Coming up for air for a moment -- how I love Rabelais. Prologue to Book 2: When they tell you about the Renaissance, they never tell you about this stuff.

Ad multos annos, Kathy & John!

I've actually grown to appreciate and enjoy Hemingway's prose style; I've just taught this book too many times.

Narnia doesn't count because it's a full-bore allegory: the Christ figure is the entire didactic point. The winner is Robyn Jenkins' The Cone-Gatherers, which is Of Mice and Men for Scottish secondary schools, and features a character who is literally sinless, and is literally hanged on a tree by the wicked for the sins of the world against the innocent. But Hemingway got knocked down to third place when dh reminded me of the existence of Billy Budd. And I feel your literary pain. I had a wonderful freshman English professor who spent the year beating "hunt the symbol" as a critical approach out of our idiot heads.

That is very stressful Loesje. I'm sorry. Hugs from afar.

My reading has slowed tremendously as the homeschooling year has ramped up. This week I barely finished Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea, which by the way gets the Academy's second place finish for Most Blatant Christ Figure in a High School Novel, for the Old Man's via dolorosa scene: Still reading mega-chunksters by Athanasius, Rabelais, and Hakluyt, which I hope to finish by the end of the year. *"I'd especially like to thank W. H. Auden, without whom this cliché wouldn't have been possible." **We suppose three would have been too obvious even for Hemingway.

Moral turpitude, probably. :D

Pretty much. Kafka left instructions to his friend Max Brod to destroy all his work; fortunately, Brod published them instead.

I'm reading The Old Man and the Sea *again*. I'd thought of A Farewell to Arms for Great Girl's Hemingway instead but on re-reading realized it has way too much sex and discussions she doesn't want to have with her mom. If only there were a bingo category for Unwilling Re-read.

I read The Trial recently and would certainly recommend it; one of my favorite reads of the year. But then I enjoyed Gregor Samsa the giant bedbug, too; it was the only thing we were made to read in high school that I really liked.

You know that if a purely historical Anne Frank costume were to catch on, some transgressive teenager somewhere will dress as Zombie Anne Frank, and then we'll just have to summon the SWAT team.

Ha! We could add "doxed and SWATted."

It's like Flat Stanley. Except literary. ETA: We all ought to have posted selfies of reading War & Peace in front of local landmarks. Oh why do the best ideas come too late?

Yes, credit where credit is due! Say, why didn't we sign the inside cover? We could see how many BaW signatures we could collect.

Good to hear that Grand Hotel is continuing to please. I share your feelings about Rebecca; if Hitchcock hadn't made a movie better than the book, I wonder if it'd have lasted so long. Middle Girl didn't care for it either, so youth probably wouldn't have saved it for you.

For the first time this week, I have a little reading time, and I need to pick a book for the occasional break from Athanasius. Since I need an R for Alphabetical Authors, and it's been a long time since Rabelais, I'm going to re-read Gargantua and Pantagruel. Many years ago I read the Norton edition translated by Burton Raffel. This time I'm reading an old Penguin (because it's handy), translated by J. M. Coffen. Unfortunately it's been too long for me to really compare the translations.

Congratulations Stacia on 52!

Most recently, the Green Bay Packers.

In the Lolcats world (a glimpse here into the precise ways I squander time on the internet), Basement Cat is the opposite of Ceiling Cat. See http://lolcats.wikia.com/wiki/Basement_Cat Somehow the expression in the photo struck me as perfect Basement Cat.

Erin, congratulations on achieving blackout! Stacia, is that Basement Cat?

I'm considering for Outer Space Lucian of Samosata's Verae Historiae. Maybe if you want a complete change of genre...?

Ooooo nice photos, Jane. "Feed me, Seymour!"

Wikipedia tells me that Poe's "The Black Cat," "The Gold-Bug," and "The Tell-Tale Heart" were published in 1843, as was Dickens's ghostly "A Christmas Carol." For that Spooky October tie-in.

This week I read Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, and Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Thanks, dh; you may return them to your office now.) Very odd books, and yet utterly unlike. And the science fiction bingo square achieved, ha ha! Does written/published in --43 count?

I was surprised by how much I liked the movie. I am really not a science fiction enthusiast. You'll quickly get why a Replicant would be reading Pale Fire. It's all about the authenticity of memory and whether your past is your own or the property of whoever is making use of it. Reading it, you will soon be far off baseline. ;)