I would vote "sad" on that one.

On the last day of Sailing Camp, when I went to pick her up, the counselors were falling over themselves to tell me what a great kid Middle girl was. Turns out there was a younger boy who was kind of annoying, and the other kids all decided as a group to not like him: when they filled out the last-day questionnaire, for "What did you like least about camp" most of them wrote his name; and nobody volunteered to partner with him. So the boy reacted by announcing that, whoever was his sailing partner for the last day, he was going to deliberately capsize the boat. So Middle Girl, recognizing this kind of behavior, volunteered to be his partner. When he capsized their boat (twice), she just righted it without getting angry. So he decided he liked her and stopped acting out, and they had a good afternoon of sailing lessons. I sure hope she mentioned she was homeschooled....

idnib, so sorry you've had such a difficult time! Virtual hugs. :)

Jane, hope the Boy feels better soon! As I recall you were the one who sold me on getting The String in the Harp for Middle Girl, who loved it. Sounds like DFW may be the luxury suite of airports! :D

Still reading the same things for now: O. Henry and volume 1 of A History of Private Life. Enjoying the return of Great Girl, who got to experience the collegiate rite of passage of spending the night in an airport. Apparently these days they give you a bottle of water and a granola bar and point you at the stack of cots. I'll see what she's reading this week if she wakes up.

Agreeing with the above, Julia; safe space right here. I'm so sorry about what you're going through. Started and finished my 39th book for the year today, Charles Dickens, by Charles Haines; from the "Immortals of Literature" series. The various "Immortals" series are all reliably good biographies for a roughly middle school age readership. Good so far, at least; there are too many of them for me really to judge: http://www.valerieslivinglibrary.com/immortals.htm. Though it struck me as odd, reading it, that it seemed to be written for people who were unlikely to have read enough Dickens to find it very interesting. Middle Girl has read a fair amount of Dickens, and found the book factually interesting but a little beneath her in its level. And in fact the parts I found most interesting were the multitudes of celebrities Dickens knew well or were acquainted with, but who could hardly interest a juvenile audience; Haines refers to Johnson and Boswell, Thackeray, Whittier, and others with little or no explanation (though, oddly, he spends a few sentences telling the young reader who Dickens' houseguest, Hans Christian Andersen, is). Back to O. Henry and A History of Private Life.

Desiree! Beautiful. Do you ever put in the accent mark? Sorry you had a hard summer. Let's hope for a better fall. Switched for the moment to Charles Dickens, a YA biography by Charles Haines. Middle Girl found it interesting and a quick read, so here's to getting it finished before I go to bed. This will be the first YA book I've listed, I think.

Raised United Methodist; my family didn't believe in God but did believe in good hymn-singing and potluck suppers. Which I don't mean flippantly; there was real concern for community in the churches we attended and that was a valuable thing. As a teenager a close friend interested me in Christianity at a deeper, more personal level. She and her family were and are the genuine article: living witnesses to beauty and Truth. But her church was Charismatic Protestant and I found the services freakish and horrifying (no offense meant to Charismatics; this was the '80s; later I attended masses that were just as freakish and horrifying). I began reading, ran into Cardinal Newman's Development of Doctrine, and was completely convinced. The week I turned 18 I showed up for RCIA and signed on. Unfortunately the Catholic Church I joined didn't seem at all to be the Church Newman described, and after many unhappy years, my Charismatic childhood friend, also unhappy, decided to become Orthodox, a faith which I found very attractive, but which on closer examination I didn't find to be an improvement of my situation. But by the time I decided against Orthodoxy (as did my friend, for different reasons), I had found Traditional Catholicism, and was at home at last.

Picked a book for the week. To accompany my non-portable volume of A History of Private Life (now on Late Antiquity), I'm reading Selected Stories by local celebrity O. Henry, aka William Sydney Porter. Henry is not deep but he is clever, getting away with such frothy stuff as "Sometimes Katy would be asleep; sometimes, waiting up, ready to melt in the crucible of her ire a little more gold plating from the wrought steel chains of matrimony." This is technically a chunkster but shouldn't really take that long.

Bwahahaha.... no.

Au Rebours is buried somewhere on my To Read shelf, so let me know if you pick it up and I'll dig it out.

Name, eh? I could do Vathek; I, Claudius; O! Pioneers; Les Liasons Dangeureuses; Eclogues; Three Lives. Unfortunately none of those are in my to-read-again-soon pile, and I just finished Three Lives, by Edith Stein. So this three-part collection of novellas was supposedly inspired by this portrait-- http://www.wikiart.org/en/paul-cezanne/portrait-of-madame-cezanne-1881 --though I can't fathom what it has to do with any of them--and is written in a modernist style that, to be frank, wears very thin very quickly, particularly in the central story, "Melanctha," which could easily have had thirty pages cut with no damage to the story. Stein's deliberately repetitive and naively simple style becomes quickly tedious, though to be fair she seems to be trying to convey the tedium of her subjects' lives. (The repetition was also inconvenient when I lost my place; it was very difficult to figure out what I'd read already.) An excerpt from the best of the three stories, "The Gentle Lena": ------------ Old Mr. Kreder kept on saying to him, he did not see how Herman could think now, it could be any different. When you make a bargain you just got to stick right to it, that was the only way old Mr. Kreder could ever see it, and saying you would get married to a girl and she got everything all ready, that was a bargain just like one you make in business and Herman he had made it, and now Herman he would just have to do it, old Mr. Kreder didn’t see there was any other way a good boy like his Herman had, to do it. And then too that Lena Mainz was such a nice girl and Herman hadn’t ought to really give his father so much trouble and make him pay out all that money, to come all the way to New York just to find him, and they both lose all that time from their working, when all Herman had to do was just to stand up, for an hour, and then he would be all right married, and it would be all over for him, and then everything at home would never be any different to him. ------------ I had a bit of a personal soft spot for this last story, as Lena's life is quite like that of my German maiden great-aunt's, who was also from Mainz. But it's not enough to make me re-read Three Lives, except possibly "The Gentle Lena." Still reading in A History of Private Life. While it's not a scholarly work, the writers of each section assume the reader is already quite familiar with the history involved, including relevant literature, philosophy, art, etc. I notice that the set is almost untouched except for the first thirty pages of the first volume, which are heavily read and falling out; I think this sat on our public library's shelf looking more accessible than it is for quite a while. So I'm frequently having to look up references (uh, when exactly was the Antonine era?). But it's paying off. Dh has been re-watching the HBO series "Rome" in the evenings, and I get to look up from my book and kibitz. No! That prostitute would have been wearing a brassiere! .. But that makes no sense, Verenus would just make sure everyone knew his wife had thought he was dead and adopted the child, and the whole adultery subplot would go away! ... No no, a young woman of her station wouldn't be praying at a private shrine in her bedroom! Dh is putting up with it admirably. What to read next. I'm torn between what I want to read, and what I ought to be reading for Middle Girl's academic year. (Aeneid again and a bio of Charles Dickens. Yawn.)

Pregnancy was the only time I could read in a car without nausea, as those were the only times in my life my blood pressure went up to normal levels.

By not looking closely enough at peanut-butter-and-jelly crusts abandoned by children before snarfing them down.

My mental image of you just changed completely.

Aha! Thank you. And I was wrong; I thought this was about that play of Christie's that's gone on for sixty-odd years.

I think I might know what this conversation is about, but you can't highlight on an iPad, so maybe not. But doesn't Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone...?

Oooo, cute baby pictures always improve even the best of threads. I settled on getting started at last on the History of Private Life series. I'm well into volume 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium. Not a scholarly work, and occasionally frustrating in the editorial assertions with no obvious support; but very readable and engaging. Unfortunately also quite hefty, with each hardcover volume from 600 to 700 pages of good quality (and heavy) paper. So for the sake of portability I'm also reading Three Lives by Gertrude Stein. More on that as I get through it. It's an odd book. ETA: Since Robin linked to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I checked and dh is cited in it ten times. Ooh, fame! Not in the article on Analogy however.

Thyme. It tastes like mold.

Yes! I have half a dozen books here that I. Must. Read. Next. I've even gotten a few pages into each, and they all look so good! One of them is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, blame for which I likewise lay at the feet of Robin's literary mafia.

I know what you mean. As I've grown older, I've started to think Goneril and Regan had some awfully good points.

Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood at that time. But it seemed pretty clearly going into the same heavyhanded Social Critique territory that I've read so much of. I didn't feel like reading a French Upton Sinclair. ETA: Oh, where, not why. Very near the beginning. So if it gets better, by all means keep going!

I hope you make it further in Germinal than I did! It may have been my only abandoned book last year.

I finished 37. Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random. I found myself comparing it to Tom Jones throughout. I was especially interested in how flawed the first-person narrator is, and not in ways as forgiveably charming as Jones; and in how often Smollett gives voice, through extended narratives, to society's disempowered, particularly women, who are victimized by what they and Random consider "bad fortune" but which Smollett shows as structural injustices and corruption. There's a none-too-subtle continuing undercurrent of criticism of English society, with Random and his servant as (Scottish) outsiders who, gifted with superior wit and education, eventually triumph over the misfortunes inflicted on them in their travels.

Is that even possible? :D I envy your trip!