I Read The Sutton Hoo Story and Pretended it Was About Beowulf

My favorite artifact is Beowulf's helmet!

 My latest Goodreads review is just me fangirling over Sutton Hoo!

The Sutton Hoo Story: Encounters with Early England by Martin Carver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you followed a rabbit trail from Beowulf or wanted a deep dive after visiting Room 41 in the British Museum, this book is where you want to go next. It's the least dry in-depth book on an archaeological site that you're going to get (yes, it's still a little dry, but you should read the book about Spiro Mounds that I'm currently trying to slog through--it's printed in typewriter font, for pete's sake!), and also the most comprehensive you'll get in under 250 pages, with a history of both the site and its excavations, and discussion of the finds in which they're put in historical and cultural context.

I loved this book so much that I carried it around my house and forced family members to listen to me read random passages out loud to them.

The Anastasius platter, engraved with the name of Roman Emperor Anastasius.

The book’s order is a little confusing at first, although I understand why Carver organized it the way he did. You obviously want to hear the fun story of Sutton Hoo’s “discovery” in 1939 first, and then you might as well continue its history from there so you can cover the other excavations, but when you get to the most recent excavation, to understand the archaeologists’ findings you have to pop back into Anglo-Saxon times and start the history all over again.

Even though I came to the book mostly to learn more about the grave goods, themselves (Beowulf and Room 41 were my gateway archaeological drugs!), I actually found it just as interesting to read about the politics of an archaeological excavation, and fascinating to read about the thoughtful reasoning involved in planning Carver's excavation of the 1980s-1990s. Basically, the idea was to come up with a research question, figure out the absolute minimum amount the site needed to be excavated to answer that question, then excavate only that amount, leaving the rest of the site undisturbed to wait for a future time with better technology and another interesting research question. Seen in this way, the 1939 Basil Brown excavation’s research question was probably something like, “What treasures are inside Mound 2?” I like Martin Carver’s research question of “How did England begin, and what did that society look like?” much better!

You can also see the really great shield in the background. I didn't take a ton of personal photos of the Sutton Hoo artifacts, because you can download high-res images free for personal use from the British Museum's online collection database.

Because I'd expected to slog through a dull tome (looking at you, Spiro Mounds book!), I was even more delighted to find Carver's book full of vivid little details and discoveries that bring the Sutton Hoo site to life. One of my favorite parts of the book is the tiny detail that when the archaeologists studied the site in the 1980s, the mounds were permeated with rabbit warrens--just chock-full of warrens! This led them to speculate that at some prior point, rabbits were probably put there on purpose because the mounds made a favorable habitat, and then the residents could essentially farm them.

You know what that is just exactly like?!? That terrifying chapter of Watership Down when Hazel and Fiver go to live on what is essentially a rabbit commune. There’s tons of food and no predators, and all the rabbits are LOVING it, but all the time Fiver is all, “DAAAAAANGER! I sense danger here!”. And they act like they don’t believe him, but at the same time the rabbits from this warren *are* hella weird, and come to find out a local farmer is feeding them and protecting them and also eating them whenever he’s hungry. JUST LIKE SUTTON HOO!!!

I appreciated having lots of illustrations in the book, although I did often go off-road and look up more info about things that Carver mentioned. He's got a few photos of specific grave goods, for instance, but it's so easy to just pop over to the British Museum's online collection site and pull up a really detailed image of each thing that tbh an in-book photo isn't really necessary. The most helpful and unique illustrations were site maps, line drawings of possible burial scenes (OMG the burial scene of people carrying the coffin of a young man to his open grave, with his perfectly alive bridled horse standing innocently next to a second open grave), and renderings of the excavation. That rendering of all the horrific ways that execution victims were found in their graves, their heads in completely random spots, their legs jacked up all weird, is the stuff of nightmares.

My personal fascination with Sutton Hoo, in particular its grave goods, is because of Beowulf. I'd read before about the tons of connections between Sutton Hoo and Beowulf, and I was thrilled to read Carver also illustrating them in his discussion of the overall historical and cultural context of Sutton Hoo: the time period the poem is set in matches the Sutton Hoo mound burials pretty well, and many of the grave goods found match things mentioned in Beowulf, from the dead king Scyld Scefing’s ship filled with treasure to the fancy horse harnesses to the weaponry. And based on chemical analysis of the soil underneath the spot where the occupant of the ship burial was laid, as well as other clues, the occupant’s age, sex, and clothing seem to match up pretty well with an old Beowulf, dead from the wounds he received while battling a dragon. Another Sutton Hoo mound burial is for a wealthy, high-status woman, Beowulf’s queen if you turn your head just right and squint. Many of the grave goods from the site have wolf imagery, recalling Beowulf’s name (“bee wolf” or “bee hunter,” both a kenning for “bear”). The ship even included a giant cauldron on a giant chain, a chain long enough to hang it from the roof beam of a great mead hall like Heorot…

In my personal Beowulf fandom, then, my headcanon is that THIS is Beowulf’s burial. The book even includes an artist’s representation of the occupant of the ship burial before death, dressed in the clothing he was buried in and carrying the armor he was buried with. That old guy in his red tunic, holding the famous Sutton Hoo helmet in one hand and the famous Sutton Hoo shield in the other?

Y’all, That. Is. BEOWULF!!!

Now future Sutton Hoo archaeologists just need to find his mead hall…

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Okay, now a little blog-only bonus content

Zoom Interview: This book is plenty to give you a good understanding of Sutton Hoo’s history and archaeology, but you know I love myself a deep dive, so over the weekend I basically roamed around the house until I convinced Matt that he both wanted to play his video game AND watch this Zoom interview with Martin Carver with me on my laptop:

He gave that about half an hour, and then I roamed around some more until I convinced my college student that she wanted to read the book she was already reading AND also finish the interview with me. 

Fun fact based on this Zoom interview: Martin Carver and I have the exact same fold-out illustrated Bayeux Tapestry print! His is mounted on his wall, but I keep mine on my bookshelves so I can unfold it on the floor and peer nearsightedly at all the details.

Martin Carver's Excavation Overview: If you’re as interested in deep dives as I am, Martin Carver also wrote a breakdown of each time that Sutton Hoo has been excavated (including treasure-hunting from the 1600s), and what each excavation did well, did poorly, and discovered. It's a couple hundred pages shorter than The Sutton Hoo Story, so it's a good quick summary with some fun details included.

The Million Pound Grave: Carver referenced this 1965 BBC documentary numerous times, and I used all my Google karma trying to locate it, but all I could find was this widely distributed clip that has done nothing but whet my interest:

Phillips Tell-All Memoir: In Carver's book, he also references a memoir by Phillips, the eventual head archaeologist of the 1939 excavation. He said that Phillips had withheld publication until his own death, but that it was available in some online archaeological database. I went there to find it, and OOOOH is it gossipy!!! In it, you can learn which museum curator Phillips thinks is incompetent, as well as which artist is an alcoholic. He low-key accuses Mrs. Pretty’s sister-in-law of trying to get her to keep the treasure so she can have the jewelry, and he definitely thinks that Mrs. Pretty’s spiritualist is telling her what to do on a general basis. He tells a few more vivid and adorable anecdotes, and his memoir isn’t long, so I think it’s a must-read companion piece.

Virtual Tour: There's a Google Street-View tour of the Sutton Hoo exhibit, but you can't zoom in well enough to read the labels so it's only okay.

More To Read: Let's keep these deep dive vibes going, shall we?

I Read The Sun and the Star Because I Am a Percy Jackson Fangirl Completionist

My college student got me back into Goodreads, so here's my first Goodreads review in seven years! True to form, my inaugural review post hiatus is a middle-grade Greek mythology fanfic...

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The Sun and the Star: A Nico di Angelo Adventure by Rick Riordan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So, first off:

Did I love this book? No.

Is this book my least favorite from the Percy Jackson universe? Yes.

Will I ever give any book from the Percy Jackson universe less than five stars? No. No, I will not. I am ride or die, for better or worse, in sickness and health, forever and ever amen on the Percy Jackson train. I love all my children equally, even if some of them are better than others (*cough, cough* Trials of Apollo *cough*).

To be honest, this might be the first of the Percy Jackson books that I'm just too old to appreciate. I remember being a fifteen-year-old who got endless enjoyment from harping on and on about my relationships and doing all that self-reflection and feeling like my dreams really meant something, you know? So I would not be surprised if the genuine fifteen-year-olds in the Percy Jackson fandom absolutely eat all of Nico's and Will's relationship talk and relationship thoughts and relationship doubts and the sharing of gentle kisses up. And good for them! Teenagers who don't introspect probably grow up into adults who take Fox News at face value. But personally, I kind of wanted a little more hijinks and lighthearted adventure--some dam plot fluff, shall we say. But when you're slogging your way through Tartarus, your boyfriend slowly dying at your side, I guess you're not really in the mood for middle-grade puns, alas.

I do have some things that I love about the book, of course, other than the simple fact that it belongs to one of my favorite nostalgia fandoms. I grew up in the 80s, where shit was fraught unless you were heteronormative and cisgender, and I'm just so happy for kids these days that I can't even stand it. The entire Percy Jackson series, the thoughtful character depictions, and the existence of Nico and Will would have changed my life for the better if I'd had it as a kid.

I also was definitely a neurospicy kid unsuccessfully masking as a quiet, bookish nerd, and the 12-year-old me who read the entirety of Bullfinch's mythology on a school trip one summer instead of interacting with my peers would have been all over the Greek mythology deep cuts in these books. Greek mythology is one of my Special Interests as an adult to a large part because of the Percy Jackson series, and in every book it tickles me all over again to discover new, obscure characters. This book's favorites include, but are not limited to, Amphithemis and the cacodemons. Poor Amphithemis hurts my heart!

 

Ultimately, I'll take any excuse to live a while longer in the Percy Jackson universe. I'd watch Percy Jackson study to lo-fi hip-hop radio, have a Calypso Castaway screensaver, wear my Camp Half Blood pajamas while eating Camp Half Blood cereal and watching a high school production of the Percy Jackson musical, just to be in that world some more. So even though this isn't the best of the Percy Jackson books, it IS a Percy Jackson book, and it was an excellent way to spend a few hours on a rainy summer day.

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P.S. If you've got a kid who's into Percy Jackson, here are some epic ways to celebrate that love while offering some stellar (and sneaky!) academic enrichment:

• Study and sit for the National Mythology Exam. It's offered for most grade levels and is a great way to inspire an overall love of Greek mythology while building geographic and historical context, increasing reading comprehension skills, and practicing taking a standardized test.
• Host a Percy Jackson party. Take a day trip to Camp Half Blood to play games and earn badges while being creative, building language arts skills, and getting some healthy outdoor exercise.
• Travel. We don't travel internationally often, but Greece was a bucket list trip that we saved up for so that all of us, but especially the kid who's Percy Jackson's biggest fan, could see the real places written about in the myths. We made all kinds of places real there, from Olympus to Delphi to the place where the Athena Parthenos once stood (see The Mark of Athena for more details). Don't have room in your schedule for a trip to Greece right this minute? Find Greek art--and more contemporary art with mythological subjects--in most art museums.

From the Natural History Museum to the Cliffs of Lyme Regis: A Mary Anning Unit Study for High School

My poor homeschooled teenager has never in her life gone on a vacation that wasn't educational. Heck, even when we went to Disney World I made the kids take a class there, and that was after we'd spent months watching videos about ride engineering and making stop-motion animations, etc. 

Two weeks in England, then, is obviously the spine for a one-credit high school class entitled The History and Culture of England, a cross-curricular combo of Social Studies and ELA, with a little bit of science and art sneaked in just for funsies.

statue of Mary Anning at Lyme Regis

With visits to the British Museum, Natural History Museum, and Lyme Regis, one of our topics of study for this class is Mary Anning, the fossil hunter and entrepreneur whose uncredited work supported much of the paleontological scholarship of the Regency and early Victorian eras. 

If you're studying a historical figure, a good intro activity is to collect several children's biographies and read/compare/evaluate them. Picture books are often surprisingly informative, and comparing several means that one can gather a larger amount of information than can be found in just one book. Picture books are also intended to be fun to read, and they're quick to get through, so on the whole it's a very unintimidating activity that provides a good starting point for further study.

Here are the children's books about Mary Anning that I collected from my local public library:

• Dragon Bones, by Sarah Glenn Marsh
• Lightning Mary, by Anthea Simmons
• Mary Anning: Fossil Hunter, by Sally M. Walker
• Mary Anning's Curiosity, by Monica Kulling
• Rare Treasures: Mary Anning and Her Remarkable Discoveries, by Don Brown

Of these, I think that Dragon Bones is by far the best and Lightning Mary is by far the worst. 

An adult biography that's interesting to read (or listen to via audiobook) is Jurassic Mary. And after that, one can watch the indie film Ammonite to find the small references to factual parts of Anning's life and discuss how/why the creators chose to diverge from the known facts in other parts. Tack on an essay or a creative response like a cartoon or work of fanfic and that's a pretty solid little ELA unit right there!

Because Mary Anning and Jane Austen were contemporaries, roughly (Jane Austen was once extremely rude to Mary Anning's father), another good text to add to the ELA component of the study is Jane Austen's Persuasion, partly set in Lyme Regis. Jane Austen and Mary Anning were of different economic and social classes, and it's an interesting activity to read a Jane Austen novel and try to piece in where these invisible tradespeople ought to be. Austen was revolutionary for her female voice, but she was still classist!

One ichthyosaur fossil definitely found by Mary Anning, and two more with unknown provenance but possibly also found by her, in the Natural History Museum in London

Since we visited London and Lyme Regis, Anning's position in time and place were both crucial to our study in a way that would probably be difficult to replicate at home. Lyme Regis' location in rural Dorset apparently made it a backwater during Anning's time, and people who made the effort to travel the one road into town or take a ship into the Roman harbor generally thought that the residents of Lyme Regis were a bunch of hicks. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd acted like a bunch of hicks, either, and just maybe part of my passion for Anning is because I think she, just like baby Julie in rural Arkansas, might have felt intellectually out of place in her cultural home. But even today, we could see how out of the way Lyme Regis still is just by driving there, down one VERY narrow country road and into a town with roads even more narrow--and this is after they'd historically been widened a couple of times since the invention of cars! Everything in Lyme Regis was either uphill or downhill, and none of it was far from the ocean.

The time period in which Anning lived also went from being a paleontological backwater, when paleontology didn't even exist as a science, nor did the word "dinosaur," to a thriving landscape of prehistoric creatures as the topics of study--many of whom had been discovered and prepared by Anning! It's pretty outrageous to read the list of names, all male, that crossed paths with Anning, learned from her, bought fossils from her, and then turned around and used her fossils and her knowledge to better their own positions. It's gross how many men bought a brand-new fossil from her... and then named it after themselves. We could see this at the Natural History Museum in London--although the signage now lists Mary Anning as the finder of a fossil when that can be proven, the original labels on the fossils often mention just the names of those rich guys who bought the fossils from her, and there are SO many other fossils that probably came from Anning, but it just can't be proven because the rich guys didn't even bother to write down her name. Who knows how much the scope of her work could be expanded if we just had an accurate count of how many fossils she'd found and where they'd all gone?

Fossil Marine Reptiles Gallery in the Natural History Museum in London

Ultimately, it's impossible to know the full extent of Anning's contribution, and the necessity for speculation, I think, makes her a terrific topic of study for high schoolers. So many historical figures presented to high schoolers to study are super well-known, with no room or need for further speculation. But true scholarship requires the presentation of ideas and opinions and theories, and the true work is in justifying it. And with Mary Anning's life and work, there's a lot of scope for speculation! 

Every Council's Own Girl Scout Fun Patch Program That Your Girl Scouts Can Earn from Anywhere: Reading and Writing

Welcome back to my very weird series in which I am listing, week by week, topic by topic, every single Council's Own Girl Scout fun patch program that your Girl Scouts can earn from everywhere!

My Girl Scout troop enjoys earning Council's Own fun patches, as well as official badges and retired badges. I usually look for a fun patch that they can earn in addition to a badge whenever we're planning a big project or a trip, etc. This list is essentially just my own research written down for easy reference.

This week's category: Reading and Writing! This includes fun patches about literary characters or genres, fun patches that support literacy, and fun patches that incorporate reading or writing challenges. 

I was a little disappointed that there weren't more Reading and Writing fun patches. Reading and writing are my favorite things, sure, but also the favorite things of many of the kids in my Girl Scout troop! I suppose that part of the problem might be that it can feel tricky to keep assigned reading and writing activities from feeling too school-ish, but there's so much scope for fun. When my Girl Scout troop had a Percy Jackson meeting, they made and battled monster pinatas, created their own card game, figured out which Greek god or goddess had secretly parented them, and just generally had a glorious time diving into Greek mythology and children's fantasy.

For this list, I only included fun patch programs that fit the following criteria:

1. Girl Scouts can earn this fun patch wherever they are. I did not include any fun patch programs that have site-specific criteria, unless I felt that those criteria would be easy to substitute and still maintain the point of the fun patch program. I also didn't include fun patch programs that require time-specific criteria that have already passed, such as patches programs designed for the 2020 COVID lockdowns. I noted in the description of each patch when substitutions would be required.
2. Girl Scouts can obtain the council's requirements to earn this fun patch. I found several instances in which the council still sells a specific fun patch, but has deleted all the requirements from its website. If I couldn't find an easy link to those requirements from another site, I did not include the patch.
3. Girl Scouts can obtain the physical fun patch. There were also several instances in which councils still host the requirements for a fun patch program, but no longer sell the patch (or, as in the case of a few GSAK patches, they have fewer than ten remaining). If it is unlikely for a Girl Scout to be able to obtain the fun patch, I did not include it. The link to purchase each fun patch is in the caption for its graphic.

READING AND WRITING

Library Love GSC

Library Love, Girl Scouts of Citrus. Become familiar with your library and the services that it offers through this fun patch program. This fun patch pairs well with the Cadette Book Artist badge, or for a younger Girl Scout troop planning a field trip to the public library.

Living Like Laura GSEIWI

Living Like Laura, Girl Scouts of Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois. Learn about Laura Ingalls Wilder while immersing yourself in the pioneer life. This fun patch program pairs well with the Junior Playing the Past badge. 

Reading Diva GSWCF

Reading Diva, Girl Scouts of West Central Florida. Rewards Girl Scouts for reading. You could pair this with a school or community reading program, or a book drive service project.

Read to Lead GSLE

Read to Lead, Girl Scouts of Louisiana East. Read widely and explore activities that advocate literacy.

Summer Reading GSAK

Summer Reading, Girl Scouts of Alaska. Create and complete a summer reading goal and try other literacy activities to earn this fun patch. Thsi is a good fun patch program for Girl Scouts to work on independently. 

Here's a look at my complete fun patch series:

• Arts and Crafts
• Culture, Diversity, and Equity
• Games and Sports
• Geography/History
• Outdoors
• Practical Life Skills
• Reading and Writing
• Science
• Service Learning
• Social-Emotional Skills
• Technology, Engineering, and Math

Follow my Craft Knife Facebook page for more Girl Scout resources as I exhaustively compile them!

April Favorites: Cows are More Emotionally Available Than King Charles, and Mary Poppins is an Accurate Portrayal of London

Here's how I've been disassociating from the real world this month!

The Locked Tomb Series

My college student (and, okay, Tiktok...) is my best source of books. She reads like she won't live through the day if she hasn't mown through two fantasy novels, the latest issue of three comic book series, and at least one chapter of a boring non-fiction book about Mongolia. I always act on her book recommendations, even if they don't gel for me right away... as Gideon the Ninth did not. 

I started reading Gideon the Ninth, then immediately complained to my kid, "I don't know what's happening."

She was all, "I know. Keep going."

A chapter later, I noted, "I still don't know what's going on, and everything is gross."

She was all, "Yup. don't stop tho."

Sixty-five pages in, I looked up with frantic eyes and exclaimed "I DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS BOOK WHY AM I SO OBSESSED OMG GIDEON IS MY FAVORITE PERSON EVER!!!!!!!"

Three books later, I am literally on Tumblr scrolling fan posts and fanart to get my Gideon fix because the next book is not going to be out until at least January, sob!

The Locked Tomb series is something that you just have to go with. It's a particularly great reading experience if you've always considered yourself such a clever girl, because there is no way you're going to understand what is going on half the time... and yet it's still so compelling! 

Fortunately, perseverance is rewarded. When I read the second book, Harrow the Ninth, I did not understand what was happening in that book AT ALL, but I finally understood (some) of what had been going on in Gideon the Ninth. And when I read Nona the Ninth, I did not understand that one at all, BUT I figured out most of Gideon and a little more of Harrow.

I cannot WAIT for Alecto the Ninth!

Read this if you want to see an awesome sci-fi/fantasy mash-up, if you've secretly got a quiet little internal Goth/emo vibe going on in your heart, and if you love excellent character development and want to absolutely fall in love with/become obsessed with your favorite characters.

Bonus points if you can get a buddy to read it, too, because all my college student and I do these days is gossip about Ortus and tell each other facts about the social-emotional capacity of cows.

The British Royals

I've loosely followed the British royal family since I was a kid--I woke up SUPER early to watch Princess Diana's wedding from the carpeted floor of my grandparents' house, woke up super early to watch her funeral from the gross old gold velvet couch of my first real apartment, bought my little kids heart-shaped doughnuts in honor of William and Kate's wedding, and casually followed along with the gossip in subsequent years.

My teenager shares my casual interest, so she and I happily made Queen Elizabeth II's death into a WHOLE THING, in which we literally ate snacks while watching her funeral coverage and gossiping. Having teenagers is my favorite thing!

Because I'm really just here for the gossip, I avidly read Spare the second it came through from my Holds queue at the library. Just to put it right out there, I am FIRMLY on team Harry/Meghan. Like, Harry is clearly a big, dumb ginger who rarely gets a turn at the shared brain cell, but on the other hand, I don't think the royal family, other than Princess Diana, actually loved their kids? And Diana's love, let's just be real here, was also a little... problematic, if problematic is really the best word to describe a mother who showers her children with affection and adoration and then fucks off and goes no-contact for months at a time, leaving the kids with a coterie of cold, emotionless adults who see family as a public-facing business. But at least she didn't throw her kids under the bus of public scrutiny in order to make herself look marginally better, which I firmly believe that Charles regularly does. 

But seriously, look at what poor little baby Charles had to deal with:

What better way to greet your three-your-old, whom you haven't seen in weeks and whose birthday you missed, than with a warm... shoulder squeeze? 

Unfortunately, NOBODY in the family would also read Spare just to humor me and let me have someone to roast the royals with, so instead I listened to the episode on Spare from Celebrity Memoir Book Club and pretended that the hosts and I are best friends:

Nobody will watch The Crown with me, either, so I'm catching up with Season Four on DVD all by myself, and pretending that Season Five doesn't exist yet because I don't have Netflix.

Ooh, maybe my AirBnb luck will hold and our London AirBnb's Smart TV will be logged into someone else's Netflix account! Bootlegging former guests' streaming services is my favorite thing about AirBnb.

On the way home from dropping my kid back at college the other week, I was able to binge the entire run of The Second Elizabethan Age on Spotify:

I did appreciate the overall look at the politics and media of Queen Elizabeth II's reign, but overall it was only okay. If you've got any better podcast recs for coverage of the British Royals (or a Netflix password you're happy to share), please send them my way! You'll find me hanging out on my bed with my teenager and watching Coronation coverage on Youtube--the teenager has already requested homemade Victoria sponge, so we'll be well-provisioned for our vigil.

Trip Planning

I'll post another time about "proper" trip planning--you know, figuring out the itinerary and trying not to blow our budget on hard cider and how to convince teenagers to visit just one more museum without later being smothered by them in your sleep... but obviously, the most important part of planning a big trip is figuring out all the thematically-relevant books and movies and albums to consume!

Academically, since I want to use our England studies and trip as a unit study credit on my teenager's high school transcript, we're currently reading (an abridged version of, because OMG) Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. I love place-based studies, so I'm eager to talk about the impact of the setting on the scenes of Arthur's birth and death, in particular, as we walk around Tintagel Castle and Glastonbury Tor this summer. I want to compare it to Susan Cooper's unhinged Dark is Rising series, which the older three people in our family unit still talk about after binging the entire series together on a long-ago road trip... but it turns out that that road trip? Oops, it was twelve years ago and for some reason my teenager insists that she doesn't remember a ten-hour audiobook series that she listened to over a two-week period at the age of four. SIGH! If we ever finish listening to the adventures of Lancelot, God's Greatest Idiot, then (even the abridged Le Morte is over nine hours long!), I'm hoping we'll have time to swing through at least the first couple of Dark is Rising books. Perhaps that's what we should do during the second week of our trip when we're driving around the English countryside!

My college student comes home for summer break next week, and I'm currently machinating how I can convince everyone to choose a Jane Austen book as our first family audiobook of the summer--this is actual footage of us in our family free time:

The kids LOVED Pride and Prejudice, so Sense and Sensibility would be the obvious choice, but I kind of want to go in a different direction so they don't pigeonhole Austen. Perhaps Persuasion, even though we won't actually be going to Bath?

For Family Movie Night funsies, here are my contenders so far:

Please feel free to spam me with all of the British-themed TV and movies that I've missed!