29. The Deeds of the Disturber Elizabeth Peters
289 pages. Mystery.
Bookshelved (for now)
Emerson seized me by the wrist.”What religious scruples? What scruples? You have none, Peabody, and you know it.”
I cheated. Shhh. I actually finished this book in 2012. This was a fabulously fun read. It is the diary of Amelia Peabody and her Egyptology adventured. This one is set in London. When I get home I think I will purchase the whole series.

30. The Elements of the Arthurian Tradition John Matthews
104 pages. Mythology.
Bookshelved.
Following the story of Arthurian lore and legend, this book concentrates on the magic, adventure and romance of the Celtic myth. It tells us about the sorcery of Merlin; the faery women of Arthur's court; the quest for the Holy Grail; the fellowship of the round table and King Arthur himself. Many of the well-known knights are included in this study such as Lancelot, Gawain, Perceval, and Galahad and the book tells of their chivalric journeys and particular detail of the origins of Lancelot and Tristian. John Matthews spent more than two decades studying the Arthurian tradition and advocates the personal involvement of readers in the legend. To enable the reader to be more conversant with the Arthurian Myth, exercises are provided which ask you to immerse yourself into your imagination and really sense yourself as part of Arthur's world.
This book was a summary of Arthurian myth. It did have some spiritual exercises to find the inner Camelot and what-not. All-in-all it was a decent read.

31. House of Sand and Fog Andre Dubus III
365 pages. Fiction. Literature.
In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to restore his family's dignity. Kathy Nicolo is a troubled young woman whose house is all she has left, and who refuses to let her hard-won stability slip away from her. Sheriff Lester Burdon, a married man who finds himself falling in love with Kathy, becomes obsessed with helping her fight for justice.
Drawn by their competing desires to the same small house in the California hills and doomed by their tragic inability to understand one another, the three converge in an explosive collision course. Combining unadorned realism with profound empathy, House of Sand and Fog marks the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction.
Read for book club. If you want devastation you should read it.

Meaning

Origin

It isn't at all obvious why 'handbasket' was
chosen as the preferred vehicle to convey people to hell. One theory on
the origin of the phrase is that derives from the use of handbaskets in
the guillotining method of capital punishment. If Hollywood films are to
be believed, the decapitated heads were caught in baskets - the
casualty presumably going straight to hell, without passing Go.

The first version of 'in a handbasket' in print does in fact relate to an imaginary decapitated head. In Samuel Sewall's Diary, 1714, we find:

"A committee brought in
something about Piscataqua. Govr said he would give his head in a
Handbasket as soon as he would pass it."

Sewall was born in England but emigrated to
America when he was nine, and this citation reinforces the widely held
opinion that the phrase is of US origin. That is almost certainly the
case and, even now, 'hell in a handbasket' isn't often used outside the
USA. The expression probably had English parentage though. The English
preacher Thomas Adams referred to 'going to heaven in a wheelbarrow' in Gods Bounty on Proverbs, 1618:

Oh, this oppressor [i.e. one who was wealthy but gave little to the church] must needs
go to heaven! What shall hinder him? But it
will be, as the byword is, in a wheelbarrow: the
fiends, and not the angels, will take hold on him.

'Going to heaven in a wheelbarrow' was a euphemistic way of saying 'going to
hell'. The notion of sinners being literally wheeled to hell in barrows
or carts is certainly very old. The mediaeval stained glass windows of
Fairford Church in Gloucestershire contain an image of a woman being
carried off to purgatory in a wheelbarrow pushed by a blue devil.

The thought behind the phrase is 17th century,
but the precise wording 'going to hell in a handbasket' and its
alternative form 'going to hell in a handcart' originated in the US
around the middle of the 19th century. The 'handbasket' version is now
the more common.

'Going to hell in a handbasket' seems to be
just a colourful version of 'going to hell', in the same sense as 'going
to the dogs'. 'In a handbasket' is an alliterative intensifier which
gives the expression a catchy ring. There doesn't appear to be any
particular significance to 'handbasket' apart from the alliteration -
any other conveyance beginning with 'H' would have done just as well.
The similar earlier phrases 'hell in a basket' and 'hell in a
wheelbarrow', not having the same catchiness, have now disappeared from
common use. Let's launch 'going to hell in a hovercraft' and see if that
flies, so to speak.

The first example of 'hell in a hand basket'
that I have found in print comes in I. Winslow Ayer's account of events
of the American Civil War The Great North-Western Conspiracy, 1865. A very similar but slightly fuller report of Morris's comments was printed in the House Documents of the U.S. Congress, in 1867:

Speaking of men who had been arrested he [Judge Morris]
said, "Some of our very best, and thousands of brave men, at this very
moment in Camp Douglas, are our friends; who, if they were once at
liberty, would send the abolitionists to hell in a hand-basket."

'Hell in a handcart' is found in print before
'hell in a handbasket'. The earliest citation I can find for that is in
Elbridge Paige's book of Short Patent Sermons, 1841:

[Those people] who would rather ride to hell in a hand-cart than walk to heaven supported by the staff of industry.