Somehow I missed one of my recent reads: 16. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451. This was another book off my Shame List; several people expressed incredulity that I hadn't read it before (including Great Girl: "But you assigned it to me! How could you not have read it?" Um, I saw the Truffaut movie...).

Sympathies for your loss Angela. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat ei. My blushes, ladies! I have to say, the bits of politics I got to hear in brief radio snatches these last several weeks has made me think I just may stay offline (except for this group of course) until November. It doesn't seem to be edifying Out There. At least Great Girl's first (!) opportunity to vote is a more-than-usually exciting election year.

Happy Easter, friends! I've been getting in lots of reading time and have made good progress through Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons. Also found a discarded Oxford volume of Middle English poetry, Secular Lyrics of the XIV and XV Century, which is rewarding but slow. Meanwhile, what with the nonfiction side of my reading taking care of itself but unfinished, it's been all fiction completed since I checked in last: 8. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe 9. Giovanni Guareschi, The Little World of Don Camillo 10. Gregor Dorfmeister, The Bridge (Die Brücke) (very depressing) 11. Maupassant, Selected Short Stories 12. P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Tie That Binds (first Wodehouse!) 13. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (emo before emo was a thing) 14. William Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country 15. Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? 16. Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville (going to see the Rossini soon) 17. Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro Right now reading the second of Trollope's Palliser novels, Phineas Finn. A good choice of series for avoiding the news of the moment: all of the politics, none of the cringe. "It is customary for the leader of the opposition on such occasions to express his opinion in the most courteous language, that his right honourable friend, sitting opposite to him on the Treasury bench, has been, is, and will be wrong in everything that he thinks, says, or does in public life; but that, as anything like factious opposition is never adopted on that side of the House, the Address to the Queen, in answer to that most fatuous speech which has been put into her Majesty’s gracious mouth, shall be allowed to pass unquestioned. Then the leader of the House thanks his adversary for his consideration, explains to all men how happy the country ought to be that the Government has not fallen into the disgracefully incapable hands of his right honourable friend opposite; and after that the Address is carried amidst universal serenity."

Also the prolific English author Enid Blyton. The Faraway Tree books and the Wishing Chair books.

Today I ran into a young friend whom I'm tutoring in English who asked what my book was about. I told her it was about a young knight fresh from the Crusades and his lady-love, that Robin Hood was an important character, and that I was pretty sure the mysterious Black Knight was King Richard in disguise. She thought it was hilarious that I was reading a book for little kids. :D I'm hoping to get much reading besides Ivanhoe done in the next few weeks. My little Oxford War and Peace being irretrievably lost, dh ordered me a Like New replacement, due to arrive Valentine's Day. Perfect. :) So those and the Newman and who knows what else by Easter? Until then, stay warm, friends!

Great A, little a, This is pancake day! Toss the ball high Throw the ball low Those that come after May sing Heigh-ho!

Definitely agree. Language isn't math (or etiquette). Of course, I don't mind the "alternative" pronunciation of Houston (or any other city, really). After all, I can't pronounce 'Edinburgh' correctly--the final consonant doesn't seem to exist in American English, and the existence of an 'Edinburg' ( /Ä“dinburg/ ), Texas, doesn't help. Different languages, and even dialects, just have different pronunciations of, and even names for, locations abroad.

Well, I don't like to take sides in the endless prescriptivism/descriptivism wars; but it seems to me that when basically all native speakers use a particular syntax unless specifically trained not to do so, there's a certain quixotic quality to insisting that, nevertheless, the non-intuitive syntax is the correct one. Regarding the city pronunciations: the British seem determined that we Texans are mispronouncing "Houston." /hyū/, cousins, not /hū/. :)

Unlike Latin, personal pronouns in English when disjoint from a sentence (as with labels, or single-word answers) are in the accusative. <points at people in picture> "You. Me. Him." "Who goes there?" "Uh, just me." Also accusative (unless native speakers have it drilled out of them) when the object of a copula. "It resembles me, because it is me."

I think that was Great Girl. :) Obviously staying away from politics in the specific, but I have to say this is the time every four years I'm glad I live in a state nobody bothers to campaign in more than halfheartedly. I haven't seen so much as an ad or sign for the national election. It's like living in a different country. I read it year before last but am enjoying lurking in the conversation!

Kathy, I'm sorry. That's so hard.

Well into Ivanhoe, and getting through Newman's P&P Sermons one at a time. Each one is like a little polished gem; carefully crafted around a single concept; erudite, lucid and convincing. Or, "convicting," as my Baptist friends say. I hope to spend Lent with Newman as my retreat-master. :) Ivanhoe is interesting. I dislike historical fiction where the protagonist just happens to have the mores of a 21st-century American humanist and other characters serve as foils against which he or she exhibits these anachronistic views. But of course Ivanhoe himself is a 19th-century Englishman in the milieu of Robin Hood, with all those enlightened views; and yet I don't mind it at all. It feels like I'm reading a two-hundred-year-old English novel in which the characters are play-acting at Sherwood Forest. Which is surprisingly fun.

Oh, books. Yesterday I finished Frank Norris' San Francisco classic, McTeague. Oddly, while I haven't been able to appreciate Naturalism in Flaubert or Zola, I really liked Norris. A book of awful people behaving awfully, that I couldn't put down. Maybe I just needed something less French. Now, besides Newman, I'm reading Ivanhoe, in another installment of Books I'm a Little Embarrassed Not to Have Read Already.

... and the horrendous nightmares have disappeared as abruptly as they arrived. Yeah! Thanks for the commiseration. And now I'm reading Newman again. Hope your dh got home safely. I read A Canticle for Leibowitz in high school, and recall liking it very much; but somehow I didn't think of it as science fiction. I think I must have a sort of reverse-no-true-Scotsman fallacy going: if I like it, it must not be genre fiction. Great Girl read it more recently and liked it. I recall vividly the main character, living ascetically out in the desert, confessing that on a fast day he had had a go at a lizard, and his confessor sighing. I agree. And now being old enough to have known many people raised in very strict religious communities, I found it a little annoying how one-dimensionally the puritan society was portrayed, with no redeeming elements at all. Communities are more complex than that. Odd you should mention spiders. One of Wee Girl's worst phobias is spiders, and many of her night fears are about them being on her and on her bed. In the closest thing to a psychotic episode she's ever had, she was convinced they were crawling all over her, even though the light was on and she could see there weren't any. Yeah: the terror is hard to take, when you know that nothing you do can make it better and you can only be there with them. I keep meaning to read De rerum. You encourage me to move it nearer to the top of the pile.

Still struggling with sleep deprivation and reading little. Spare a thought for Wee Girl whose night-disturbing anxieties have come back into full flower. At least with dh home there are now two parents to handle the nights. Dh, flush with his success at last in finding a sceince fiction book I liked (Roadside Picnic), convinced me to read The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (better known for Day of the Triffids). It was all right for a while and then collapsed into standard YA post-apocalyptic stuff. I suppose being fifty years old it was probably one of the first such, but still. I've completely lost my copy of War and Peace and Newman is beyond my current intellectual powers so currently reading neither of those but instead Frank Norris' McTeague, which has been in dh's TBR pile since we got married. And now I'm going to have read it first, ha.

Wanting to comment on so many of these posts; but dh just got home and I handled his absence for the last week-plus by collapsing into bed exhausted at the end of each day and watching Columbo and Star Trek on Netflix until I fell asleep. This weekend I hope to resume reading amd posting. Bluegoat, in a nutshell, and I'll expand later, I'm pretty sure Veblen would have seen the "new domesticity" much as he sae the Arts and Crafts movement: as a deliberately wasteful occupation meant primarily to demonstrate wealth and status. Not that I'd agree--after all, I'm complicit in it too, and it's much more complex, as was the A & C movement--but I've seen a fair amount of evidence for that being at least partially convincing.

My thoughts and prayers are with you and your parents, mom22es and kareni.

How annoying. All the French though seems very Google Translate-able; though it's certainly a pain to have to keep a tab open next to you while reading. I've been going slow on Newman myself, for the same reason of temporary single-parenting, but will now accelerate a bit. Interested in your thoughts on Newman's critique of Christianity in an era when obvious devotion and churchgoing was expected as a default for the middle and upper classes. Re: The New Domesticity: last year (or was it the year before?) I read Theory of the Leisure Class; and I think Veblen would have had a very different take on it.

This week I read more of War and Peace, and Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons. Also I delved back into Texas history and read Cabeza de Vaca's Narrative of the Narvaez Expedition. All of us homeschoolers covered Cabeza de Vaca at some point, and many of our kids read the well-done fictional account of the disastrous expedition, Walk the World's Rim, so we recall that he was part of Governor Narvaez' expedition to the coast of Florida that went horribly wrong. Ships badly damaged by a hurricane, they missed their harbor on the Florida coast, decided to explore the interior on foot (according to Cabeza de Vaca, against his advice), lost their ships, continued north along the Gulf Coast in cobbled-together craft, wrecked on a barrier island south of Galveston, and proceeded on foot through the interior of Texas in the northern part of the Rio Grande Valley before striking out west to the Mexican coast and then south until they encountered Spaniards. Drowning, cold, disease, starvation, and hostile Indians reduced the survivors to a handful. The account is a report to King Carlos I, and a tricky business for Cabeza de Vaca it is. He has to explain why a complete disaster actually has some value for the Crown, and why none of it was his fault. The best he has to offer is that he was able to obtain detailed and useful intelligence about the land and its inhabitants; though there isn't much for him to say except that Texas is a barren and sparsely populated land where the perishing locals can barely scrape together enough meager corn, ants' eggs, and prickly pears to stay more or less alive. In the middle of his businesslike account of the local conditions, there is this very, very strange part: a story, attested to by many of the local Indians, of "Mala Cosa," the Evil Thing. I believe this is Texas' first ghost story. ------------------------------ ... These Indians and the ones we left behind told us a very strange tale. From their account it may have occurred fifteen or sixteen years ago. They said there wandered then about the country a man, whom they called Evil Thing, of small stature and with a beard, although they never could see his features clearly, and whenever he would approach their dwellings their hair would stand on end and they began to tremble. In the doorway of the lodge there would then appear a firebrand. That man thereupon came in and took hold of anyone he chose, and with a sharp knife of flint, as broad as a hand and two palms in length, he cut their side, and, thrusting his hand through the gash, took out the entrails, cutting off a piece one palm long, which he threw into the fire. Afterwards he made three cuts in one of the arms, the second one at the place where people are usually bled, and twisted the arm, but reset it soon afterwards. Then he placed his hands on the wounds, and they told us that they closed at once. Many times he appeared among them while they were dancing, sometimes in the dress of a woman and again as a man, and whenever he took a notion to do it he would seize the hut or lodge, take it up into the air and come down with it again with a great crash. They also told us how, many a time, they set food before him, but he never would partake of it, and when they asked him where he came from and where he had his home, he pointed to a rent in the earth and said his house was down below. We laughed very much at those stories, making fun of them, and then, seeing our incredulity they brought to us many of those whom, they said, he had taken, and we saw the scars of his slashes in the places and as they told....

Let's talk about Cedar. All the folks who moved here this year wonder why they have some sort of super-flu bug that lasts for weeks. The HEB has a big display of cough, cold, flu, and allergy medications; vaporizers, cough syrup, headache remedies, antihistamines, lemon tea ... Not that anything works. Shoot me.

Ooooooookayyyy... I wonder what they would have done with The Wings of the Dove.

Read J. R. Ackerley's We Think the World of You. This gets cast as a "gay novel," but its homoeroticism comes across, like the narrator's insane affection for his jailed lover's dog, as a metaphor for British class conflict. Worth reading. Back to Newman and Tolstoy.

Keep in mind that he wrote it as Poet Laureate under Queen Victoria (and dedicated it to Prince Albert!). Faced with an adulterous fictional queen, he praises the real queen's chastity by contrast through his condemnation of the former.

There's absolutely no content problems with Daudet. Very gentle little stories and portraits of the Provence region and its inhabitants. It may be that a 13-year-old would find it dull, but not necessarily.

Read something your mother wouldn't approve of. ;) I can give you the list of books we sold when you graduated from picture books....