I am down to hsing only 2 children now (though hsing a high schooler is pretty time-consuming), but I understand the time crunch. I found converting internet time to book time makes it easier. YMMV. When I started, I committed to just a book a month, and managed 26 that year, to my surprise. There’s no minimum book requirement; we’re an easygoing bunch. Give it a try!

Stopped spending much time on the internet. Stopped eating sugar. Started reading a book a week (thanks Robin!). Started running.

Pale Fire is exceedingly good but Nabokov's word-play is exhausting. Strawberry, True Grit is a good choice; if you want to try McMurtry but Lonesome Dove is too lengthy, you might try Horseman, Pass By.

You can join me for a Nabokovian Replicant Read-along! ETA: Pale Fire is one of dh's Fave Books Ever, and he was giddy to see it featured in the Goslingflick. He's fetching home the original Dick novel from his office for me, too.

You must not live with an avid Philip K. Dick fan who read all his novels multiple times, rented the movie multiple times in high school and made you watch (Harrison Ford being the only part that kept you awake), and took you out to see the sequel as soon as it hit the screens last month. (Harrison Ford is still the best part.)

I finished Peer Gynt, read with appropriate incidental music. Very pleasing to now be able to associate the right scene with each piece of music. Started Nabokov's Pale Fire, recently recommended by a Replicant interested in questions about the links between authorship, identity, and authenticity.

Oh we’re all just regular Maughams here.

Congratulations to your son, Colleen! Heather, hope you feel better soon. Bronchitis is miserable. Wee Girl, whose reading is really picking up, just started The Witch Family. Good timing.

Had to quote because liking wasn't enough.

Rose, glad to hear it. Breathe easy.

This week I read a collection of John Updike's short stories, The Maples Stories, originally published between 1956 and 1979. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed them, having not liked Updike in college. Still reading Athanasius; and I must get through the last four volumes of Hakluyt before the year ends. But also reading the Ibsen play Peer Gynt. Jenn, any ideas for musical accompaniment? ;)

I enjoyed Tolstoy's postlude essays to the point of buying myself the Oxford edition of his Recollections and Essays. There is some deep vein of boringness in my personality.

Don't feel silly. I won't read material meant to arouse the reader, either (though I will except older literature which, while perhaps having that intent, fails in its effect). I think a lot of people quietly practice that "custody of the eyes."

Keep you and yours safe Rose. Our thoughts are with you.

How awful Rose. Please keep us updated as you can.

Dubliners, surely?

Speaking of Catch-22 ... I was reading our local news this week, and there was a policeman named Commander Officer, and I thought, "I bet he worked like a dog to make commander so everyone would have to stop calling him -- "

This week I'm reading Select Treatises of St. Athanasius in Controversy With the Arians, edited by Cardinal Newman -- I know, it just flies off the library shelves, but somehow I managed to get hold of it -- and the only slightly more popular novel The Reverberator, by Henry James. Anyone remember Somerset Maugham's comment, in the introduction to The Razor's Edge -- "Even so subtle and careful observer as Henry James, though he lived in England for forty years, never managed to create an Englishman who was through and through English"? Let me say for the record that James's portrayal of the speaking patterns of Americans -- or at least, those Americans of whom he socially disapproves -- is more grating than convincing. I nearly threw the book across the room when he says, superciliously, of a character who has just said the word "sitting," "A person with a delicate ear might have suspected Mr. Dosson of saying 'setting.'" (Dh and his parents, originating from a culturally disfavored part of the United States, don't distinguish between short /e/ and /i/, and I dislike the suggestion that there is something contemptible about their accent.) So we'll see if this novel recovers from this early stumble. I know James can do better; the protagonist of The American was well done.

To get candy at my house, you have to bob for an apple. Candy if you try; double candy (plus the apple you chomped) if you win. Any teenager game enough to stick their head in a tub of water deserves candy. The parents who try their luck get homemade soul cakes. And a towel.

Finally finished Somerset Maugham's The Magician, my October Halloween book. It's short and not a challenging read, but dh has been gone all week and reading just didn't get done. Not much sleeping nor housework either really. I disliked the book until I decided to not think about its being by Maugham and then it was reasonably enjoyable. The prose is florid, the plot predictable, but it's not lacking in bright spots. There's a lot of this kind of thing: Paging Edward Said.... Anyhow Middle Girl thinks she prefers not to read it, so I'm going to send it on.

My 4th and 9th grade girls are on Levels I & II of Artes Latinae. I've never seen a Latin program I thought superior. It was designed in the '50s according to Dr. Waldo Sweet's theory of teaching Latin using structural grammar concepts. All three girls enjoy(ed) it. Most importantly, Great Girl can now read Latin, and Middle Girl is almost there. It was pricey, but not so much when divided by three children. Unfortunately, Bolchazy-Carducci owns the rights but no longer makes it available for sale. They failed to upgrade the cd-roms/dvds for so long that a used set is unusable on any modern system (Windows 8 or later). We keep an antique computer in the corner that has no purpose other than Latin.

Sorry, maybe I needed more coffee. Here's the Lewis: http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Toast_CSL.pdf It's pages 9-10. My memory misled me, and I see Lewis was using tall ears of grain rather than tall poppies. I had remembered it as poppies, so I must have run into the expression elsewhere and remembered it back into the Lewis essay.

I first encountered it in one of C. S. Lewis's writings, where he recounted the story that the saying is supposedly based on -- I assume spelling it out for his American readers. I'd have thought more Americans would recognize it from Lewis. He uses it as an illustration of how repressive societies protect themselves by keeping outliers in check, and suggests that in America the other poppies bite the heads off the tall ones -- and that the tall ones will soon bite their own heads off "to be like poppies."

Colleen, hello! Robin, it was so nice to get the postcard; dh has been out of the country for a while, Great Girl is of course gone, and I was feeling lonely that day. Kathy, nice cat. We have a (tailless, fat) little tuxedo kitty. Cats and books, what else do you need. Regarding literary locations. The best literary locale I ever visited was a small, very old building in a little town in Scotland, used by 19th-century writer Margaret Oliphant as the setting for a quite effective ghost story. As I read the story, I realized the town Oliphant described without naming was the very town we were staying in. And as I read on, I realized further that the house itself was unmistakably one the next street over. Right there. I wished the story had been less disturbing.

A book from each century? Work back to Gilgamesh? It's the 21st that would be tricky.