First book of the year finished last night! It would be more impressive if I hadn't started it two weeks ago. But anyway. 1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species I had expected that, given the importance of his visit to the Galapagos to his theory of natural selection and descent with modification, that there would be much discussion of the islands' species. But though Darwin provides copious examples from organisms in nature and from domestic species throughout the book, only in one brief passage does he mention the Galapagos. But he frequently mentions the short-faced tumbler pigeon, a bird popular among Victorian pigeon fanciers. Take a look at this creature: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbler_pigeons#/image/File:Berlin_short_faced_tumbler.jpg And check out the tumbling. I didn't know birds could do this. I did appreciate how thick on the ground Darwin's examples are. My biggest complaint with last year's read of Theory of the Leisure Class was Veblen's lack of examples, making it difficult to grasp his theories about societies and cultures. Darwin on other hand is right there with ants, orchids, and elephants illustrating his observations, conclusions, and speculation. The Origin of Species does leave you wishing for a time machine so you could go tell him about chromosomes and continental drift. But he makes some pretty good guesses about "inherited tendencies" and geographic distribution, considering. I had also started Andrei Platonov's Soviet-era novel The Foundation Pit before Christmas, but I think I left it at my in-laws'. Maybe I'll finish off the next Brigadier Gerard collection instead. If I were a better person I would jump into Eliana's Ulysses read; but the stars are not yet aligned. Lady Florida--I loved The Way We Live Now. If you enjoy novels about people behaving scandalously, you might like Bel-Ami, if you haven't read it already. Someone is going to like that novel besides me.

I will have to look it up. I've never heard any of her music. Thanks!

For June, can we choose Dumas fils rather than Dumas père? I've had Camille on standby for a while.

This is my delayed summary of my 2014 challenges. With Robin's indulgence and absolution, I like to group mine as Violet Crown's Post-Hoc Challenges. 500+ pages Chunkster Challenge: St Hildegard de Bingen, Scivias Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy Boccaccio, The Decameron Dmitri Merejkowski, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson The Oxford Book of Ghost Stories I have more long books in my TBR pile, which may be counted by volume so as to keep up my spirits. Ye Banks and Braes Scottish Writer Challenge: Nancy Brysson Morison, The Gowk Storm Christopher Rush, Last Lesson of the Afternoon R. L. Stevenson, The Merry Men and Other Stories John Buchan, The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn and Other Stories John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy Robin Jenkins, The Cone-Gatherers James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson Conan Doyle, The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard I was pleased to discover Canongate Press, the Edinburgh publishing house that tries to keep Scottish literature in print. Dh is still reading and enjoying Canongate's long and increasingly bizarre cult novel Lanark. Remember the Ladies Female Writer Challenge: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, Or the Royal Slave Colette, Music-Hall Sidelights Colette, Gigi Colette, Claudine at School Nancy Brysson Morison, The Gowk Storm Katherine Mansfield, in a German Pension George Eliot, Silas Marner Colette, The Innocent Libertine Mary Shelley, The Last Man Eleven out of 59 is almost certainly a record for me. Plague Challenge: Mary Shelley, The Last Man Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year Boccaccio, The Decameron I had more plague books planned; but my meta-self rebelled at my primary self's setting reading requirements for her. This is why I should stick to post-hoc challenges. Love Me Some James Challenge: Henry James, The Awkward Age Henry James, The Bostonians Henry James, Washington Square New Year's resolution: more James!

I will definitely tell her about Hogmanay. We do often have a dark-haired visitor after midnight; but it's always Wee Girl herself.

Re: Dark literature. I enjoy a well-written book whether the plot and subject matter are dark or light. I don't get caught up into fiction, so death and misery don't cause negative emotions in me; though writing that attempts to be emotionally manipulative does cause in me the negative emotion of annoyance. (Real horrors are difficult for me to read, though; it was all I could do to get through Solzhenitsyn's first volume of The Gulag Archipelago.) Re: Fish. Fresh catfish from the US of A for me. Environmentally friendly, inexpensive, tastily fried in beer batter, and pretty darn clean for a bottom feeder.

Update. All things pass, and Wee Girl has I think worked through her grief for Miss K. She was able to express a lot of her sadness--and thank you all for the helpful suggestions!-- and ultimately I think it was the passage of time, and the arrival of Christmas and of her adored biggest sister, that healed. She is back to being dry at night as of this week, has stopped needing a parent with her when she wakes up at night, and is in general not sad and subdued all the time. She also asked last week if she could be in our church choir, and our children's choir director (who knew Miss K. and Wee Girl both) has encouraged her to start in January. Her therapist noted that she hasn't progressed in her speech since the death (though she has recovered from the regress), but I expect she will now resume making some progress.

Elynt, These are very interesting questions, but I suspect this isn't the right place to be asking them. Most of your questions seem to need responses from speech therapists, or even just data about pediatric speech pathologies that none of us have special access to, any more than you do. For the most part, our experiences are individual, with our own children; we can't formulate the kind of general responses you seem to need. Good luck with your research.

Happy birthday, NoseInaBook! I liked Wuthering Heights. What can I say.

"Here, throw up in my hand." Middle Girl: "We can't come, John and me are tying up up James." Me: "John and I are tying up James."

I am so sorry for your family's loss, mumto2. The shock of losing someone important in your life to a sudden death is especcially grievous.

Christmas books! I do the book gifting (because I know what everyone wants!) so there were none for me. Middle Girl is at that age when they devour books at lightning speed and beg for more, so she really cleaned up. Dh: Wilkie Collins: A Rogue's Life; The Haunted Hotel Nabokov: The Luzhin Defense Great Girl: Maria Montessori: The Montessori Method; Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook Middle Girl: J. Henri Fabre: The Insect World Paul Gallico: The Abandoned Leon Garfield: The Complete Bostock and Harris Ottfried Preussler: Krabat & the Sorcerer's Mill James Cloyd Bowman: Pecos Bill, The Greatest Cowboy of All Time Gerald Durrell: Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons T. S. Eliot: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats Wee Girl: Paddington Marches On Paddington Takes the Air Paddington Abroad Paddington Goes to Town

I sometimes have the urge in December to reply to "Merry Christmas" with a confused look and "Um ... Joy of Advent?" But I don't because my religion specifically teaches Don't Be a Jerk Especially to People Just Trying to Get Through the Day Like Everyone Else. I'm pretty sure that was one of the Anathemas of the Council of Trent. So I go for smiling pleasantly and repeating back whatever greeting I just got.

Well you see there's the difference. My misspent youth was frittered away on network tv and Atari. No Christmas crackers on Hogan's Heroes.

Jane, don't we also have The Good Soldier Å vejk planned? I think one of my Challenges for 2015 will have to be the I'll-Have-What-She's-Having Jane Challenge.

It was only a few years ago I realized what Christmas crackers were. I thought it must be some very boring holiday food. Yep, skip the crackers, pass the tamales please.... Last night I finished 59. Henry James, The Awkward Age. Not my favorite James read; my unfamiliarity with the social conventions at the heart of the plot made it more difficult than usual to follow the periphrastic Jamesian conversations, and I have to confess that there were some fair stretches where I had no idea what the characters were talking about. This was one of a collection of brand-new (as in, bookmark ribbons still tucked into the unopened pages) Everyman Henry James novels I picked up at the library discard store. I don't get how our library purchasing and distribution system works. They were recently bought for not-cheap, and promptly discarded unread. But, good for me, I guess. An excerpt from The Awkward Age. Aggie and Nanda are about eighteen: Aggie has been reared in an old-fashioned, protected way, and her friend Nanda with a more open and modern upbringing. Both are entering the London "marriage market." ------------------- As she passed into the house by the nearest of the long windows that stood open Mr. Longdon placed himself beside her little charge [Aggie], whom he treated, for the next ten minutes, with an exquisite courtesy. A person who knew him well would, if present at the scene, have found occasion in it to be freshly aware that he was in his quiet way master of two distinct kinds of urbanity, the kind that added to distance and the kind that diminished it. Such an analyst would furthermore have noted, in respect to the aunt and the niece, of which kind each had the benefit, and might even have gone so far as to detect in him some absolute betrayal of the impression produced on him by his actual companion, some irradiation of his certitude that, from the point of view under which she had been formed, she was a remarkable, a rare success. Since to create a particular little rounded and tinted innocence had been aimed at, the fruit had been grown to the perfection of a peach on a sheltered wall, and this quality of the object resulting from a process might well make him feel himself in contact with something wholly new. Little Aggie differed from any young person he had ever met in that she had been deliberately prepared for consumption and in that furthermore the gentleness of her spirit had immensely helped the preparation. Nanda, beside her, was a Northern savage, and the reason was partly that the elements of that young lady's nature were already, were publicly, were almost indecorously active. They were practically there for good or for ill; experience was still to come and what they might work out to still a mystery; but the sum would get itself done with the figures now on the slate. On little Aggie's slate the figures were yet to be written; which sufficiently accounted for the difference of the two surfaces. Both the girls struck him as lambs with the great shambles of life in their future; but while one, with its neck in a pink ribbon, had no consciousness but that of being fed from the hand with the small sweet biscuit of unobjectionable knowledge, the other struggled with instincts and forebodings, with the suspicion of its doom and the far-borne scent, in the flowery fields, of blood.

Miquon Key To Old math competition materials LLATL (the old version with the awful comb binding) Artes Latinae Hillyer world history Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Still using them, except the old math competition papers (thank you AoPS!).

Mom-ninja: my sympathies! Stomach bugs for little people are horrible.

Yes we do!

This. Even non-handy I was able to do this. Find the studs, put up a board. Easy and cheap.

Best and worst: There were some, like Boswell's Life of Johnson, that I did love and the reading of which will have a more lasting effect on me than most of the other books I read; some, like The Theory of the Leisure Class, that I think are terribly important but not necessary to read more than judicious selections from. But I will limit this to well-written books that I think my friends would enjoy, but which do not show up on anyone's 500 Best Books Ever list. Books that I wish I had extra copies of, so I could press them into people's hands and say, Try this! 57. J. Frank Dobie, Cow People 32. Nancy Brysson Morison, The Gowk Storm 28. John Buchan, The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn and Other Stories 21. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty 13. Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (Honorable mention: Maupassant, Bel-Ami) Worst: This is reserved for books that, while not so very bad that I couldn't finish them--not even necessarily bad at all--I would probably tell my January 2014 self not to bother with. 10. Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General From Big Sur 31. Christopher Rush, Last Lesson of the Afternoon (okay, actually bad) 43. Alan Garner, Red Shift 42. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (a good book now too dated to be readable)

Yes. You said it much more elegantly than I did.

This week I am still reading The Awkward Age. It's a busy time with family and preparation, so I make no apologies for slowness in reading. Negin, ChrisB, and NoseInaBook, I think we must be pleased with ourselves for whatever reading we get done. When I joined this lovely group, I had to force myself to think of it, for me, as the "Book of the Month Club"; if I could manage a book a month, that was fine. I was excited to find at the end of the first year I had read twenty-six books. I'm thrilled to have gotten up to 52 books this year! 58. Conan Doyle, The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard 57. J. Frank Dobie, Cow People 56. Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident 55. Colette, The Innocent Libertine 54. Mary Shelley, The Last Man 53. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class 52. George Eliot, Silas Marner 51. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night 50. J. Frank Dobie, Tales of Old-Time Texas 49. Jeremy Lewis, Penguin Special 48. Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami 47. The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories 46. Horace, Satires 45. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year 44. Henry James, The Bostonians 43. Alan Garner, Red Shift 42. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death 41. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson 40. Katherine Mansfield, in a German Pension 39. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 38. Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets 37. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage 36. Shakespeare, Hamlet 35. Dmitri Merejkowski, The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci 34. Boccaccio, The Decameron 33. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk 32. Nancy Brysson Morison, The Gowk Storm 31. Christopher Rush, Last Lesson of the Afternoon 30. François Mauriac, Life of Jesus 29. R. L. Stevenson, The Merry Men and Other Stories 28. John Buchan, The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn and Other Stories 27. John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps 26. The Poetic Edda 25. Walter Scott, Rob Roy 24. Robin Jenkins, The Cone-Gatherers 23. Henry James, Washington Square 22. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 21. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty 20. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain 19. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ 18. Colette, Music-Hall Sidelights 17. Colette, Gigi 16. Colette, Claudine at School 15. Balzac, The Black Sheep 14. Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth 13. Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne 12. Byron, Don Juan 11. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, Or the Royal Slave 10. Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General From Big Sur 9. A. J. Symons, The Quest for Corvo 8. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park 7. Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias 6. Shakespeare, As You Like It 5. Guy de Maupassant, "Le Horla" 4. Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories 3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables 2. Frederick Rolfe, Hadrian VII 1. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice & Other Stories Robin, many thanks for another year of your gracious hosting. Responses to your questions later, when I'm not on the iPad and can see what I'm doing.

For the hardcore liturgical geek, the ultimate resource is Dom Guéranger's 15-volume The Liturgical Year. http://www.theliturgicalyear.org/theliturgicalyearpdfs.html (No I haven't read it. It's on my bucket list.)

If I tried to keep my tree up through then I'd be celebrating the Mass of Light by means of spontaneous arboreal combustion in my living room. ;) Traditionally in the west also, the Feast of the Purification (aka Presentation, aka Candlemas) is the end of Christmastide. Really I've never understood why the western Church has been so eager to dismiss feasts and customs that unite us to the east. Candlemas (Candelaria in Spanish; Lichtmess in German) is when candles are blessed for use the following year, because of the propchecy of St Simeon at the Presentation, revealing Our Lord as the Light of the revelation to the Gentiles. There are a lot of light and weather related customs in Europe for Candlemas (Feb. 2), including an American one involving a groundhog. Fortunately we don't have to keep going to Mass over and over and over.