Just ran across this in Blaise Pascal's Pensées: "Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling have no understanding of matters involving reasoning. For they want to go right to the bottom of things at a glance, and are not accustomed to look for principles. The others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles, have no understanding of matters involving feeling, because they look for principles and are unable to see things at a glance." (Pascal thought both were necessary, especially in matters of religious belief.)

Do I give away my secret planned book for Huntingdonshire? ;) ETA: I shall. T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets has been on my tbr pile for a while, and the fourth poem of it is "Little Gidding," which is of course in Huntingdonshire. The first three poems are named for places in Somersetshire, The Cotswolds, and Massachusetts, but I'm going to be good and only count it for the one county.

There was a certain Puritan who was famously incarcerated in Bedford Jail. I'm going to assume that the dream-allegory he wrote there is set in Bedfordshire.

Reading planned out for London, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, and Bedfordshire. Fun!

So if I read four Thomas Hardy novels I'm good. Excellent!

Sandy, Amy: What actual county/counties would "Wessex" be?

Wodehouse's Uncle Fred books, most of which start with U, are set on an estate just outside London.

Mothersweets, much joy to the happy couple and to you! Sandy and Amy, thanks for all that hard work. More additions to the tbr pile, I see, unless I pull a Bertie Wooster and just read A Shropshire Lad for the nth time.

It was full of wisdom. I kept feeling that I would be getting more out of it if I read it in the original ... Swedish? Finnish? There's another one of hers I will read when my dear father-in-law is done with it.

I've got too many books going simultaneously, and need to settle down and finish some. Besides unfinished books from last week, I'm reading Blaise Pascal's Pensees, excerpts from which Middle Girl will be discussing in her book group next week. This is the source of the famous Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point ("The heart has its reasons of which reason know nothing."). The Pensees is a fascinating collection of snippets of writings which Pascal was preparing as the framework for a book, but he died before writing it. So the fragmentary, sometimes cryptic, nature of the Pensees ("Thoughts"; not Pascal's title) is accidental, and yet part of its attraction. And then suddenly a copy of Dylan Thomas' short prose writings, the posthumous Quite Early in the Morning, leapt into my hands, and I couldn't resist starting it. What poetry this prose is. Reading the introduction, I realized that both Pascal and Thomas died at the age of 39. As did Flannery O'Connor. Also, earlier in the week I read Tove "Moomintroll" Jansson's short novel The True Deceiver.

I didn't, much. I was an early and hungry reader, but my parents weren't readers, and my reading choices in elementary school were (a) issues of Psychology Today and Journal of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (I read the former cover to cover); (b) my older brother's science fiction paperbacks, which I was threatened with death for touching (I sneaked them anyway, finding only the Bradbury tolerable); (c ) two books each time from the Scholastic catalog when we got those in school, which were inevitably too low-level; and (d) books given me by the sympathetic school librarian, which unfortunately were mostly fantasy, and I learned to hate that genre as well. The situation improved in middle and high school as far as quality, though not quantity. I'm still making up for lost time.

Somehow I never read a single Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Three Investigators, Secret Seven, or Cherry Ames book as a child.

Literary homeschooling moment while prepping Middle Girl for National Latin Exam: Me: And Romulus and Remus's grandfather was ...? MG: Numenor! No, wait.... Numitor. Numitor.

I know, right? Check out the cover on the Thomas: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a1/4c/c7/a14cc7a49120c5c8f715ba990f36aaaf.jpg Dig it, cats! Hand's perfectly usable now, thanks for asking; there are scars on three fingertips but they'll fade.

What is this "book-buying ban" thing anyway? I just got out of our library discard store with Dylan Thomas' Quite Early One Morning and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, and if I hadn't bought them someone else would have, and then where would I be? :)

Almost done with Ratisbonne's St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Niche reading, not because Bernard of Clairvaux and his role in the tumultuous events of 12th-century Europe are of niche interest, but because this isn't a history or biography as we would expect it today, but rather a 19th-century French priest's account of those events for a contemporary Catholic readership. I'm very much enjoying it, though the chapter on Realism versus Nominalism made my head swim. Earlier this week I read another of my recent NYRB finds, Jean Giono's 1929 novel Hill, sort of an early environmentalist writing, very mystical and French. Highly recommended. If most of my reading this year is in translation, it's partly because I'm immersed also in Child's Ballads, Cleanth Brook's studies of great poems in English, and the King James Bible: so I've been filling up my Timeless English prose and poetry need that way. Three more NYRBs to go, two translated from German and one from Finnish.

I used Thomas De Quincey, which is a little cheaty, but Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, read in the context of our current opioid crisis, was timely and interesting. The only other one I can think of is Arthur Quiller-Couch; I think I've got a collection of his lectures here somewhere....

Send up a flare when you do. I didn't like North and South that much, but I keep thinking I should give her another chance.

No, I agree. The busy multi-lane intersection near our house had crushed gravel dumped on the ice and a police SUV parked in the middle so people could only go through slowly and one at a time; that's all the city has got to work with. Hope your well has thawed. We're without hot water ourselves because our water heater failed and it's impossible to get a plumber because of all the folks with burst pipes.

While homeschooling huddled upstairs, hiding from the "Ice storm" and sub-freezing temperatures that have immobilized Central Texas, because we none of us apparently can drive over thin patches of gathered sleet, I finished two very short books, The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. The former was one of a stack of NYRB reprints I lucked into finding at the library discard store; it's mid-19th-century German, a tale being told in the context of a baptismal dinner, about a medieval village's desperate pact with the devil and the horrors ensuing. Let's just say, don't read this excellent book if you have a hint of arachnophobia. The latter is a 1961 novel being celebrated at the moment in Spark's Edinburgh, this being her centenary. I quite like the technique of moving forward and backward in time, triangulating on a particular important event, with significant plot information casually dropped into the narrative from time to time. A little challenging as a homeschooler not to frown and think, "That woman really needed to prepare her students for their exams!" Scurrying back now to 19th-century France with the Abbe Theodore Ratisbonne's Life of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. it's funny how the prose style--even accommodating for different translators--in this hagiography is so similar to that of Eugene Sue's anti-Catholic The Wandering Jew. A sample: (If you're wondering how one can read much of this kind of thing ... the trick is to wallow.)

I bury them. There's an oak tree I planted in my grandmother's memory, and I bury the teeth there, with a brief prayer for the child's welfare.

This week I burned the fingers of my dominant hand pretty badly, but they're all healed now, and the upside (silver lining! that's it!) was that, dh doing all the housework, I finished my first two books of the year and made headway through the slower ones I'm reading. 1. Eugene Sue, The Wandering Jew. A 1500-page chunkster from the mid-19th century, with one of literature's best villains--the reptilian (Sue uses this adjective a lot) nefarious Jesuit spymaster Rodin--and an indescribably over-the-top plot with the rare satisfaction for the jaded reader of (spoilers!!!) seeing nearly every good character die off as a result of Rodin's evil scheming, though of course he gets his comeuppance in the end. 2. Joris-Karl Huysmans, The Damned (La-Bas). I read Huysmans' Against Nature (A Rebours) a year or so ago and was so taken by his pioneering work in French Decadent literature that I rushed to check out everything else of his in our library. At the end of 2017 I read his Marthe, in which he was still emulating Zola's Naturalism; but The Damned, which followed A Rebours, is so much better. It's about a writer who greatly resembles Huysmans himself, who is trying to write a novel about a medieval "Bluebeard" child-murderer and satanist, and whose attempts to supplement the book with information about the contemporary (and absurdly pathetic) survival of satanism in modern Paris keeps interrupting his progress. Huysmans dearly wants the reader to read this as a roman a clef, and one of the best parts--after the first chapter where the writer's friend lectures him on the disastrous failure of Naturalism as a literary movement--has the writer's lover forcing him to sign an affidavit (as a condition to his being allowed to attend a Black Mass) swearing that all of the events or persons he will include in his book are false. Thus of course Huysmans can have it both ways: if his readers read La-Bas as thinly veiled reportage, his very assurances that it was all fictional would go to support the idea that it wasn't. Still reading Child's Ballads and Cleanth Brooks' classic of New Criticism The Well-Wrought Urn, the latter in preparation for next semester's high school poetry course with Middle Girl. Lately it's seemed optimal to balance a book of poetry, a non-fiction book, and fiction, as the first two are always slower going for me. So time to pick some more fiction. Hardy, maybe? ETA: formatting

I'm doing plenty of reading for homeschooling that doesn't count as it's not books, but so far this week I've read Grahame Greene's short story "The Destructors," and these poems: Edwin Arlington Robinson, "The House on the Hill"; Tennyson, "The Deserted House"; Milton, "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso"; and Christina Rossetti, "A Birthday." And discussed them, a lot.

Negin, I've been thinking of trying The Winds of War at some point, having liked The Caine Mutiny. But as you say, it's pretty long; and I'm still finishing a ~1500-page novel. Which reminds me, I should see the movie version of The Caine Mutiny. ETA: Should have read on to Jenn's post first!

Still reading the same books ... nothing to report ... and making my life slightly harder by determining to try again on reading through the Bible this year, and not get sidetracked into just the Psalms and Gospels again.