Last Saturday was the anniversary of Tasha Tudor’s birth, and there was a celebration with links at the blog Storybook Woods. Ms. Tudor was a flawed but lovely author and artist, and it’s fun to see how different families and individuals celebrate her life and work each year.

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We’ve been watching a lot of the television show Numb3rs here at Semicolon home, and I’ve managed to watch the first two seasons, most of the episodes at least twice. That’s what happens when you have eight children, six of them grown up enough to watch a sometimes violent FBI drama, and each of them with different schedules. I’ve watched some episodes with Karate Kid(13) and Artiste Daughter(20), and others with Brown Bear Daughter(15) or with Drama Daughter(19). I actually downloaded the first season of Numb3rs to share with Engineer Husband because I thought he’d like the math aspect of the show. However, Engineer Husband doesn’t sit still for TV much, and I can’t say he’s actually watched an entire episode through. We make a good pair, EH and I: he’s mathematical, scientific, and compulsively busy while I’m bookish, literary, and congenitally indolent. (I looked up that synonym in my thesaurus; it sounds so much better than “lazy.”)

Anyway, back to Numb3rs, the plot and the characterizations both sometimes get stretched a little thin, but what keeps me coming back is the family dynamics. Two brothers, one an FBI agent and one a gifted mathematician, work together to solve crimes, sometimes using the mathematical skills of the younger brother Charlie, but also depending on the strength, intelligence, and common sense of the older brother, Don. The brothers obviously care for one another deeply, but there is also baggage, as there is in all families. Charlie’s status and needs as a child prodigy made Don the somewhat neglected older (normal) brother, and yet Charlie admires and wants to impress his older brother, too. There’s a dad, played quite capably by actor Judd Hirsch. And Charlie’s friend Larry, a physics professor, has the best lines in the show. all about the cosmos and relationships compared to black holes and metaphysical speculations on the meaning of life and mathematics. I just started season three, and so far so good.

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I’ve been reading about Pilgrims and Puritans (The Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick, an adapted version for young people and various other books, mostly kidlit). I’ve learned a few things I didn’t really know before:

Half of the Pilgrims died before and during their first winter in Massachusetts, from 102 down to 51.

Many of the local Indians became Christians largely through the work of missionary John Eliot. They were called Praying Indians.

The colony at Plymouth eventually failed. The colony at Massachusetts Bay became the center of New England life, later Boston. The land around Plymouth wasn’t that good, and the harbor there was also poor, so descendants of the original settlers moved away to find better lands and better trading opportunities.

King Phillip’s War was a nasty, bloody mess on both sides of the native/European divide.

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Go here to look at some amazing photographs from Tsarist Russia, taken in color circa 1910. I have a tendency to think that people lived in black and white that long ago whereas the beautiful colors of God’s world existed then, too. Look and see if you don’t have to keep reminding yourself that the photographs are of real people from the early twentieth century, not actors dressed up as Russian peasants.
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Thanks to Bill at Thinklings for the link to this brief 30 minute BBC film, first broadcast in 1968, about Tolkien and Middle Earth. Seeing the beginning of the film made Z-baby bring me our annotated copy of The Hobbit and ask me to start at the beginning and read. I read about two pages and put her to sleep. The film itself consists mostly of Tolkien and some of his fans and detractors talking about LOTR and its merits and demerits. There are also links in the sidebar to other BBC author interviews, including ones with P.G. Wodehouse, Daphne duMaurier, and Somerset Maugham. Maugham talks with Malcolm Muggeridge about Maugham’s list of his top ten novels, as published in his book Somerset Maugham and the Greatest Novels.

Maugham’s List (not in order):
1. Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
2. The Red and the Black by Stendahl.
3. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky.
4. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
6. David Copperfield by Charles DIckens.
7. War and Peace by Tolstoy.
8. Old Man Goriot by Honore de Balzac.
9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
10. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

I’ve read eight of the ten novels on Maugham’s list, but not Fielding nor Stendahl. I’ve always thought Tom Jones would not be my sort of humor, and I never really knew what The Red and the Black was all about. What do you think are the top ten novels of all time in terms of classic staying power?