So great. I don’t need to tell you about Bleak House – but I will take this opportunity to highly recommend the BBC’s 2005 miniseries. If you weren’t convinced that you loved Inspector Bucket, his appearance in this 7-hour melodrama will definitely convince you.  It’s full of great performances by British actors, and has given us a new ridiculous fake-curse-word in our house: “Burn Gorman! I broke another glass!”

Just a little tidbit for you here: my favorite description of a maid ever-

There is something indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy, and she has a watchful way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without turning her head which could be pleasantly dispensed with, especially when she is in an ill humour and near knives.

Despite the sensational title and endorsements by Dr. Phil, this is a really compelling quick read, with what seems like smart thinking about consumer debt. More than anything else, it makes me want to see more support for Warren’s policy work.

What gets families into bankruptcy? It’s not overconsumption – people don’t spend their way into bankruptcy; it’s caused by sudden loss of income (a layoff) or huge expenses (medical costs). And it’s not that the social stigma has reduced – people still feel the moral burden of debt, and bankruptcy is still shameful.

Families spend up to their means to cover their homes and educations costs — and homes are often really just education costs in disguise. If we don’t send our kids to private school, then we move into the nicest school district we can afford. It’s the allure of a good school that stretches our budgets.

Stay-at-home moms serve as an unrecognized safety net. Besides providing childcare and domestic services, she can enter the workforce if Dad gets laid off or hospitalized.

Here’s the kicker: living on two incomes feels safer, but it’s really more dangerous. When both parents work, you’ve doubled your chances for a layoff or a disability injury. And because we’re all living at or near our means on fixed costs – not frittering our money away on luxury goods – there’s no place to cut back. It would actually be safer if we all had spent lots on cruises and fancy restaurants, because that stuff is easy to cut.

So Warren’s recommendations: If you live at the edge of your income, don’t cut back on discretionary spending: reduce your fixed expenses.

Warren’s policy proposals:
1. a serious school voucher program that lets parents stay in their houses and send kids to school anywhere.
2. public preschool. If we’ve decided as a society that preschool is more or less mandatory, then we should make it public just like kindergarten.
3. reduce college costs by specializing them. There’s no need for every specialty at every school.

I just discovered the Centuries of Meditations, and I can tell it’s going to be one of those books that sticks with you for a lifetime.

It’s a series of devotional meditations written from an exuberant, almost mystical perspective. But that’s saying it too strongly. The ideas are nearly mystical, the writing is poetic but strongly grounded in real life. So far, it’s as if a good friend grabbed you by the shoulders and said: Look! Look how easy it is to be happy in the Lord! Let me show you how!

The writing is lovely and super-quotable.

Is it not a great thing that you should be Heir of the World? Is it not a great enriching verity?

and

By the very right of your senses you enjoy the World. Is not the beauty of the Hemisphere present to your eye? Doth not the glory of the Sun pay tribute to your sight? Is not the vision of the World an amiable thing? Do not the stars shed influences to perfect the Air? Is not that a marvellous body to breathe in? To visit the lungs: repair the spirits, revive the senses, cool the blood, fill the empty spaces between the Earth and Heavens; and yet give liberty to all objects? Prize these first: and you shall enjoy the residue: Glory, Dominion, Power, Wisdom; Honour, Angels, Souls, Kingdoms, Ages. Be faithful in a little, and you shall be master over much.

I picked up The Silver Chalice because I’ve been pleasantly surprised by others in the Loyola Classics line. I knew nothing about it, except that it was set in the first century and featured a Greek artist.

The first thing I noticed was a sort of earnestness, the kind you see in mid-century religious sword-and-sandals epic movies like ‘The Ten Commandments.’ Turns out I wasn’t too far off – it was made into a movie just like that in 1954, featuring Paul Newman as our hero. You can watch it on YouTube!

The story is interesting enough – our hero Basil is a young sculptor and silversmith, and is chosen by Luke (the apostle Luke!) to create a chalice to hold the cup Jesus used at the last supper. Amazingly, Costain writes for 540 pages without ever referring to it as the Holy Grail.

Basil must travel through the Mediterranean world to meet and sculpt the surviving apostles, and has adventures with Paul, Peter, Joseph of Arimathea, Emperor Nero, and Simon the Magician. I have a higher-than-average tolerance for this kind of thing, coming from a family of devout believers, and was alternately irritated and charmed by the earnestness of the writing. I think my grandparents might really love it, and I’m looking forward to seeing if my Grandpa has read it.

A series of essays about Frank Mundus, a deepwater shark fisherman and probably the source for Sam Quint’s ‘grizzled fisherman’ character in the movie Jaws.

It’s at its best when Drumm analyzes why shark fishing has become popular – taking a very Melvillian approach about the sea being a refuge for our more animal selves when the constraints of civil society become too tight – or when he lets Mundus tell a story all the way through. But those aren’t common – Drumm often interrupts Mundus with backstories and asides, and generally turns a good yarn into a series of weird, half-finished, uncalled-for elliptical sub-points. And believe me, it’s not the asides that bother me. I’m the guy that loves Tristram Shandy after all.

Those quibbles aside, it’s full of exciting stories about catching sharks, and good high seas adventure.

The Dark is Rising is a part of a five-book series; they’re a perennial favorite of mine and a series I pick up for comfort. I was sick a few weeks ago and grabbed this one off the shelf for a quick re-read.

The whole series (sorry, the official word Cooper uses is ‘Sequence’) is a weird beast. The first one feels almost like a Boxcar Children book, where overly nice children solve a mystery. In the second book, we never hear from those nice children at all, and we’re on a mystical journey and battle with what seem like gods and demons. These two worlds start to bleed into each other in the rest of the books, but really putting it that way makes it sound more cohesive than it is.

The actual plot of The Dark is Rising has a strange, fate-like quality – it moves forward without any decisive actions taken by the protagonist, and its mystical moments seem to unfold without much rhyme or reason. Our hero Will is carried along just as inexorably as we are, even through the wild and magical ending. But here’s the kicker – the plot feels just right, in spite of this. There’s some kind of harmonic whole here, or a poetic shape, or something that makes every strange occurrence in the book seem like it had to be that way. I lack the literary understanding to really explain this, and I think that’s one of the reasons I keep coming back to these books.

My first non-fiction Pushkin, an account of his travels with a military company in the Caucasus. Quick, pleasant, and mostly diary-like. There are a few notable points where the quality of Pushkin’s short stories shines through. It’s a little bit funny to see him cross paths with one Count Puschkin.  Some notable passages:

People are convinced only by Fame and do not understand that among them there may be some Napoleon who has not commanded a single company of chasseurs, or another Descartes who has not published a single line in the Moscow Telegraph. Besides, our respect for Fame arises, perhaps, out of self-esteem: for our voice too must contribute to that Fame.

Recently a peaceful Circassian who had shot at a soldier was captured. He tried to justify himself by saying that his rifle had been loaded for too long.

“To seek inspiration” has always seemed to me a ridiculous and absurd fantasy: you cannot find inspiration; it, of itself, must find the poet.

The jury is still out for me on Onegin. I love Russian literature, so it seems only natural that I would love the most famous work of the ‘Father of Russian Literature,’ right? But I’m stumbling over the “Novel in Verse” thing, and found the whole book a little blah.  If anyone has recommendations or advice about how to think about Onegin, please let me know!

A few great moments here and there.  Since I married a farm girl from Kansas, I thought this description of rural conversation was hysterical:

Their reasonable talk
of haymaking, of liquor,
of kennel, of their kin,
no doubt did not sparkle with feeling,
or with poetic fire,
or sharp wit, or intelligence,
or with the art of sociability;
but the talk of their sweet wives was
much less intelligent.

A note about the translation: this one, by Vladimir Nabokov, is stellar – and it’s the fourth I’ve tried. (Yes, that’s how much I wanted to like this book, picking up four translations!).

The first I found is SO astonishingly bad, I feel like I should warn people. Tom Beck’s translation is sing-songy, awkward, and cliched. Stay away, at all costs.  I should’ve known better when Beck’s bio said, “[Beck] learnt Russian so that he could translate Eugene Onegin into English. The result is a masterpiece.”

Overstreet’s ongoing story about the peoples of the Expanse continues in Raven’s Ladder. This series definitely hit its stride in Cyndere’s Midnight, and Raven’s delivers more of the same goodness.

In this one I found the language inventions (“Jiggerspit!”, one character exclaims) more like a noisy background, but I guess that’s a hazard of world-building. As I get more invested in the story, I start to notice the friction between my initial reading of a word like ‘longears’ (that’s like a rabbit, I guess?) and later references to them being the ‘height of a stag,’ (Wait, like a huge rabbit?). Small moments like these disrupt the flow of the book, but also contribute to the sense of its Otherness- that this is really a different world. I’m not here to judge.

I found his parallels with the fundamentalist cult of Auralia to be pretty hollow, but I’m trusting that they won’t have too large a part in the greater story.

And I am very interested in the continuing developments with the Keeper – the mysterious beast who seems to reveal himself more as the series goes on. As we learned more about him (it?), the contours of this story started to seem familiar – but Overstreet corrects this with a few surprises by the end.

I’d also like to point out, mostly just for posterity, that as Overstreet writes more, his name gets bigger and bigger on the book cover designs. I recognize this is the way things go, but it’s fun to see it happen in the Auralia’s Thread series.

I’m definitely looking forward to #4!

Man, I am on an unexpectedly long stretch of non-fiction.  I guess that’s what I get for being interested in the real world?

This book is a primer to five figures that were influential in developmental psychology – or maybe childhood development. I’m so new to this field I don’t even know what to call it. I grabbed this from the library because I’m looking for a good introduction to the Montessori idea, and this threw in a few other concepts for free.

Mooney’s book is very targeted towards educators, so half the book is full of classroom examples, which I mostly skipped by. It’s an uncritical overview of these five influential people, without any context.

I’ve got a full book-report style notes section on this, so follow the link if you’d care to read more.