Solar eclipse

"I tell you, sir, it's the end of the world. Never has there been loose such an unruly mob of students!  It's the accursed inventions of the age that are ruining everything--the artillery, the muskets, the cannons, and above all the printing press, that scourge brought from Germany"--The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Monday afternoon during the solar eclipse I was inside the Lillian Smith library with the memoir group. (Father made a clever gizmo out of a computer crate for seeing the crescent sunbeam.) Oh well, maybe the Imp of the Perverse would have made me look directly into it...

Now that I've finished Sons and Lovers, I got some new books there.  Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame I'm reading for John Snow's book club.  Machiavelli's The Prince I'm reading for the History Meetup.  And I also got an annotated edition of the manuscript Pioneer Girl, Laura Ingalls Wilder's first attempt at telling her story.

On the first page of Hunchback, Hugo indirectly reveals that he's started writing the novel at the time of the July Revolution.  No doubt he did so to remind his readers that the age of Paris mobs was far from over!

Hunchback and Prince are rather appropriate books to be reading at the same time, since they're both about the difficulties of the Renaissance.