Your post just makes me happy. :) Finished 22. The Aunt's Story. Wikipedia tells me Patrick White was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for literature, so shameful of me never to have heard of him. Apparently known for his "florid prose and stream of consciousness technique." Hm, yes. And just in time, the ever-reliable clearance shelf yielded a collection of Hilaire Belloc's essays, and Vainglory by Ronald Firbank, of whom I had not before heard and which looks very promising.

Can't you just use your time machine to research for me? I'm pretty sure I read that in the southern hemisphere the time stream rotates backward. ETA: Which actually would explain a lot of this book...

Rosie, Interesting that the adjectives are outdated. I wonder if they were still in use when the book was written, or if the author was using them to set the time? The part of the book where they turn up is right before the Great War--the Australian participation in which has just been in the news of course--and The Aunt's Story was published in 1948. Any thoughts? Jane, Excellent choice.

This is my pocket poem of the moment, because I had to hunt it up for a friend. It's recited at the end of the St. Anthony chaplet, a long devotion that I think must be for when you've misplaced something fairly major like your final draft of The Great American Novel or a nuclear submarine. It's in Very Late Latin and is clearly meant to be sung; I couldn't find a tune for it, but "Buffalo Gals" turned out to fit the meter and the sentiment pretty well, and now I can't get it out of my head. ------------ Si quaeris miracula Mors error calamitas Daemon lepra fugiunt Aegri surgunt sani. (Ant:) Cedunt mare vincula Membra resque perditas Petunt et accipiunt Iuvenes et cani. Pereunt pericula Cessat et necessitas Narrent hi qui sentiunt Dicant Paduani. (Ant:) Cedunt mare vincula (etc.) -------- My very loose translation: If you're looking for miracles: death, disastrous mistakes, various calamities, demons, even leprosy all run away from St. Anthony. And the sick rise to health! Refrain: The sea and your chains give way! Lost things, including limbs, restored! Youngsters and graybeards ask, and receive! Perils perish, the worst wants go away--those in the know will tell you. So say all Paduans! [drinking glasses presumably hoisted here]

I am not enjoying Patrick White so much as I had hoped. ------------------ "You would not know," said the General. "It takes a lifetime to unravel the history of such impostors. And you have arrived by the morning train." She began to feel this without the telling. But it was something she had suspected all her life. Now she knew. She walked with her hat in her hands, the big straw with the unfortunate sallow ribbons, she walked to where her mother sat, saying in her small, horn, interminable voice: Here is Theodora, we were discussing whether, but of course Theodora would not know, Theodora has just arrived. "It is often a virtue," the General said quickly. ------------ Now Theodora, our protagonist, did not actually walk to where her mother was sitting. Her mother died in the first section of the book, freeing Theodora to leave the Australian countryside, which is why she's now in a French pension talking to a Russian general. In fact, Theodora didn't walk anywhere in this scene; she's (probably) still sitting in the dining room listening to the General. Whether she's actually got a hat with her is unclear. White likes to do this sort of thing rather a lot, sometimes for a few pages, often to the great confusion of this reader who is trying to follow along between lessons and with frequent interruptions, and I find myself perpetually unsure of where and when Theodora is doing whatever she's doing, or possibly not actually doing, and bewildered. And I'm not sure this book is good enough to justify the amount of sustained attention it's asking of me. On the other hand, I'm learning lots of Australian. Jackeroo, sawny, slommacky, brumbies!

This week I finished St. Francis de Sales' classic, Introduction to the Devout Life. The modern translation by John K. Ryan captures Francis' conversational approach nicely; the spiritual advice is perennially relevant (if it's your sort of thing); and the steady flow of anecdotes and analogies drawn from questionable natural history keeps it all colorful and interesting. "But when a test comes, we see how different it is. Just as in the hot summer passing showers send down great drops that fall on the earth but do not sink into it and serve only to produce mushrooms, so also these tender tears fall on a vicious heart but do not penetrate inside and are completely useless to it.... The good feelings they experience are no better than spiritual mushrooms." Now to finish The Aunt's Story. And then we're on to Dante?

Just arrived in the mail, fresh off the presses: Umberto Eco's 1977 classic How to Write a Thesis, now translated into English. Great Girl is reaching that point, and dh is competent (unlike me) to give her relevant advice in advisor selection, methodology, etc., so I offered her Eco. She looked at the one-star review that said, "The book contains little salient information or procedures to formally construct, compose, write, & edit a thesis. I learned more about Italian philosophy and socialist politics then I did about writing," and said, "Sold!" So here it is, smelling deliciously of printer's ink, and since she's off taking an evening exam, I think I will browse in it when little people are in bed.

Besides Amazon... Rainbow Resource Bolchazy-Carducci bookfinder.com Home Science Tools TOPS Science website AOPS website Key Curriculum Press (now defunct) Angelus Press

A book in the second person that all my girls have enjoyed is Three Stories You Can read to Your Cat. Their favorite is "The Yummy Bug."

All that poaching, steaming, and grilling in last week's thread was making me feel like y'all live in a different country. Fish is cooked by dipping it in beer batter and deep frying it. Sonnets: I've been reading a lot of those this month, and I'll post one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's later, but here's one Middle Girl wrote a few weeks ago. One drop whirls down from a clouded sky which lowers, Gray clouds ready to open, heavy with rain; More drops rattle on my window pane, Pattering on my roof, a light spring shower, Quickly increasing with the approach of night. Blinding sheets of water foam and crash, White streaks the horizon; its menacing flash Followed by roar and rumble; the fading light And evening stillness broken by the loud Thunder as it crashes; and the pouring Rain, endless, tumbling, swiftly roaring Down to flooded earth from flooded cloud. Parting clouds reveal a bright blue sky; The earth is soaking now--will soon be dry. This week reading St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life (France, 1609); Patrick White, The Aunt's Story (Australia, 1948); and poems of William Morris (England, 1858). So a nice variety of time, place, and genre right now.

That's what I recall the cost being. That was about a sixth of a semester's tuition. You know, for all that I love this city and am happy to have grown up here, the lack of museums is a flaw I've always felt. It's a long, long drive to Houston or Dallas. Anytime I travel anywhere, the main thing I want to do is visit the museums.

Tom Phillips! I got his Inferno back in college, when it was something of an investment. The artwork was much more interesting than the translation if I recall. It's floating around here somewhere.... However I think I'll try Dorothy Sayers for the challenge. There was a charming little Penguin paperback on the Next-Stop-the-Dumpster shelf for $.50, original price 2/6. It was saying, "I'm sixty-five years old! Don't let me be shredded!" Listening to importunate books is what makes things so cluttered around here.

A quick look through older threads didn't turn this up, but forgive me if this got posted and I just missed it. From April 1, The Paris Review of Books for Young Readers. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/01/the-paris-review-for-young-readers/ It's all great, but my favorite is Goofus and Gallant Read Poetry. http://www.theparisreview.org/goofus-and-gallant ETA: Or perhaps the Bret Easton Ellis lunchroom scene. Ha! I'm only sorry they didn't really have a Where's Wodehouse? puzzle. Or "Richard Scarry: The Lost Years."

Yes, there's a certain Poe-esque quality to some of her work, and not always in a good way, isn't there? Though it was her brother's sonnet sequence which I read a few weeks ago that was such slow going. Sorry, my post was confusing.

Robin will have to decide if this constitutes cheating but my huge thick collection of Pre-Raphaelite poets is divided conveniently by author into respectably book-length sections; and so I'm counting each section as a book. Because reading 100 sonnets by D. G. Rossetti took as long as a normal book. For me. Thus 20. Poems of Christina Georgina Rossetti. Here we go: ------------ AMOR MUNDI “Oh where are you going with your love-locks flowing On the west wind blowing along this valley track?†“The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye, We shall escape the uphill by never turning back.†So they two went together in glowing August weather, The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right; And dear she was to dote on, her swift feet seemed to float on The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight. “Oh what is that in heaven where gray cloud-flakes are seven, Where blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt?†“Oh that’s a meteor sent us, a message dumb, portentous, An undeciphered solemn signal of help or hurt.†“Oh what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly, Their scent comes rich and sickly?â€â€”“A scaled and hooded worm.†“Oh what’s that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow?†“Oh that’s a thin dead body which waits the eternal term.†“Turn again, O my sweetest,—turn again, false and fleetest: This beaten way thou beatest I fear is hell’s own track.†“Nay, too steep for hill-mounting; nay, too late for cost-counting: This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.â€

Not-boring Australian history!

But ... but Ned Kelly!

I'm with Stacia and other non-fans of Lewis. Not a fan of Tolkien or G. K. Chesterton either, which apparently constitutes some sort of quasi-heresy in certain circles. Finished my latest Dobie, and planning to make some more serious progress on De Sales. And starting an old Penguin I picked up in the desert, The Aunt's Story by Patrick White, which I think is my first foray into Australian lit. Rosie, any thoughts on White?

Great photo Stacia! Halcyon, may you find relief. I'm sorry for what you're going through. From J. Frank Dobie, Rattlesnakes: -------------- I may revert to my raising and kill the next rattlesnake I meet, but I knew one mighty good man who would not kill a rattlesnake under any condition. That was the noted hunter Ben V. Lilly. One cold, damp night while he was out on the trail of a bear in the Louisiana bottoms, he took refuge in a hollow cypress log and slept snug. About daylight he crawled out and made a fire right at the hollow. He roasted an ear of dry corn, and while he was eating it an immense rattlesnake, thawed out by the fire, ponderously crawled from where Lilly had spent the night. Ben Lilly looked at him and said: "Brother, you didn't bother me last night. I went into your house and you let me be. I won't bother you now, and I promise you I won't ever bother any of your folks." --------------- Dobie has an entire book on the legendary Ben Lilly, which is in my tbr mountain.

Ironically, the next day we went to White Sands, which featured long-eared, long-legged, adorable jackrabbits. I will take the jackrabbits any day. Mumto2, we have plenty of rat snakes out here, too. They don't bother me, because they're beneficial and rather timid, but they are awfully big. A three-footer crawled out of our storm drain just this evening and Great Girl had to prompt him back with a broom handle, because he was stretched out in the middle of the street, fixing to get himself run over. A mockingbird nesting in our elm was seriously freaking out and flying at the snake, which ignored him completely. It was pretty amusing watching this tiny ball of feathered fury going berserk on a great big oblivious reptile. Really I don't mind snakes if they have the courtesy to not be venomous. It's just there are so dang many venomous snakes around.

Loesje and TeacherZee, I hope you find alleviation for the headaches. :( Don't all our threads come back somehow to Poe's Pym? I meant to give an excerpt from The Golden Bowl, which I finished a few weeks ago, with a Pym reference: ------------------ The Prince's notion of a recompense to women—similar in this to his notion of an appeal—was more or less to make love to them. Now he hadn't, as he believed, made love the least little bit to Mrs. Assingham—nor did he think she had for a moment supposed it. He liked in these days, to mark them off, the women to whom he hadn't made love: it represented— and that was what pleased him in it—a different stage of existence from the time at which he liked to mark off the women to whom he had. Neither, with all this, had Mrs. Assingham herself been either aggressive or resentful. On what occasion, ever, had she appeared to find him wanting? These things, the motives of such people, were obscure—a little alarmingly so; they contributed to that element of the impenetrable which alone slightly qualified his sense of his good fortune. He remembered to have read, as a boy, a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospective wife's countryman-which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans could have: the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole—or was it the South?—than anyone had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known curtains but as purple even to blackness—but as producing where they hung a darkness intended and ominous. When they were so disposed as to shelter surprises the surprises were apt to be shocks.

While internet-deprived this week I finished 17. Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana and 18. Henry James, The Europeans. And further progress through St. Francis de Sales. External adventures dictated my next choice. When out hiking one morning, my desert-dwelling relative decided we would leave the boring trail and go straight up to a rocky outcropping. As we picked our way through the ocotillo and prickly pear, I noticed Wee Girl in front of me had just passed or stepped over a flattish gray patch. I thought, Huh, how oddly round OHMYGOD RATTLESNAKE!!!!!!1111!!!! And then part of my brain started saying quickly, definitely rattler, classic triangular head and rattles, only about a foot long uncoiled, not rattling and head down so still sluggish from the chilly night, that's why it didn't protest Wee Girl being so close And another part of my brain was saying !!!!!!!!!!!11111111!!!!!!!!! RATTLESNAKE !!!!!!!!! and running in tight little circles inside my skull. Now and then I still get a clear mental image of the critter and Wee Girl's chubby little legs right by it, in easy striking distance, and then I don't feel so good. So in honor of this week's adventures, I've started J. Frank Dobie's Rattlesnakes, a collection of Southwestern rattler lore and stories. If I were a real self-respecting Texan, that snake would be six feet long and a Diamondback or a Mohave Green, rearing up with a fifteen-ring rattle giving warning. But honestly it was just a sleepy little prairie rattler. Still. Edited for seasonal haiku: Gray leathery coils Spring dawn warms cold reptile blood-- Desert citizen.

Welcome Angela and Polly! Jane, I love your posts about The Boy; they give me encouragement in thinking Great Girl will someday graduate to doing what she loves. Posting & liking is difficult as I am in the Chihuahuan Desert with no wifi anywhere ... Not so much as a Starbucks in view so far ... And pages take minutes to load. And I am typing on my phone. Finished Greene, still reading de Sales. Stacia, sympathies on your reading drought; myself stuck in a re-reading rut right now. But Our Man in Havana, the story of a British expatriate vacuum salesman and his teen daughter caught up in an espionage scenario that he just can't take seriously, was again a fun read. An excerpt: ---------- They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there. It was time, Wormold thought, to pack up and go and leave the ruins of Havana. -------- ETA: Thought that would never post! Starting (more) James: The Europeans.

I'd thought the other thread was the new thread! I'm just going to re-post my list of recent and current reads here. Pretend you haven't seen this before. -------------- 11. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 12. J. Frank Dobie, Coronado's Children 13. Henry James, The Golden Bowl 14. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, The Letter Killers Club (thank you Jane! Dh has it on his tbr stack now) 15. Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 16. Conrad, Lord Jim Currently reading: A dear pious older lady of our community lent me a devotional book that I must finish skimming for duty's sake but am not really enjoying. A review on the back cover calls it "a modern-day Introduction to the Devout Life." Which only made me want to re-read the actual Introduction, which is vastly superior. So St. Francis de Sales is my current Easter reading. And also Our Man in Havana, because Graham Greene. --------------- Added: One thing that makes Francis de Sales such good reading is that, like any good public speaker (he had quite a reputation for oratory), he always went straight for the vivid example or anecdote. And all of his are medieval. Confessed sin is like a poisonous scorpion reduced to oil and used as a salve to cure scorpion stings. People who refrain from sinning reluctantly are like men ordered by their doctors to abstain from melons; always longing for what they know will kill them. It really puts spiritual progress in a new light to think of it as leaving behind forbidden melons and advancing to puree of scorpion. My favorite bit of Salesian advice: if you have trouble with humility, cast your mind to some moment when you committed a grotesque social faux pas. That should do it.

Good morning, friends! What a lot of catching up to do! A quick list of books read while taking a break from overindulgence in chicken, cheese, and chocolate: 11. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 12. J. Frank Dobie, Coronado's Children 13. Henry James, The Golden Bowl 14. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, The Letter Killers Club (thank you Jane! Dh has it on his tbr stack now) 15. Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 16. Conrad, Lord Jim Currently reading: A dear pious older lady of our community lent me a devotional book that I must finish skimming for duty's sake but am not really enjoying. A review on the back cover calls it "a modern-day Introduction to the Devout Life." Which only made me want to re-read the actual Introduction, which is vastly superior. So St. Francis de Sales is my current Easter reading. And also Our Man in Havana, because Graham Greene.