Book serendipity! Dh just finished reading his chosen Scottish novel, How Late It Was, How Late by Glaswegian James Kelman, which won the Booker Prize in 1994. He was poking through my TBR stack -- and discovered one of my new Scottish books, George Mackay Brown's Beside the Ocean of Time was short-listed for the Booker the same year. So he's reading that, too. So he can decide if they made the right decision.

Finished the collection of Hardy stories, A Changed Man, today. Hardy calls them "short novels" in his introduction, but only the last (and weakest), "The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid," is what we would consider a novella. Now to finish my William Soutar poems so I can pack it and get going on War and Peace. Some Soutar, from his "Bairnrhymes":

Welcome, Quill! Never mind the high book counts; my first year here I aimed for "Book of the Month" and was super-pleased to read two a month instead. I'd burned out in grad school and it took the BaW thread to really recover. You'll be amazed at yourself.

I have my doubts about the usefulness of Latin for learning Romance languages and English vocabulary (classical honeschool heresy!). Just from my own experience ... As I've mentioned before, we start Latin (gently) at an early age because it's the language of our church services and many of our domestic prayers. But my children are always surprised - though pleased - to notice that an English word has a Latin root; their attention generally has to be drawn to it, and they don't seem to gain any edge in learning English vocabulary. And I don't think my girls are particularly dull. Middle Girl hasn't found French made any easier by learning Latin first, other than some irregular French verbs being a bit quicker for her to learn. Great Girl ended up learning German, where Latin was of course no use at all.

The only really good reason to learn Latin is so that one can read Latin. If the primary goal is something else, better to go after it directly, I say.

English Major.

In only a month, it will be this thread's 9th Anniversary! What is that, copper?

Regarding "pearl" titles: there's also Steinbeck's The Black Pearl; and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

Our heat wave ended, too. It had gotten up to 70 degrees and the sun was spotted a few times; but today when I went running it was in the 50s again, windy, and with that familiar precipitation oscillating between drizzle and mist. The day it hit 70, a couple of people remarked that "this must be just like home for you." Once Middle Girl muttered, "Yes, in winter." Nothing finished since my Conrad novel and Jacobite history book from last week. Right now I should be starting War and Peace but have gotten sidetracked by a Thomas Hardy short story collection, A Changed Man, all set in the fictional Wessex familiar from his novels. One character even gets drowned in what may be the same weir that drowns Eustacia and Wildeve so tragically in The Return of the Native. Someone should put a warning sign near that thing. Also still reading Bacon's Essays and poems by William Soutar.

Thanks for all the good leads! Old Navy and Athleta are both Gap, right?

Great Girl completed, and Middle Girl has almost completed, Artes Latinae. AL was a 2-year high school/ 2-semester course in the 1950s when Dr Waldo Sweet designed it, but now is equivalent to 3 years of high school Latin. GG went straight to a university Virgil course when done and was over-prepared. AL teaches Latin using a structural linguistics approach, which teaches the student to read naturally from the beginning of each sentence rather than picking out subject, verb, object, & modifiers. It uses CD-ROMs and can be set for any Latin pronunciation. My kids have found it to be effective and enjoyable. It is/was expensive, but it's all we needed to purchase for Latin; and most importantly GG can actually read Latin, while MG is nearly able. Unfortunately the owner(s) of AL, Bolchazy-Carducci, did not update the software and now have ceased selling it entirely, so it's only available used. We keep our antique desktop computer solely for running AL.

Thanks Angela and Pawz4me: I will check those out.

There are some nice things there for the short. Thanks!

Just what the title says. I'm tired of folding up the bottoms of leggings and having sleeves dangling over my knuckles on cold days. Where do short people shop?

I finished reading Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands, his second novel, already full of his meaningful mists, vapors, and various symbolic meteorological obscurities. Can't go wrong with Conrad! Also finished at last John Prebble's Culloden, which while informative was too much atrocity porn for my tastes: documented crimes against Scottish civilians by "The Butcher" Cumberland and his English army in the aftermath of the Jacobite disaster at Culloden are mixed in with the rumored and unlikely horrors that are retold in every century. 100 pages could have been reduced to "Cumberland's army inflicted murder, rape, looting, and mass property destruction on the civilian population of Scotland, with little regard for actual involvement in the Rebellion." I have a pile of books recently acquired in Edinburgh and from Bill, our local bookstore owner, who no longer waits for us to search the shelves but now just hops up from his chair and finds the books we should read for us. A new Somerset Maugham for Middle Girl, and "Poems in Scots and English" by William Soutar for me, with instructions to read it this week -- English poems first -- and tell him what I think. He was so pleased that MG reads Maugham that he gave it to her free and told her to come for more when it's done. Also I bought his little Oxford War and Peace (Maude translation, Matryoshka!) so I can get started on that. When I've finished my Soutar assignment that is.

How awful Amy. I'm sorry. It's one of dh's favorite books. On my TBR stack....

Prayers for your sister and the whole family, Amy. Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei.

Link:http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/648538-book-a-week-2017-bw25-june-solstice/page-1 :)

Prose quality is primary for me (well, not with books of poetry I suppose), so it rarely takes more than a page or two before I decide to continue or abandon. A real-life book group didn't work for me -- people get tired of you showing up having read a single page -- so I found an on-line book group of intelligent, engaging moms, in which we all read our own book choices and discuss them, reporting in weekly. It turns out to be surprisingly jolly to hear people you like talking about books you'll never read that they've enjoyed. I recommend it.

No.

In the Renaissance, books were shelved with their spines in or up. See Durer's "Saint Jerome in his Study" for an example.

Stacia, many hugs of comfort in memory of your dear cats. Life is giving you a hard go of it lately. Jenn, thanks for the playlist. When I read W&P last time, I listened to a recording of Russian liturgical music, including the hymn Spasi, Gospodi, Lyudi Tvoya, which is incorporated into the 1812 Overture. Now I firmly associate the novel with that music. Jane, that is the best photo. Real cowboys knit! This week I finished my collection of Max Beerbohm's writings (mostly essays or radio broadcasts). Does anyone else here like Beerbohm? I feel lonely in my reading lately. This week I'm working on my history of Culloden and its aftermath, and on Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands. Francis Bacon is backburnered for a little while. And I just acquired a nice Oxford collection of the major poetry of John Clare, "the English Burns." Tomorrow features a couple hours on a train, so maybe I can make some progress.

The writer of that article either hasn't actually read Thorstein Veblen, or hasn't understood him.

Ethel, best wishes for a quick recuperation for your ds. Stacia -- hats off for doing the due diligence of historical research! (Every single thing I know about Napoleon's invasion of Russia comes from reading War and Peace. Sure hope Tolstoy was accurate.)

Ah, Auden. Thank you.