Unfortunately, whatever flaw in my brain's Aesthetic Center makes me unable to enjoy science fiction, romances, or spy thrillers, has also determined that I am not to enjoy mysteries. I swear it's not snobbishness; dh has twice my intelligence and education, and he likes good writing in all those genres.* It's just something wired wrong. (But he doesn't like poetry, so there you go.). . . *Okay, not so much romances.

Shame on the author! Susanna Dickinson is buried only a few miles away from me and I think I can hear her turning over in her grave. If you'd like a children's book about the Alamo that's much more accurate--and engaging--try The Boy in the Alamo. I think every Texas schoolchild of the last fifty years has enjoyed reading it.

Still reading Roderick Random. But I finished planning French, classics, and religion! All of which I am trying this year to make more literature-oriented for Middle Girl; so much of my own reading may be driven by needing to be able to keep along with her. Which reminds me, I did finish, for homeschooling discussion, something far too short to count, but interesting nevertheless: Freud's letter to Einstein on the topic of why human beings resort to violence, and whether war is avoidable. Written right before the Second World War, alas. If I can find a link, I'll add it.

It was very startling to get likes on a post I wrote five years ago! I would add that I Am Not A Lawyer, and nobody should take legal advice off the internet. Now, back to the Zombie Thread....

Some housekeeping: unpacked at last my list of books read on holiday, so now I have an intact list with numbering for May-July: 26. Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beasts. I asked dh what genre he thought this might be, and he said "Borges." 27. Eudora Welty, Losing Battles. Not my favorite Welty, though LostSurprise has convinced me to give her another try. Some day. 28. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song. Very readable and quite a popular book in Scotland; generally recommended for those who like historical novels with strong, convincing female characters and accurate historical detail. Got the rest of the trilogy before we left and must read it soon. 29. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail. As you would expect from St-Ex, brief, philosophical, and joyfully tragic. 30. E. F. Benson, As We Were. Memoirs of the Victorian era from the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose family knew everybody who was anybody. Much more interesting than I had thought it might be. 31. Ian MacPherson, Wild Harbour. Scottish post-apocalyptic fiction from the 1930's, taking place during or possibly after a Second World War; the characters are pacifists hiding in the Scottish countryside, and the reader's information is as delimited as their own. Okay, but eclipsed by the fantasticness of Gillespie. 32. Dickens, David Copperfield. The fun part of reading this with Middle Girl is that she immediately checked out Nicholas Nickleby and the Pickwick Papers--the only other Dickens our little library had--and devoured them. 33. T. H. White, Farewell Victoria. The story of a country groom born in the Victorian era and his life through the social changes of the turn of the century. This is the only T. H. White I've ever read, actually. 34. J. McDougall Hay, Gillespie. A very strange book. I think I've already described it; it's up there with Sunset Song as highly recommended Scottish lit. 35. Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson. This farce was Beerbohm's only novel; about a young American woman so stunningly beautiful that she causes the entire student body of Oxford to commit suicide out of unrequited love. I notice the latest NYRB has an article on Beerbohm. 36. Orkneyinga Saga. It occurred to me that the extensive section on Earl Thorfinn ought to be of interest to Dorothy Dunnett fans who have read King Hereafter and are familiar therefore with the theory that Thorfinn and Macbeth were the same person.

Thanks! We are drilling happily now.

No more than an hour after garbage pickup, a squirrel plummeted to its demise right in front of our driveway. Dh flung it into the trash before the vultures could arrive and spread it over a larger area. We have no covered place to keep the bins, so the squirrel has been pining for the fjords in the 90+ degree heat for a few days now. I have to hold my breath to take out the garbage. Come on, Friday....

Alternating lesson planning with reading: I finished working out what we'll need to cover in Latin and Roman history/culture for the NLE this year, so I read another 50 pages in Roderick Random. It's your classic picaresque novel, with the hero's adventures following one hard on the heels of another with no real connection between them, though characters reappear frequently. There's an interesting section in which a prostitute who nearly traps Random into marrying her tells her story, in a manner designed to elicit sympathy for the unfortunate women in that position; unlike the apparently similar section in Jane's Smollett, though, it's completely Smollett's fabrication. A little more, and then I have to go figure out Middle Girl's non-Roman history for the year.

Does anybody have a link to Latin grammar (preferably paradigm) drills, for occasional review? I used to use the Bolchazy-Carducci drill cd-roms for Artes Latinae, a hundred years ago, but they won't run on our desktop and certainly not on an iPad! ... even if I could find the passwords.

Who eats ice cream now that all the Blue Bell is gone? :(

Robospam reported. Don't click on link.

Little reading of Smollett, as I have spent every spare waking moment planning lessons for our fall semester, which starts the second week of August. Tomorrow begins what the girls and I call "Beta-Testing Week," wherein I try out all the new things (scheduling, curriculum, tweaks) before implementation. Then they're at camp for a week while I smooth the rough places. Must get ducks in a row; no time for self-indulgent mommy reading! Jane, PM on the way.

In this part of the country we'd call it "settin around nekkid." Who knew it was good for your health? Ben Franklin was a famous promoter of the air bath. Local air bathers. http://www.hippiehollow.com Careful clicking on the links at that site....

At State PSIA (an academic competition for Texas private schools, including homeschoolers), the science exam included this question: if you put ice cubes in a glass, then filled the glass to the rim with water, what would happen as the ice melted? The answer was, bizarrely, that since ice is less dense than liquid water, the level would go down. Middle Girl and dh protested her answer (the level would stay the same) being marked as wrong, explaining Archimedes' Principle to the confusion of the folks in charge; so they contacted the author of the test question, who doubled down on the wrong answer. The parents of our team explained and re-explained how buoyancy works, but to no avail. Eventually the contest director conceded that the answer was wrong and Archimedes was right, but too late for Middle Girl's score. :(

A local urologist, who specializes in vasectomies, is Dr. Dick Chopp. An unending source of hilarity in this town. And our mayor for six years was Will Wynn. He never put anything but his name on his campaign posters.

I might be tempted by a re-read. Has anyone ever read the adaptation of Parts I & II in the last volume of the old My Book House? Not the sort of thing you expect someone to write a children's version of.

Shukriyya, good to see you around! You might like Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake, written when many people who knew Blake were still alive, and which is the source for most of the fun things we know about the Blakes. Mrs Blake seems to have been an impressively patient woman. Did your book mention the "air bathing"?

Hello friends! I have been very out of touch up in Ultima Thule where wi-fi is apparently shipped in by herring boat from Norway--so one concludes from the small trickle available in the rental flat, disappearing entirely when there's "weather," which is most of the time. Happily that led to increased reading time, when sight-seeing wasn't occupying us--and by the way you could read outside at 3 in the morning if you had wanted. I finished off my Scottish reading with Orkneyinga Saga, a book foisted on you quite literally at the ferry depot, and which rewards the tourist reader with accounts of viking power politics and alcohol-fueled national crises occurring in the very locations that you, gentle reader, are visiting a thousand years later, with inscribed runes and grave goods still around to remind you these things actually happened. Orkneyinga Saga features Earl Thorfinn and St. Magnus, but I preferred Earl Rognvald (pronounced "Ronald"), nephew of Magnus, and particularly the account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Rognvald takes a few longship-fuls of his viking mates, and while other pious Europeans are slogging south and east on their own dime, the Orcadians finance their pilgrimage by (naturally) viking raids along the way. At one point they run across a dromond, which Earl Rognvald is very excited about, and they decide they'll take the ship with a clear conscience: if it's full of infidels, they're doing a holy work; if it's Christian merchants, they'll let them buy the vikings off in the usual manner; and either way, they'll give a full fiftieth of the loot to the poor. So it's all good. (When they reach the Holy Land, they spend a lot of time getting drunk and annoying the locals; afterward they visit the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople, who, with a keen eye to character, immediately offers them jobs as mercenaries.) Earl Rognvald ends up as St. Rognvald, by the way, on the strength of building St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall and forcing the relocation of his uncle's relics thence. So he's either in heaven or valhalla I suppose. And Jane, I am starting Roderick Random, which I suppose is another Scottish novel, so that's one more on the pile. Though your Smollett sounds so intriguing. Jet lag overwhelms and so I will go on about other vacation books on another day.

... except in Austin. Where we are not thrilled, either, about guns on campus.

Posting from my phone in technologicslly unfavorable conditions so this will be short. Read T. H. White, Farewell Victoria; observations on the social changes from 19th to 20th centuries, through vehicle of the life of a country groom who lives out and reflects on them. Very good. Must read more White. Halfway through 1914 Scottish novel Gillespie, about which more later excrpt to say engaging and a page turner though often turning pages to glossary of Scots in appendix. Nowhere near 52 books at half year point though list is at home so maybe not too far. Och Dhia, as they say in Gillespie, this post took half an hour. Moar in aboot a fourtnicht, I'm gey thrang an cannae be fashed tae deel wi fushionless wi-fi.

I had thought of Belloc, but his Cautionary Tale is missing the "I don't care" aspect of both Dickens and Sendak. I should be more specific: I'm wondering what is the source story Dickens is referring to, and did Sendak get the Pierre concept from that source, or secondhand from Dickens?

Finished David Copperfield. Here's a passage that has been on my mind, in which James Steerforth addresses our narrator: 'Tut, it's nothing, Daisy! nothing!' he replied. 'I told you at the inn in London, I am heavy company for myself, sometimes. I have been a nightmare to myself, just now - must have had one, I think. At odd dull times, nursery tales come up into the memory, unrecognized for what they are. I believe I have been confounding myself with the bad boy who "didn't care", and became food for lions - a grander kind of going to the dogs, I suppose. What old women call the horrors, have been creeping over me from head to foot. I have been afraid of myself.' ---------- So this bad boy who didn't care and was eaten by a lion--wasn't that a book, "Pierre," by Maurice Sendak? Written somewhat later than Dickens' day? What's up with this?

But if it does, just before you swoon into unconsciousness you will glimpse a dim form, possibly of a handsome man whose face is obscured, breaking your fall. You will find out who he is in three hundred or so pages.

Eliana: Genet is pretty darn explicit. But he certainly doesn't want his reader to be comfortable. I deny that my reading is broader than yours; for one thing, you read at about ten times my speed! :)

Well let's be honest here: insofar as "best" is taken as the superlative of "good," it's not at all clear that there is a "best" Radcliffe. Oh, what horrible thing is behind that curtain??!! It's...