Sure ... after finishing the big fat trollop, I mean Trollope, I just started.

Oh please choose Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, I’ve been wanting to read it with someone!

Heading out the door so will post more later, but wanted to thank Robin for the sonnet as serendipitously I'm teaching the sonnet form to Middle Girl this week. She's analyzing Shakespeare's 71st. She tried composing her own, and it wasn't bad but she seemed unable to fix a line that was a syllable short; turned out she thought "pale" was two syllables. #texanproblems Sonnet quiz for the poetry nerds: In Shelley's "Ozymandias," in the line "the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed" ... Whose hand? Mocked whom? And fed what? (We spent two days on "Ozymandias" and banged our heads against that line for a while.)

Thrift store find! The old Anchor Books Gorey-illustrated covers are my one indulgence in buying books for their covers. Fortunately, Anchor Books had Gorey illustrate interesting books, so they're good reads in themselves. I just handle them v-e-r-y carefully.

Agreeing to zones and to recycling glass food jars. We have an impossibly tiny "pantry" and so struggle just to not have everything piled on everything else, so I'm reading your thread with interest. By the way the most effective method of pantry decluttering in my experience is a good meal moth infestation.

50 next month. At 46 I started getting a host of unpleasant symptoms: terrible cramps, cycle irregularity, heart palpitations, insomnia, constant fatigue, and some tmi stuff. I lost the extra 30 lbs. I'd been carrying and started exercising regularly: all of it went away. Very different story from my mom. No sisters or aunts so no other family data.

Okay then. Well at least the excerpt from the book is enough to let me know it's not for me. Thanks.

We were in London last weekend when England qualified for the semifinals. The streets were empty of all but the tourists.

Dang. Croatia goal.

Tied 1-1; end of 90 minutes. !!!! https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-cup/2018/07/11/england-vs-croatia-world-cup-2018-live-score-latest-updates/

I've never read The Mists of Avalon (though I did read Malory earlier this year for Hampshire); but I remember vaguely that there was some controversy regarding Bradley. Too lazy to google.

The one thing Wee Girl wanted out of London was Cream Tea. We finally found an affordable place for such a thing; photo below (rare picture of dh and Wee Girl, both of whom normally refuse to have their photos taken). An Orthodox friend says I need to read Laurus. Looking forward to your review. There was a "Mexican" section in the shop in Fife; unfortunately this foodie town has ruined me to the point I can't eat tortillas that aren't super-fresh (like, made that morning). Until Sainsbury's starts carrying cilantro and tossing tortillas in their bakery, we just eat like the locals. One thing I wish we could have in our Tex-Mex is British cheese. The worst cheese we had from Tesco was better than the best cheese I can find in the HEB. That's quite the afternoon tea!

While out of town I passed the 52 books mark; hurrah for me. Book 48 was David Wilson's The Anglo-Saxons (an old Pelican, slightly out of date due to later archaeological discoveries but very useful for the inexpert reader), prominently discussing the Sutton Hoo ship burial hoard, thus counting for Suffolk. The hoard is at the British Museum, where we also saw the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, and most of the nifty Mesopotamian artifacts that show up in homeschooling history texts. Right, this is my first attempt at including photos in a post. Here goes: The Anglo-Saxon helmet The brooch (If anyone knows how to reduce the photos, let me know.)

Trying multiple photos one two

Inserting photo in text

Greetings from the United States of Texas! We landed last night, walked into customs, and a big security guy with a nametag saying "Valdez" smiled at all of us and said "Welcome home y'all!" I almost cried. We had tacos for dinner. We spent our final week in London, and it was so very literary and fulfillingly touristy that I can't possibly include everything in one post. Limiting myself to what doesn't require photos, which I will figure out how to post later, we visited Westminster Abbey and of course poets' corner for a pilgrimage to Chaucer's tomb (no photos allowed). Which was my completed reading this week: super-chunkster (i.e. 500+ pages in Middle English verse) The Canterbury Tales, including the tales I'd never read before (Man of Law, Melibee, Parson). I read my tiny Oxford edition, both for portability and because it has no notes, only a partial glossary in the back; otherwise I get pulled into the notes and lose the momentum I need to read ME at anything close to normal reading speed. Counting it for Kent, though of course the pilgrims never actually reach Canterbury. A volunteer let us stay a few minutes after closing so she could guide us to Edmund Spenser's tomb. After we'd finally been politely evicted, we were standing around the cloister when I noticed the tomb marker beneath our feet said APHRA BEHN. Unbelievable. Lots more, hopefully illustrated, later. Now to catch up with BritTripping and old threads. Wifi in London this last week was iffy. We were staying in Putney, which in a way was literary: as we walked past streets of small gingerbready Victorian row housing toward the underground station, Middle Girl observed, "This is where you lived when you lost all your money and had to sell your carriage and move to the unfashionable suburbs with only one housekeeper and a cook." That's my girl. Currently reading: Lady Audley's Secret (Sussex). My RLS for Bucks was supposed to have arrived in the mail but hasn't.

How awful, Zebra. ?

Happy Sunday in July! In virtual BritTripping this week, if I were reading a book set in Cornwall, it would be Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes, a melodramatic serialized minor novel. One installment ends with the hero (conveniently named "Henry Knight") dangling off a cliff (to be rescued by the heroine's knickers in the next issue), which Wikipedia claims as the source of the word "cliffhanger." In fact, what I finished this week was Edinburgh writer Muriel Spark's Collected Stories and Iain Crichton Smith's novel Consider the Lilies. Spark's stories, generally told in the first person, are strange and sometimes disturbing, occasionally drifting into the supernatural without devolving into genre fiction, and really defying genre altogether. Reading them all at once was probably a mistake as some of them were too similar in theme or plot development. But much recommended, especially for anyone who liked The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Which reminds me, at Grassmarket in Edinburgh we passed the Miss Jean Brodie steps, named as such just last month at the 100th anniversary of Spark's birth. We honored her by consuming gelato from the milk bar next door. Consider the Lilies was a bit of a disappointment. Usually I love prose written by poets, but Smith let his nationalist feelings and anti-Calvinist sentiments take over this short novel about an old woman forcibly removed from her home in the Highland Clearances. A very good and poetic scene where she crosses a moor to get to her priggish minister's house includes an encounter with a dead sheep (no, really, it's poetic) that echoes one of Crichton Smith's poems I recently read. Not sure which came first, the poem or the novel's scene, but it was effective in both poetry and prose. Still, I think I'll leave this one in the rental when we leave. Still reading through The Canterbury Tales. Wife of Bath done; a good chunk of the way through the Clerkes Tale, Chaucer's version of Petrarch's story of Patient Griselda. By the time we BritTrip to Canterbury/Kent, I'm going to have earned my way there.

I thought that was someone else....

Erin and Nan — so good to see you.

Falling further behind on BritTripping. If I had access to my shelves, this week I'd be reading the 12th-century Life and Passion of William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth, a chilling book that is our earliest source for the anti-Jewish "blood libel"; a story unfortunately popular in the Middle Ages and repeated in Chaucer's "Prioresses Tale," which I recently read in my continuing slow pilgrimage through The Canterbury Tales. Finished this week only my Penguin selection of Iain Crichton Smith's poems; continuing my previous reads, including Smith's novel of the Highland Clearances, Consider the Lilies. Mid-year wrap-up will have to wait until I have access to my records, as I write my reading in a notebook not currently with me.

Don’t forget the Sutton Hoo ship burial! I read a book about the Anglo-Saxon archeological record for my Suffolk BritTrip read, and next week I get to see all the stuff! I am so excited.

I have Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right scheduled for Week 28 (Devon). If anyone wants to join in. ETA: I see the BBC filmed this one too.

Last night I finished Witch Wood; much better than The 39 Steps if I may say so. Being a little tired of Scottish writers I started a book dh has from the Library: The Best of Richard Matheson, a collection of 1950's short stories by one of the Twilight Zone writers. Why oh why do I ever read any of dh's books? Just awful. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" was only bearable because I could imagine the protagonist as a young William Shatner. Fortunately the library told me to pick up my Essex read, Lady Audley's Secret, and I've abandoned Matheson for Braddon. Also more reading of Iain Crichton Smith. some of which I almost understand. I think. Here's a not completely inaccessible piece: At the Firth of Lorne In the cold orange light we stared across to Mull and Kerrera and far Tiree. A setting sun emblazoned your bright knee to a brilliant gold to match your hair's gold poise. Nothing had changed: the world was as it was a million years ago. The slaty stone slept in its tinged and aboriginal iron. The sky might flower a little, and the grass perpetuate its sheep. But from the sea the bare bleak islands rose, beyond the few uneasy witticisms we let pursue their desolate silences. There was no tree nor other witness to the looks we gave each other there, inhuman as if tolled by some huge bell of iron and of gold, I no great Adam and you no bright Eve.

Beautiful! You are gifted.