*GASP!*

"Everything they say at Saint-Sulpice about free will is an idle fancy.  I already see that I will lose my fortune and my reputation for your sake.  I can read my destiny in your lovely eyes"--Manon Lescaut

Friday morning I had a dental checkup. (In the reception area I met Kathy from my opera group!) I still haven't got my dental card from ODSP so I'll have to deal with that soon. Because I had a headache Thursday and had to get up early Friday, I got behind in my emails. (I need to unsubscribe from more of those lists!)

Yesterday afternoon was the Reading Out Loud Meetup. September is Banned Books Month, so as usual our topic was banned and challenged books. (The event's title was *GASP!*) I read a chapter from Frank McCourt's memoir 'Tis, in which he tried to teach J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye to his high school class but the principal came in and confiscated all the books!  We also read the chapter from Catcher where Holden meets Luce the college boy.  

Other readings were the first chapter of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (from the second edition--I suppose John Snow knows the differences between the editions!); the part from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita where Humbert Humbert recalls all the places they visited driving around the U.S.; and Tomi Ungerer's children's book No Kiss for Mother (which a librarian panel denounced, leading to all his books being removed from some school libraries!) I would have read a bit from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but we ran out of time.

Through sheer persistence, I've come to follow over 2500 people on Twitter. (Some of them are nice enough to tweet their thanks!) I skip the singers and the business firms and those using foreign languages, but there are still a lot of others.  And mostly as a result of that, I already have close to a thousand followers.

Manon Lescaut is a cracking good read!  I'm still not sure what to think of Manon:  is she a "bad girl" or just making the best of her limited options?