) [currently reading] *Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (Dorset) [any day now] * = not yet read actually Ranks earned! 21 BritTrip books, 5 (almost) ranks Wilfred Owen: plus WWI book (All Quiet on the Western Front) & WWI poem (var. Wilfrid Owen) J. K. Rowling: plus Robin Hood dispensation (Robin Hood ballads in Child's Ballads) Jane Austen: plus anonymous book (Life of St. Cuthbert) *Bram Stoker: plus participation in Spooky October (*M. R. James ghost stories) Geoffrey Chaucer: plus pre-1600 book (Canterbury Tales)