Weekly Review - interrupted & unfinished, but good

A weekend away at a Mum Heart Conference gave me a refreshing start to this week. And a wedding at the end of the week on the Friday was a lovely finish.

The downside was getting some stitches on my nose in the middle of the week. A couple of anaesthetic needles shoved into your nose is not fun and neither is walking around with a pressure dressing on the centre of your face.

The Mum Heart Conference is based on Sally Clarkson's Mom's Heart in the USA but the Aussie version focuses on homeschooling mothers.

 I'd forgotten how encouraging it is to be around other people who share a similar vision on the heart of education - discipling our children, teaching them virtue, nurturing their souls.

I didn't realise how thirsty I was for fellow travellers and it did me good to see so many young women just beginning this journey with their children and to meet up again unexpectedly with friends I hadn't seen for years, not to mention making new ones.

Not everything got done this week but when that happens I take note of what was missed and make it a priority the next week.
Here are some things we did do:
 
Plutarch's Life of Timoleon - we completed this and Moozle wrote a funeral speech for him because of course he died at the end:

Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well -we also finished this play. Benj did a written narration after we listened and read along with the audio each week. I didn't see it until the play was finished but it was around 13 pages - so I won't post it here.

Moozle's Reading

We have one more week of Term 2 using my modified version of Ambleside Online Year 4 which is going well. I've added How Did We Find Out About Vitamins? by Isaac Asimov to our Science reading this term. There is quite detailed information in this book but Asimov's writing is very accessible and he brings the subject alive. It's out of print but I've picked up his books at library sales, ebay & Abebooks.

She has been going through some of the Jungle Doctor books by Australian author Paul White this past week. A few of my children really loved his medical missionary stories based in Africa.

Helping Dad put new locks on the windows...

Benj's Reading

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper - a great classic; starts slowly and is a bit of a challenge reading-wise but very worthwhile.

The Four Feathers by A.E.W. Mason - my friend, Kathy, is an old movie officiando. I'm not, but she tells me about these obscure movies she loves and then I try to find the book they were based on. This book has been filmed several times but it's taken me a long time to find a copy and then it was only online. The University of Adelaide is an old book lover's paradise and they keep adding new titles to their website. Their Kindle versions are so well done and I found the book there. Written in 1902, The Four Feathers is the story of a young man redeeming his character from the charge of cowardice. Benj's comment - "It's good. You should read it." I haven't yet.

Jensen's Format Writing is a book I've used with one Benj's older brothers and it seems a good fit for Benj. Well, I gave him a choice between this, the AO Year 10 selections and Wordsmith Craftsman, which I also have. He liked the look of Jensen's best, plus he preferred to use a book rather than an online programme.

He's done a fair bit of Grammar in the past and is covering that in Latin also but I wanted to keep it fresh in his mind. One of my girls tutored first and second year students at university and a major problem for many of them was their lack of grammar skills. This series of books is good for an  overview or for picking up problem areas and they only take a few minutes. Benj is only doing a page a week. The answer key is in the back.

 

I'll end with a quote that was read at the wedding we attended that I thought was a wonderful choice.

Love as distinct from ‘being in love’ is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by the grace which both partners receive from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: the quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it. 

C.S. Lewis

Linking to Weekly Wrap-Up

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers (1933)

It's been a few years since I read Murder Must Advertise and although it wasn't one of my favourites, I did enjoy reading it. However, two of my children say it's their favourite Lord Peter Wimsey novel and that the background setting of an advertising firm was really interesting (Sayers worked as a copywriter with a London advertising agency for nine years). Most of my children started reading the Wimsey novels around 14 to 15 years of age and the books do sometimes contain some mild adult themes. I asked my 14 year old son to write a brief review which I've put below.

The Lord Peter Wimsey crime/mystery novels are scheduled for free reading in the Ambleside Online Year 10 curriculum.

Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers (1926)

So far I've read over half of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels by Dorothy Sayers. I've enjoyed all of them but I have some favourites and Clouds of Witness has just been added to those.

It was the shooting season and Gerald, the Duke of Denver, with a party of guests had been lodging in the village of Riddlesdale. In the absence of his wife, his sister Lady Mary, was acting as hostess. At three o'clock one morning the dead body of a man was found on the threshold. It was Lady Mary's fiance.

Lord Peter Wimsey had been in Corsica for three months refreshing himself after the exertions of a previous crime investigation (Whose Body?) and had just returned to Paris to spend a fortnight there when, to his surprise, he found Bunter his butler packing their belongings in order to return to England.

In answer to Lord Peter's consternation, Bunter produced a copy of The Times where Wimsey read the following:

RIDDLESDALE  INQUEST

DUKE OF DENVER ARRESTED

ON MURDER CHARGE

'Dear me! Poor old Gerald arrested for murder. Uncommonly worryin' for him, poor chap. Always hated my bein' mixed up with police-courts. Now he's there himself. Lord Peter Wimsey in the witness box - very distressin' to feelin's of a brother. Duke of Denver in the dock - worse still. Dear me! Well, I suppose one must have breakfast.'

'Who's on the case, by the way?'

Mr Parker, my lord.'

'Parker? That's good. Splendid old Parker! Wonder how he managed to get put onto it...'

Meanwhile, back at Riddlesdale, the Duchess had hastily returned to the lodge and an inquest had been held which found the deceased had quarrelled with the Duke of Denver the evening before his death. A pistol belonging to the Duke had been found near the crime scene and Lady Mary had collapsed after giving evidence and was understood to be very ill.

Wimsey arrived on the scene and together with Detective-Inspector Parker they commenced investigations only to find that the Duke refused to co-operate and appeared to have something to hide and Lady Mary had lied at the inquest and was using her illness to avoid being questioned further.

From complicated love interests, a shooting attempt on Wimsey's life, a night on the bleak Yorkshire moors which almost ended in tragedy, to court room antics and encounters with a ferocious farmer, Clouds of Witness is a great story. I enjoyed getting to know Wimsey's relatives in this story and his lame humour scattered throughout the book added to its pleasure.

The man spat again, pulled his hat over his forehead, and said briefly:

'What doost 'a want?'

'Well,' said Peter; 'it's so uncommonly jolly finding' all you Yorkshire people so kind and hospitable, what? Never mind who you are, always a seat at the fireside and that kind of thing. Excuse me, but do you know you're leanin' on the gate so as I can't open it? I'm sure it's a pure oversight, only you mayn't realise that just where you're standin' you get the maximum leverage. What a jolly, charmin' house this is, isn't it? All so jolly stark and grim and all the rest if it...Who lives in it?'

A list of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels in the order of when they were originally released is here.

 

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

'As my Whimsy takes me,' is the motto of Lord Peter Wimsey, the aristocratic gentleman and detective whose hobbies include criminology, bibliophily, music and cricket, and he is the delightful hero of the golden age detective novelist, Dorothy L. Sayers.

Besides her Lord Peter Wimsey's crime novels, the author has penned plays and apologetic works such as The Mind of the Maker, and has published her own translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, so it comes as no surprise to find Lord Peter indulging in the classics or hunting for rare books in between his criminal investigations.

I mentioned in another post that Lord Peter Wimsey annoyed me in the first couple of books I read until I saw other facets of his character developed more fully in subsequent books. Whose Body? revealed the effects of the war on his nervous system after serving in the armed forces and the loyalty displayed by his man Bunter, who had been with him in active duty, and it made me like him all the more.

In Whose Body? we find Lord Peter Wimsey on his way to a book sale when he realised he'd forgotten his catalogue and had to return home. His man Bunter informed him on his return that his mother was on the telephone and wanted to speak to him. The Dowager Duchess of Denver, who was always of the greatest assistance in her son's criminal investigations hobby, had rung with the news that Mr Thipps, the architect who was building the church roof, had found a dead body in his bath.

Lord Peter embarks on a quest to solve the murder and has to contend with a bungling police inspector, a missing financier, an intellectually brilliant and dangerous criminal, in addition to an unidentified corpse.

It seemed, however, as though the man had melted out of society without leaving a gap or so much as a ripple. Assigning a motive for the murder of a person without relations or antecedents or even clothes is like trying to visualise the fourth dimension - admirable exercise for the imagination, but arduous and inconclusive.

Elizabeth George, a crime novelist herself, wrote this of Dorothy Sayers:

What continues to be remarkable about Sayer's work, however, is her willingness to explore the human condition. The passions felt by characters created eighty years ago are as real today as they were then. The motives behind people's behaviour are no more complex now than they were in 1923 when Lord Peter Wimsey took his first public bow...

One of the true pleasures inherent to picking up a Sayers novel now is to see how the times in which we live alter our perceptions of the world around us, while doing nothing at all to alter the core of our humanity.