The happy (sort of) ending was a shocker. I checked Wikipedia to make sure his editor hadn’t forced Hardy to add it on, like with Return of the Native.

All Hardy's "Wessex" novels and stories are, as far as I can tell, set in Dorset.

Welcome! And I'm sure you aren't the only one lingering in Iceland.

Don't be absurd. It was Derek Jacobi reading the Fagles Iliad. And only six tapes (abridged). Penguin, I love those photos, and am eaten up with envy of your travels.

There's the Sagas, and the Eddas....

Ichnield way will be resuming this week. I've so far got 37. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (Isle of Wight) 40. Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd (Dorset) ... and will soon be starting Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur (Hampshire), the excessive length of which I plan to make up for in Berkshire by stopping only briefly in Reading Gaol with Mr. Wilde. Meanwhile, a silly personal challenge, which I call The True Random Book Challenge. At random.org, I set the generator to the number of books you own, and then read (or re-read, or reject) the resulting book. The first attempt yielded 41. J. Frank Dobie, A Texan in England Dobie, a Texas folklorist, usually writes about cow herding, outlaws, rattlesnakes, vanished gold mines, and the like; but this is his memoir of his time in 1943 as a scholar of American history at Cambridge. It probably wasn't enough to support a whole book, and at times Dobie falls into the over-familiar English-vs.-American stock genre. But I enjoyed his specifically Texan experience of England and Wales: his discovery that the song of the skylark, so familiar to him from literature, sounds like the southern mockingbird minus the squeaks and whistles; his mild disappointment that the mountains of Wales are, though beautiful, less mountainy than the hills of the Hill Country; and his desperate attempts to get a cup of coffee: Also amusing and charming was his initial anxiety about knowing little of American history or government -- soon dissipated by his discovery that his students preferred hearing stories about cow herding, outlaws, rattlesnakes, and vanished gold mines. The next resort to True Randomness brought up a book I'd totally forgotten I owned: A. E. Ellis' The Rack. It seems this book was popular when it first came out, but Ellis never wrote another one; moreover, Ellis was a pseudonym for one Derek Lindsey, who kept his real name secret until after his death; so Ellis and his novel were soon forgotten. It has the same plot as Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, but is otherwise completely unlike it, being an intimate and disturbingly detailed account of a young man's sufferings at a tuberculosis sanatorium. When The Rack is done, it's back to BritTripping with Malory. ETA: I will hold Dobie in reserve as a BritTrip wild card, as he seems to have visited most of England's counties.

Aha! That makes sense. Last time I listened to an audiobook, it was a cassette tape in my Walkman; I didn't know we'd moved on to visuals.

Chapter 31, when Gabriel Oak and Coggan think they're tracking a gipsy horse thief but it's actually Beersheba sneaking off to Bath to meet Sergeant Troy.

Now I need to know: how does an audiobook handle the bit from Far From the Madding Crowd where the hoofprint patterns of Bathsheba's horse are illustrated? The text even says the illustrations are necessary because they can't be asily described.

Just mentioning -- for Tyne and Wear I read Geraldine Jewsbury's The Half Sisters, a Victorian feminist novel that would certainly count for the bingo square, and starts and ends near Newcastle. Very readable and entertaining. If anyone in the US has a hankering to read it, pm me your address.

Here's a BBC article explaining that Alice in Wonderland is set in Tyne and Wear: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-33694931 ETA: Fingers crossed, Robin.

I love the Tom Brown excerpt. All right, flinging it onto the tbr pile.

Tuesdayschild, what did you think of Tom Brown's School Days? It's one of those old bestsellers that I keep not getting around to reading, so I'd be glad for a review.

Me either. At least the shame is spread thin!

Oh! Well then you should be fine with all of the Decameron. No, I won't read that kind of thing either. Except I guess for Genet, where there's a lot of -- content -- but it's the very opposite of titillating.

What's your tolerance level? Day 3, Story 10 is the only one that rises to the level of obscene (though hilarious...); I have a translation that actually leaves the crucial parts in Italian in case ladies are reading the book. However many of the stories find their humor in someone cheating on their spouse, and mention that the illicit lovers "lie together," with nothing more graphic. Most of the Day 3 stories are of that kind.

Probably Æthelwulf is too much to hope for. Cnut?

LOL I don't know -- those are the only ones I've read! I'll consult dh, the sf connoisseur around here. You and Sandy could do a joint reading project. Next, Apuleius, divided into Respectable and Naughty parts...

Well, only by 14th-century standards; I would say "racy" by modern standards. And only a few of the hundred stories. I could give you the numbers for those stories, so you could skip them....

Boccaccio's Decameron is a fun and easy 14th-century read. There's not a lot of medieval books you can say that about.

Chaucer. Lots of other good Wyndham out there when your dd finishes Triffids! NYRB republished The Chrysalids, which is a kind of post-apocalyptic dystopia, not as dark as modern ones.

Looking ahead, if anyone is still looking for a good Hampshire book: Thomas Malory's great Morte d'Arthur, on my tbr pile since forever, is of course set in Camelot; but I'd forgotten that Malory was firmly convinced that Camelot was Winchester.

Reading slowed down this week. Currently reading Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd for Wessex, I mean Dorset, being a little ahead on the Roman roads (but there are slow BritTrip reads coming up, so I'm working ahead).

I ran into our parish's junior priest at the opera, arm-in-arm with a lovely young woman. It took him .3 seconds to introduce me to his sister. Fortunately for him they have a close family resemblance! But in any other situarion, no, that's just tmi.

Amy, so sorry about all the Confirmation trouble! Surely there's a backup date? We had the same dress agonies with Great Girl. We ended up buying her an LDS temple dress with a slip under it. Lovely and very modest, if a tiny bit more of the prairie style than she might have chosen. You'd think there would be enough of a market for nice Confirmation dresses. Maybe the Mormons should pick up the unmet Catholic demand and start advertising in diocesan papers.