A very chilly morning in Central Texas, with our totally inadequate heater failing to make a dent in the cold. So the girls and I are tucked into my bed - the cat determinedly staking out the foot - with our books (Great Girl with a math problem*), while dh laughs at us as Bryn Mawr in pajamas and heads off to work. Our book choices: Hakluyt's Voyages; Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Margaret Storey's The Dragon's Sister and Timothy Travels. *"Find a 9-digit number made up of the digits 1-9, ending in 5, which is a perfect square, or prove that no such number exists."

I may hold down the other end of the spectrum. I never posted a wrap-up, but in 2016 I read 76 books, of which only seven were written by women. And of those, only three I thought were very good (Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado; Margaret Oliphant, The Beleaguered City; Catherine Carswell, The Life of Robert Burns); and two of them were among the books I most disliked that year.

Stacia, I just wanted to mention that I gave Wuthering Heights to Middle Girl and she loved it. It's one of her favorite books now; tied with Tristram Shandy. Corrupting the youth of Athens!

Well said.

Cave Adventure!!! I played that as a little kid. It became Zork, if I remember right, and launched the Infocom series of text-based adventure games. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."

Woke up early, finished my first book of the year, ran 5K as the sun rose and the city started moving around me. [/smug] From St. Teresa: On to volume 2 of Hakluyt. Name Spelling (personal) Challenge: 1. Voyages, Richard Hakluyt 2. The Interior Castle, Teresa of Avila

As a child, Flannery O'Connor wrote in the margin of her copy of Alice in Wonderland, "Awful. I wouldn't read this book."

Bwahahahaha! :D Now I'm trying to think of what other edgy classics they could rewrite for the indigo snowflake toddler set. Tropic of Capricorn? Go Ask Alice? Fanny Hill?

I would have voted first non-article word only. But I'm about to ask for an A to Z author's name exemption, so maybe I should vote for liberality, in my own self-interest. Can I count De Quincey for Q? I have too many D authors.

And so short-sighted. I bet you get much better results taking Kerouac out of their hands when they find it on the coffee table, saying "No honey, you're too little to read that."

I think I posted the article more in horror, and yet hilarity. Kerouac for tots! Once you've left out the drugs and the Mexican prostitutes, what's left? Maybe they could do Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for preK next. Re: eastern Europe, I vote for War and Peace. It's far more readable than its imposing reputation would suggest.

Well we're even, then: I assumed The Portable Veblen was a compendium of excerpts from his writings! :D Anyone read this article, by the way? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/18/business/media/forget-pat-the-bunny-my-child-is-reading-hemingway.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1

A hearty literary welcome to our new BAW readers, former lurkers, and friends giving it another try! Angela, hope dh and baby are feeling better soon and you get a break. My memory of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class was that it cried out for concrete examples of his theoretical assertions; frequently I wasn't sure at all what he meant about a cultural behavior with no "for instance" given. Are his other writings similarly abstract?

Her most important work, and probably the most interesting for most people, is her "Life" (or "Autobiography", depending on the translator). Relics are weird, aren't they? They're where the incarnational nature of the faith really hits the road. Our family trip to Rome last year really stretched my American sensibilities in that regard. Yes! Welcome! More = merrier!

Robin's birthstone challenge and Bingo name-in-title square spurred me to a sort of sub-challenge: books whose titles spell out my name. Because why not. And because for three years I've been meaning to get to Hakluyt's Voyages, all 8 volumes and 3000+ pages of it. Having read volume one, I'm taking a quick break to read my "I" book; the idea being to intersperse subsequent letters between volumes. We'll see how that goes. So this week: Richard Hakluyt, Voyages St Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle.

Still catching up with the thread ... but I think I've run afoul of the >200 pages rule; not with novellas but with some dense nonfiction. My current read is only 150 pp but is slow and thoughtful going; I would have counted that in the past. Oops. ETA: Just caught up to your happy news, Robin! Congratulations!

Spare moment post - The List, 2016 1. Samuel Pepys' Diary (abridged) 2. Giovanni Guareschi, Don Camillo's Dilemma 3. Alphonse Daudet, Letters From My Windmill 4. J. R. Ackerley, We Think the World of You 5. Cabeza de Vaca, Narrative of the Narvaez Expedition 6. John Wyndham, The Chrysalids 7. Frank Norris, McTeague 8. Scott, Ivanhoe 9. Giovanni Guareschi, The Little World of Don Camillo 10. Gregor Dorfmeister, The Bridge (Die Brucke) 11. Maupassant, Selected Short Stories 12. P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Tie That Binds 13. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther 14. William Gass, In The Heart of the Heart of the Country 15. Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? 16. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 17. Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville 18. Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro 19. Trollope, Phineas Finn 20. Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (ed. R. Robbins) 21. Euripides, Bacchae 22. Guareschi, Don Camillo and His Flock 23. Anatole France, Penguin Island 24. Vita Sackville-West, Challenge 25. Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds 26. Marquis James, The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston 27. Shakespeare, Hamlet 28. Jack Kerouac, On the Road 29. Herman Melville, Moby Dick 30. Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp 31. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That 32. J. M. Barrie, Sentimental Tommy 33. Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship 34. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up 35. J. H. Newman, Verses on Various Occasions 36. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep 37. The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (ed. T. Scott) 38. Margaret Oliphant, The Beleaguered City, & Other Tales of the Seen and Unseen 39. Allan Ramsay, Selected Poems 40. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet 41. Catherine Caswell, The Life of Robert Burns 42. J. Frank Dobie, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver 43. Shakespeare, King Henry VIII 44. Trollope, Phineas Redux 45. Waugh, A Bitter Trial 46. Plato, Apology 47. John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers 48. Virgil, The Aeneid (trans. C. Day Lewis) 49. Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? 50. Lorenzo Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat 51. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South 52. Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 53. Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado 54. Trollope, The Prime Minister 55. Jose Saramago, Blindness 56. Stevenson, Treasure Island 57. Mike Cox, Texas Ranger Trails 58. Stevenson, Kidnapped 59. Shakespeare, King Richard III 60. Wouk, The Caine Mutiny 61. Bierce, The Spook House [& other stories] 62. Von Zeller, Praying While You Work 63. Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality 64. Bram Stoker, Dracula 65. Steinbeck, Cannery Row 66. Akutagawa, Rashomon & 17 Other Stories 67.The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1 (trans. Kirsopp) 68. Poetry of Matthew Arnold 69. Dostoevsky, Devils 70. John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany 71. Rawlings, The Yearling 72. Madeleine Cosman, Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery & Ceremony 73. Dumas fils, Camille 74. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat 75. Endo, A Life of Jesus 76. Trollope, The American Senator Books started this year, still in progress: Quasten's Patrology; various New Testament apocrypha; Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons, Hakluyt's Voyages. Many, many thanks to Robin for keeping the book thread up and fresh. And thanks to all of you. This group of women has made a qualitative difference in my life. There have been some moments this year that were particularly personally difficult but which I wasn't comfortable talking about publicly; it was so good to escape to book reading and discussion sometimes. Continuing thanks to Kareni for tipping me off about the wonderfulness of Don Camillo. Continuing thanks to Jane for book recommendations and gifts. I pass on dh's thanks; you definitely share his tastes in reading, even more than mine! Special gratitude to Stacia for a sweet Halloweeny remembrance, at just the right moment.

The end of the year is always so troublesome; I want to post my wrap-up, and read and respond to posts, and there is no time until the New Year; and then there will be so many posts for a while! Please forgive me Robin if I don't post my wrap-up until somewhere around mid-January, sorely unseasonable. Stealing a few moments here though to tell Jane that I started reading Hakluyt's Voyages, and will be on it for a while because it's 3100 pages in all; but in the course of reading interesting passages to dh we discovered that Dorothy Dunnett apparently mined Hakluyt for her books. So there may be some interest for you, though frankly I would recommend the Penguin (abridged with notes) rather than the Everyman (complete, with no helpful notes, so I have frequent recourse to Wikipedia). Briefly: Hakluyt in the 1590s decided, enough with the Spanish and Portuguese getting all the juicy discoveries: time to gather all the evidence that the English have been the real seafarers, so as to encourage further exploration, especially up north into Russia, which will really pay off (though he notes in passing that there might be some promising discoveries to be had inland of the Virginia colonies). Thus he gathered every single scrap of textual evidence of English navigation, ever, and sets it all out. Right now I'm reading the account of the Sir Richard Willoughby expedition, which Dunnett used for her book The Ringed Castle. Without comment, Hakluyt sets side-by-side Richard Chancelour's detailed account of the Muscovite court, and Willoughby's (later discovered) log of his incompetent attempts to get north around Norway, ending with him and his ship's company all freezing to death in Lapland.

I like the looks of that. Too late for Christmas Day. Maybe for New Year's or Twelfth Night.

This year I acquired a secondhand Sonlight Book of Time, and have been entering my reading lists of the last several years, so I actually have a visual now of the chronology. It turns out that my most crowded page is the 1930s: since 2014, twenty of my books came from that decade. (Interestingly, there's an almost unbroken eight-year hiatus after that, due to the WWII paper shortages.) Robin - seriously, I think it would be fun to read books with first letters spelling out my name; the very book I wanted to start the New Year with is a "V." That is my new goal.

Dh tells me I should read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy for Steampunk, and a Wodehouse Psmith novel for Flufferton. If I make Wee Girl's next read-aloud Lang's Violet Fairy Book, I'll count that for name in title. The reading level of Lang is challenging enough for WG that I'm content to count it as YA fiction. Andy Adams' The Log of a Cowboy for my western ... and I have no idea at all what to do for dystopian, sf, mystery, or finance. ETA: After poking around my TBR pile(s), dh suggests Butler's Erewhon for dystopia, and Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism for finance.

Finished another Trollope, The American Senator. An entertaining anti-heroine, Arabella Trefoil, who gets Trollope's usual humane treatment and satisfying fate. Hoping to finish the last of the early Christian apocryphal writings from Quasten's Patrology by the end of the year, so I can round them all up and count them as a book. They make for a fun change of pace as Christmas reading. I've just started The Arabic History of Joseph, the Carpenter, from around 4th- or 5th-century Egypt. It's interesting to learn that there was a very strong devotion to St. Joseph in Christian northern Africa - I knew that Augustine had a Christmas sermon on the true paternity of Joseph, but didn't know it was a feature of his region - because medieval Western Europe was often uncomfortable with Joseph, seeing him as a faintly comic, quasi-cuckold, and so his popularity came about much later in the west. Kathy, I was thinking of True Grit also; the thing is, it's also a bestseller published in dh's birth year, so I'd been planning to use it for that. But I think I have an alternate choice for Western around here somewhere. Robin - is there an official definition for Flufferton and Steampunk?

Didn't finish anything this week. This is crunch time for dh and Great Girl both: end of semester, exams to take/give, papers to write/grade, panicky grad students to advise/ panicky student grinding out grad school applications. Meanwhile cleaning baking shopping wrapping church church church church. But still taking breaks for Trollope's The American Senator, and to read The Prince and the Pauper to Wee Girl. Congrats on finishing Life of Johnson! I really enjoyed it last year, or was it the year before? My favorite Johnson quote from it is in my sig. I loved City of God too. At first though when I read your post I thought, How did anyone fit a 1200-page book into 140-character tweets? You'll have to keep us abreast of your progress.

Glad to have you and your recovering eye back, Jane! I hadn't known that cataracts affected color vision. Nobody in my family has ever had cataracts, come to think on it; thus my ignorance. Middle Girl once again took away the book I was reading, so instead of continuing Flannery O'Connor I'm reading more Anthony Trollope, The American Senator. Is there a fox hunting scene in every single Trollope novel? I think there might be. We're all enjoying reading together right now, dh and the girls and me, listening to the moaning racket outside as a blue norther blows in. A couple hours ago it was 77 degrees; already dropped by thirty, and it'll be down another twenty by morning. Bring in the dogs and horses, Mabel!