I've misplaced The Last Man (yes, yes, the jokes write themselves), so am finishing up Veblen, and may just start Year of Wonders while I wait for Shelley to show up.

Middle Girl is getting a wood tabletop easel/ art storage box, and some real art supplies for a change. Great Girl is getting a *car* (no not one of those Lexuses with a bow on top like in the commercials) and driving lessons from dh. I feel a little faint just typing that. I suppose that one will be educational for us all. Wee Girl is getting more marble run pieces to make even more elaborate contraptions. That's a toy that was well worth ith, given the continuing appeal for multiple ages.

While waiting in line at the HEB, I skimmed an article in Texas Monthly--an excellent magazine--on the Texas books you must read. The online article is a very brief synopsis; I'll have to get a better look at the full piece at the library, Wee Girl permitting. http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/john-phillip-santos-against-the-texas-canon

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class. The badly written Wikipedia article: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class I knew the book by reputation and thought I should get around to reading it.

Ick. Interesting as Veblen is, he was a man of his times. From the chapter "Conservation of Archaic Traits," an incomprehensible examination of the relation of ethnicity to social institutions, served up in Social Darwinist soup: "It may be worth while to point out that the dolicho-blond type of European man seems to owe much of its dominating influence and its masterful position in the recent culture to its possessing the characteristics of predatory man in an exceptional degree. These spiritual traits, together with a large endowment of physical energy,--itself probably a result of selection between groups and between lines of descent,--chiefly go to place any ethnic element in the position of a leisure or master class...." Right, let's see how that works out in about forty years. ETA: Googling "Veblen dolicho-blond" takes you nowhere good.

((((Sadie)))) Now I feel quite rotten for snapping at you in Another Thread. When I first discovered the Board, I lurked for a long time, eventually made a few tentative posts, and finally started what I thought would be an innocuous Newbie's First Thread.... and a fight immediately broke out. A member started posting angrily that I was a pot-stirring religion-hater, announced she had reported me to the Moderators, and sneered at my terrified apology; and at last the thread was deleted.

I'm not mad at you. :) Forgive my abruptness.

But they aren't a first step. The Office of Papal Charities (papal Almoner)--the pope's personal charity for the poor, including the homeless--is at least a thousand years old. Perhaps I am not understanding the point you are trying to make. ETA: You might try googling "Catholic Charities homelessness" to see what the Church is doing in this country to deal with homelessness itself. If your Italian is up to it, you can see what the Church is doing in Rome.

Start somewhere? The Catholic Church is the world's largest charitable organization, and provides a quarter of the world's health care. The vast majority of services for the homeless in Rome are provided by the Catholic charities Sant' Egidio and Caritas Roma. The city of Rome spends almost none of its own funds on aid to the homeless.

Well into Mary Shelley's The Last Man, and while there's no sign of a plague yet, there's a satisfyingly villainous character named Lord Byr--, I mean Lord Raymond, who is plotting to overthrow the idyllic royalty-free Republic that Britain now is, and set himself up as king. Also, hilarious descriptions of late 21st-century technology. The journey from London to Dunkeld: --------------- "'To-morrow,' said Raymond, 'his mother and sister set out for Scotland to see him once again.' 'And I go to-day,' I cried; 'this very hour I will engage a sailing balloon; I shall be there in forty-eight hours at furthest, perhaps in less, if the wind is fair.'" ---------------- And a frame narrative of wonderful unlikeliness, wherein Mary and Percy Bysshe are tooling around in Naples and discover the actual Sibylline cavern, where they find the story written on leaves of paper lying around on the floor. I give it two Romantic thumbs up.

Happy birthday, OnceUponATime! Literary flea connection--William Blake's drawing, "The Ghost of a Flea": http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_of_a_Flea#/image/File:William_Blake_002.jpg As I learned from my 2013 read of Gilchrist's Life of William Blake, Blake--who tended to see things the rest of us don't see--said this was what the spiritual being of a flea looked like. What that contributes to the discussion of sentience, I don't know.

That reminds me; it's been a long time since I read The Metamorphosis.

Middle Girl says Kim is better than Puck. She likes the Indian setting. I guess I know which Forster she'll eventually be reading. You know Puck has a sequel, right? ETA: Though your son may have moved on....

I agree with Jane all around; I've only read Room With a View and Passage to India, and liked Passage better, but Room is the one I'd vote for. Middle Girl read Kim this year and says it's the best Kipling and you should definitely read it. I suppose I ought to read it too.

There was a red-shouldered hawk sitting on the phone line across the street from my house yesterday, with scattered feathers of what had once been a mourning dove on the street below. He looked pretty smug. This discussion also makes me think of the Tejano saying, "Vultures await the will of God."

Yes! Half Price was indeed full of identical copies of Year of Wonders, with all the marked-up or beaten-up copies on the dollar clearance shelf. So that's added to the TBR pile (and I used my 40%-off coupon on Dumas fils' Camille; Middle Girl is intrepidly reading Dumas père's chunkster Twenty Years After, so we'll have a father-son, mother-daughter read). And dh wants me to read a Saramago novel that's apparently plague-related also. Because he's been trying to get me to read Saramago for years. And I think he's a little jealous of my virtual reading club here.

Veblen on the eternal question, Dog or Cat? "In the case of those domestic animals which are honorific and are reputed beautiful, there is a subsidiary basis of merit that should be spoken of. Apart from the birds which belong in the honorific class of domestic animals, and which owe their place in this class to their non-lucrative character alone, the animals which merit particular attention are cats, dogs, and fast horses. The cat is less reputable than the other two just named, because she is less wasteful; she may even serve a useful end. At the same time the cat's temperament does not fit her for the honorific purpose. She lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honor, and repute, and she does not lend herself with facility to an invidious comparison between her owner and his neighbors. The exception to this last rule occurs in the case of such scarce and fanciful products as the Angora cat, which have some slight honorific value on the ground of expensiveness, and have, therefore, some special claim to beauty on pecuniary grounds. The dog has advantages in the way of uselessness as well as in special gifts of temperament. He is often spoken of, in an eminent sense, as the friend of man, and his intelligence and fidelity are praised. The meaning of this is that the dog is man's servant and that he has the gift of an unquestioning subservience and a slave's quickness in guessing his master's mood. Coupled with these traits, which fit him well for the relation of status—and which must for the present purpose be set down as serviceable traits—the dog has some characteristics which are of a more equivocal aesthetic value. He is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits. For this he makes up is a servile, fawning attitude towards his master, and a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then, commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery, and as he is also an item of expense, and commonly serves no industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in men's regard as a thing of good repute." --Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, "Pecuniary Canons of Taste"

Also Martinmas. Time to kill the geese. And put them in the crockpot. While our children play in the street.

That's another archaic (16th-17th century) usage, so I'd guess KJV as a source.

All copies of Year of Wonders in the public and university libraries are checked out, which tells me someone assigned it to their undergraduates. Which means the last week of classes Half Price will be flooded with copies and have to put most of them on the clearance shelf. This is how we do bookbuying around Big State U. Butter, thanks for the nudge on Douglass. Got to get to that one, too.

Okay, I will make the library yield up Year of Wonders. And I'm counting The Decameron. So that gets me five. I don't read much dusty philosophy. Dh reads it and coughs up the predigested summary for me. (Sorry for the disgusting metaphor; Wee Girl has been down with flu and we've been watching lots of David Attenborough.) One of my choice? Hm. Have you read Guy de Maupassant's Bel-Ami? It's on the 1001 list, and is far from dusty.

Of course the list isn't exactly "books" but "novels," which excludes the vast majority of pre-18th century literature. I'd like to see a list more reflective of what was written and read in earlier eras. Because, no Homer, no Virgil, no Milton, no Shakespeare, no Aeschylus? No Quran, no Bible, no Gospels, no Analects, no Bhagavad Gita? The Romance of the Rose and The Imitation of Christ were once the most popular reading in Europe. Charlemagne used to have The City of God read to him repeatedly. It leaves one looking around for novel-like pre-modern literature, of which there isn't an abundance, and people are left with the impression that before Defoe all people really had to read was Don Quixote. On the other hand, some of us really do need a little prompting to read some of the more recent stuff.... I have one more challenge left in me: plague literature, which really has to be done this year, doesn't it. I have a little start with the Defoe, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man appeared at the library discard store, unread, in a lovely Oxford edition. And then Camus, and then ...? Dh taunted me with The Stand, which he made me (really) read in high school and which will not get a second go.

Re: Tobias Smollett. Jane, you're on. Let's throw another Scottish author onto the pile. Re: Pets on beds. That arctic front is blowing in this morning--and just last night we had all the windows open!--so I brought out my mattress heating pad; and now the cat looks to spend the day in my bed. Re: Bechdel Test. Fitzgerald does pretty well in that regard.

Not me. The book angel, perhaps.

Depressed to read through the first 300 books on the list of 1001 essential books and find I've only read one of them--Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian--and I didn't like it. The chances of checking off much of that list seem slim. ETA: Oh! It's chronological! I've read lots of books from the bottom of the list!