Biblioll College's Monthly Miscellany
Notes and highlights from June 2025
“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...”
~Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Happy July, friends of Biblioll College! June was a busy month, as Dana and Daniel completed their final weeks in Oxford while Boze and Rach kept up the house in southern Oregon and finished out the school year along with sewing & book review deadlines.
We want to send our most grateful thanks for all of the likes, shares, comments, and subscriptions! Huge “thank you” to our newest subscribers, and to all of our free and paid subscribers! We truly appreciate the support.
June 2025
June was our third full month of Dispatches from Biblioll College! It turned out to be an unexpectedly (or, perhaps, expectedly) Dickensian month, as Boze and Rach toasted to Charles Dickens on the anniversary of his death, then posted their personal (mutual) ranking of least-favorite to favorite novels by their beloved Charles Dickens—a post they’d long anticipated after completing their nearly three-year Dickens Club.
We finished Prometheus Bound for our Great Books Challenge and started Sophocles’s Theban plays. Boze and Rach posted a joint piece on Prometheus Bound and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, looking at the complicated figure of the Romantic poet.
Boze wrote a smashing summer reading list for kids and explored one of his other recent reads, while Rach introduced her series on Dickens’s letters—and the next post will be arriving this week! Also, don’t miss Boze’s marvelous podcast on the importance fairy tales, hosted by Faith Moore of Storytime for Grownups!
The St. John’s College Great Books Challenge: Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus; beginning Sophocles’s Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex/Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone)
We are hugely grateful for those reading Aeschylus and Sophocles with us as part of our St. John’s College Great Books Challenge which started on March 9th. Due to finishing out the school year and falling down a rabbit hole with the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley and connecting it to Prometheus Bound, we will be focusing on Sophocles in July.
For those reading along with us, here are our upcoming reads in order—a very Sophoclean month:
Sophocles’s Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex/Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone)
Sophocles’s Philoctetes
Sophocles’s Ajax (late-July/early-Aug)
Dispatches from Dickens Series
Rach posted her introduction to her new series on going through the twelve-volume Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, beginning with Volume One, 1820-1839. We’re so excited for this nerdy project!
What We’re Reading, Watching, and Pondering:
Dana & Daniel
Dana and Daniel recently returned from a marvelous month in the City of Dreaming Spires. Alas, between a spot of illness and a chronically misbehaving laptop, they weren't able to really post in situ, but as soon as they've settled in properly at home, they will be posting again on several Dreaming Spires topics from their voluminous notes and photos.
This month Dana's been reading Prometheus Bound along with Rach, but has also been on a vampire quest after a re-reading of her favorite vampire novel, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Along with some non-fiction sources, she's re-read Stoker's Dracula, of course, but also Polidori's The Vampyre, Le Fanu's Carmilla, a translation of Ali Riza Seyfioglu's Dracula in Istanbul, and, along more contemporary (and Dreaming Spires) lines, Deborah Harkness's All Souls trilogy. She may even dip into Anne Rice again before she's through. Needless to say, a (probably long) post about the nature and development of vampire tales is percolating thereabouts.
In the evening, to clear her palate of ghoulishness and the day's news cycle, Dana's been slowly re-reading another favorite, Browning's The Ring and the Book from a lovely copy she picked up in Portland's Powell’s City of Books on their way home from Oxford. (An aside: Yes, Oxford's Blackwell’s is wonderful, with its 125K books or so, but nothing compares with the intoxicating smell of Powell’s million-plus old books!)
Boze & Rach
Boze had a lovely month. He and Rach watched the 2008 adaptation of Little Dorrit with Claire Foy and Anton Lesser. He walked two miles in the heat to a local bookstore to purchase a lovely red-and-gold volume of Carlyle for Rach’s last day of school. A friend with whom he had a nasty falling out in 2014 heard him speaking about fairy-tales on Faith Moore’s podcast and texted to say she was proud of him. He bought a book on Eleanor of Acquitaine and a novel about the Plantagenets by Sharon Kay Penman, both of which turned out to be really splendid. He got new, even nerdier glasses. He posted a weirdly popular tweet about an incident where he whipped out his favorite etymological dictionary at a dinner party. He tried several excellent beverages. At one point it rained all weekend and the temperatures dipped into the fifties. There are strawberries growing on his back porch. He’s learning that many of the folks he thought hated him don’t actually hate him. A very fine month.
Indeed, Rach wept when she saw what Boze had done by walking miles in the 90-ish-degree heat to get the beautiful volume of Carlyle—and his allergies suffered for weeks afterward. As to books, besides the read of Prometheus Bound (& Unbound), Rach delved in to Percy Shelley-related books and essays in June. She also read Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, which she hadn’t yet read, in spite of growing up with the beautiful 1991 film. (She loves them both.) Other reads include: Tristram Shandy, Oedipus the King, George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, the beginning of Volume One of Dickens’s letters, and even Stephanie Meyers’s Twilight, since it is a favorite book of a young lady she supports. Rach has also been focusing more on her sewing work now that the school year is over, and after finishing more batches of pet products for a client in California & alteration work for friends in the community.
Rach has also been reveling in some long walks with audiobooks, in gardening, and she and Boze have been loving the time taking care of their niece. Every evening, Boze and Rach continue to watch one of the London walking videos of John Rogers. But they were absolutely delighted to stumble on a particularly “bookish & rainy” walk of Ruby Granger’s, to the Lake District of Beatrix Potter and Wordsworth! Highly recommended.
Boze
Upcoming...
Dispatches from Oxford (Dana, Daniel)
Dispatches from Dickens (Rach)
Essay on Sophocles’s Theban plays (Rach, early-July)
Essays on Sophocles’s other plays on the St. John’s College list: Philoctetes and/or Ajax (Rach, July/early-Aug)
An essay on The Ramayana (Boze)
An essay on children’s literature (Boze)
My eighty favorite books of all time (Boze)
...and more. Thank you again for journeying with us, friends. We are so grateful for all of our subscribers, and would love to hear your thoughts about what you are reading, watching, and learning, and what kind of content you would love to see here. Wishing you a glorious July, & that Aloysius remains always in good temper.
Wonderful words and images! Thank you for recapping and sharing these memorable moments. 😁
Love, Love, Love -- "A friend with whom he had a nasty falling out in 2014 heard him speaking about fairy-tales on Faith Moore’s podcast and texted to say she was proud of him."