Right, I'm definitely reading The Worm in the Bud when I finish the two books I'm on. I notice it starts with a double page "Sin Map of London in Victorian Times."

Also I don't think anyone's mentioned Richardson, who was considered in his day the greatest of English novelists but who has somewhat passed from the scene. Pamela is still read sometimes but Clarissa--which I prefer--not so much, in part because of its length. He was the master of the epistolary novel, an endless source of interest to critics for the opportunities to talk about texts spawning texts in geometric profusion as the plot, quite literally, unfolds.

LOL. In fact when Great Girl was able to read fluently, dh and I went through our library and culled all the Inappropriate Books that she might stumble on. I regret selling Our Lady of the Flowers; Henry Miller, not so much.

Now I feel as if I'd corrupted the morals of the youth of Athens. And lest I make the situation worse, the fact is Cleland is far milder than the books Rousseau was talking about, none of which as far as I know were ever reprinted but are sometimes available in university libraries. I took a class on this subgenre of English and French literature once (our prof had to photocopy the originals; I wonder what the folks at Kinko's thought), and am well-assured that 50 Shades is quite derivative. A literary connection; in Henry James' The Awkward Age, from my list of last year, the coming-of-age heroine is known to have read a French novel of her mother's that came in a plain wrapper: while her mother's social circle applaud the girl's emancipated upbringing, she discovers in the end [spoiler ALERT!] that the old Victorian standards nevertheless hold, and she has rendered herself unmarriageable even among the most "modern" of her mother's set. I'm glad that when I read Jean Genet's Funeral Rites a year or so ago, nobody Googled that. But if you do, I have a whole list of vulgar lit for anybody who's interested. Rabelais, Boccaccio, Bataille... ETA: I just read the Wikipedia article on The Awkward Age. What a subliterate mess. It reads like a composition by a high schooler who had never read James before. More reasons not to depend on the internet.

Whatever it means, since it's in French, one knows the sentiment must be sophisticated, n'est-ce pas?

Great pictures. Poor dd with the stomach bug; what tenacity though.

What, that it's one of what Rousseau called des livres à lire d'une seule main? Some of the lit of the eighteenth century makes Fifty Shades of Yawn look like John Bunyan. What am I saying, some. Which reminds me, still in a Victorian mood, I picked up yesterday an old Pelican edition of Pearsall's The Worm in the Bud. The problem with this place is the booksellers are overflowing with things I want to read, but the beautiful and castle-y countryside keeps me from having enough time with a book.

Congratulations on 52! Other favorites of mine from the 18th century are Mrs Radcliffe and her gothics, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, William Blake, Cleland (Fanny Hill), Rousseau, and Voltaire. Still on David Copperfield, with a little distraction from T. H. White and Grassic Gibbon.

Well, Middle Girl wanted me to read to her this week, so I'm going through Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," which I guess would meet all those requirements. I don't know if you must read it, but apparently I must. Meanwhile finished Ian Macpherson's Wild Harbour: ----------------- My head is never so busy as when I am occupied with monotonous work. As I cut peats or walk on the hill a multitude of scarcely related thoughts voice themselves in my brain, and I, like a half-attentive eavesdropper, hear my own mind rehearse the hundred shifts and stratagems, the alternating successes and failures which now elate and again depress us as if it was another's voice I heard telling a half-fabulous story. And all the while I am alert for signs in the country, deer with heads in the air, storm-clouds in the sky, with an attention which seems closer and readier and more instinctive when half of my mind is occupied than when I watch and listen with each sense trained to alertness. I have found myself dropping flat on my face in the heather, and I had to recall my wits from day-dreaming, and reason and stare before I knew that it was a stag's horn on the skyline which warned me.

Settled on Ian Macpherson's Wild Harbour, sort of a Scottish Robinson Crusoe set in the near future of the 1940s, when a Second World War has broken out and a pacifist couple escapes to live in the countryside near Inverness. It's not great literature but is very engaging and should be a quick read.

Dang! I accidentally rated the thread at four stars. Now after a few votes everyone is going to wonder who gave the thread one star. Stupid bad eyesight. Sorry Robin! Just finished As We Were today and haven't decided what to read next. There's some hilarious literary anecdotes in that book and I can't decide whether to share the one with Tennyson or the one with Henry James. Benson knew everyone who was anyone, or someone he knew did. What a fantastic book. What to read next? Middle Girl won't relinquish my Dickens. ETA: ((((Eliana))))

Because the two books of hers I use--mentioned above--show no sign of deep-seated bigotries? Or are you limiting the argument to specific texts?

Sure, but the weird thing is that it flows from Brutus to Julius Caesar without a sense that we're going from myth to history. My smallest would know that the beginning was made up; but she'd likely conclude that the Roman conquest in the next chapter was likewise made up. It's the lack of signaling that's odd. ETA: On reading more carefully I see Marshall ends with "Some people think it is only a fairy tale." But the beginning of the next chapter inserts Brutus into the historical narrative: "so we must pass on to the time when another great warrior [Julius Caesar] heard of the little lonely island and came to conquer it."

Citation, please? Seriously though, it's a weird way to start any kind of history book. There are plenty of history texts that begin with a national myth as a way of engaging the reader, but before or after the telling there's some sort of explanation of its mythical status. And the little mermaids in this one are kind of twee. On the other hand ... I have Wee Girl reading Marshall's "Scotland's Story" right now, after my explaining that the people and historical events are real, but the anecdotes are stories made up to help you remember who's who. So Culloden and Stirling Bridge are real happenings, but Robert Bruce's spider is to show his determination in the face of defeat, and Prince Charlie's kindly robber friends may not have been as kindly as all that. I have always felt that there's a place for learning cultural history and national mythos in the younger years, and Great Girl (for instance) didn't seem to get to college under the impression that Rome's founders were really suckled by a She-Wolf. But that said, I wouldn't be leaving Wee Girl to read these stories if they required lots of intervention and explanation about other people being "savages" or unenlightened subjects needing a good colonization. The English do take a few hits, but they can put up with it. Other than her Scottish history and Beowulf, though, I haven't been a huge fan of Marshall. I don't like to have to edit or explain as I read.

From current read As We Were: A Victorian Peep-Show, by E. F. Benson: [Mother] was also very daring (for a clergyman's wife) in her open advocacy of George Eliot's novels, in spite of all that was known about her life. She read "The Mill on the Floss" aloud to her children and she thrust "Adam Bede," which had some very shocking passages in it, into the hands of canons' wives and told them not to mind. I think indeed that she must have read "Adam Bede" to us as well, for an acquaintanceship with Mrs. Poyser seems to date from then, and she would certainly have been ready with some adroit answer if any inquisitive creature had asked why Hetty and Arthur Donnithorne should not meet and talk in the wood. And she was equally up to the mark when one of her children publicly demanded to know the difference between a bull and an ox, for she at once said that the bull was the father and the ox the uncle.

Finished Gibbon's Sunset Song and Antoine Saint-Exupéry's Southern Mail, a nice little philosophical novel, and now into E. F. Benson's As We Were, the memoirs of his Victorian boyhood. Full of interesting detail. Now I know about bandoline, and epergnes, and candied angelica. David Copperfield arrived at the library and Middle Girl took it immediately, so it may be a while before I'm back to Dickens. Overheard some American tourists looking for Scottish literature in the bookshop and sold them on Brigadier Gerard, which made the bookseller and them quite happy. Literary street-corner evangelism!

Almost done with Lewis Gibbon's Sunset Song, which is really good and highly recommended. I think I mentioned that it was "Voted Best Scottish Book of All Time By the Public in 2005." (Great Girl: "They must not mean the Scottish public, or it would have been Best book of all time.") It's part of a trilogy called A Scots Quair. I'm eager to request the sequels from the library. Though I swear I'm going to finish David Copperfield. Some day. It was bad weather when we visited Edinburgh yesterday, so after the National Gallery and National Museum, we scurried over to Armchair Books and got some ballast for our suitcases. Dh went for Scottish writers: David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, a 1920 science fiction, sort of, novel, to which Harold Bloom once wrote a sequel; and Ian Macpherson's Wild Harbour, a 1936 postapocalypse set somewhere near Inverness. I got Gillespie, by another Scot, J. MacDougall Hay; T. H. White's Farewell Victoria; and E. F. Benson's Victorian memoir As We Were. Middle Girl found A. A. Milne's The Red House Mystery, and The Phantom of the Opera. And Wee Girl stocked up on Rupert annuals and Enid Blyton. Because you know, she hasn't read all of them yet.

You make a compelling case for trying Welty again. I think I just kept wanting her to be Flannery O'Connor.

I have not. But I think I prefer her stories to her novels (admittedly on the strength of one novel) sufficiently that I will give it a pass. Totally agree with you about plot and prose. And frankly it was hard to get past the not very subtle "rural Mississippians aren't just inbred ignoramuses, they actually prefer inbreeding and ignorance, and further will actively destroy those who try to help them out of their mud-wallow." Welty was from Mississippi: was this her own projection? Did she see herself as the martyred Miss Julia? ... but I find myself not actually caring enough to look into it. This'll teach me to read a book from 1970, really the day before yesterday. On the reading stack now, from the local bookshop: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail/Night Flight (recommended by Middle Girl) Ernest Bramah, Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat Ernest Bramah, The Wallet of Kai Lung J. D. Scott, The End of an Old Song Catherine Carswell, Open the Door Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song Last three are my Scottish authors for a while; the Gibbon was "Voted Best Scottish Book of All Time" according to the cover. Library promises to have David Copperfield in for me shortly.

Thank you for the update. May the Divine Physician look upon him with eyes of mercy.

I read an article, I think in Commonweal magazine, that gave an hour-by-hour comparison of 24 and Ulysses. It was something like, Hour 4: 24: Jack Bauer does this, that and the other, while driving fast and shouting into his cell phone; his wife and daughter do all these other things; his colleagues do more things; the villain does many villainous things. Ulysses: Leopold Bloom buys a kidney for breakfast. Maybe 24 is Ulysses for the modern age.

I was going to read Camille by Dumas fils for June, but failed to pack it. Ah well. I did bring, and read, Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beings, which was every bit as good as Borges fans might expect, with a great many literary beasts making appearances, including critters from Dante's Inferno, and a white weaselly thing from (of course) Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. My favorite was the Celestial Stag, of Chinese myth: ---------- We know absolutely nothing about the appearance of the Celestial Stag (maybe because nobody has ever had a good look at one), but we do know that these tragic animals live underground in mines and desire nothing more than to reach the light of day. They have the power of speech and implore the miners to help them to the surface. At first, a Celestial Stag attempts to bribe the workmen with the promise of revealing hidden veins of silver and gold; when this gambit fails, the beast becomes troublesome and the miners are forced to overpower it and wall it up in one of the mine galleries. It is also rumored that miners outnumbered by the Stags have been tortured to death. Legend has it that if the Celestial Stag finds its way into the open air, it becomes a foul-smelling liquid that can breed death and pestilence. ----------- Finishing up Eudora Welty's novel Losing Battles, which is only okay but was all I had left for our first week when there were no books in English available. But that part of our journey was not unliterary, as I read a great deal of Our Athenian Cousin (thank you, Baldwin Project) to Wee Girl; and dh and Middle Girl read lines from Euripides in the very Theatre at Epidaurus, which made everyone happy with its amazing acoustics, unimpaired by the millennia.

Congratulations to Geezle and to you, justifiably proud Mama!

From David Copperfield, some books from his library: ---------- The natural result of this treatment, continued, I suppose, for some six months or more, was to make me sullen, dull, and dogged. I was not made the less so by my sense of being daily more and more shut out and alienated from my mother. I believe I should have been almost stupefied but for one circumstance. It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time,—they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,—and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It is astonishing to me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favourite characters in them—as I did—and by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones—which I did too. I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of Voyages and Travels—I forget what, now—that were on those shelves; and for days and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees—the perfect realization of Captain Somebody, of the Royal British Navy, in danger of being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price. The Captain never lost dignity, from having his ears boxed with the Latin Grammar. I did; but the Captain was a Captain and a hero, in despite of all the grammars of all the languages in the world, dead or alive.

I tried ... I just can't stand reading books on screens. I need paper, and heft, and turning and crackling, and book smells. Eliana, congratulations! Someday... Jane, that sounds like a great book.