Sunday Salon: Names and other literary references

Our dog's name is Daisy. Really my kids named her but I like to imagine that we really named her for Daisy in The Great Gatsby (although hopefully she won't come to such a terrible end!). And when we were looking to adopt another dog, I had already decided that his name was going to be Gatsby. It just would have worked. And then the first adoption didn't happen. The second dog was named Clyde and he wouldn't have been named for a character (not that I couldn't have told people we named him for Clyde Edgerton, a wonderful North Carolina writer) but that didn't work either. And now I find myself needing another dog name. I don't know if it will be for a girl or a boy so I might even need one of each. I could always use Gatsby again since that little dog lives with someone else now and is terribly unlikely to have been named Gatsby but somehow I still think of him in those terms. Our dog before Daisy was Spenser (alternately for Sir Edmund Spenser, if you're me, or Robert Parker's Spenser for Hire if you're my husband--but either way a literary name as well) so I do have a habit of bookish names for dogs. I'm tossing around Bronte for a girl dog but really I'm stumped. What literary name would you give a pet?

This week hasn't been the best reading week for me, finding me unable to settle well into a book. There's just too much going on in our lives at the moment. R. had her first dance competition of the season and despite the fact that I took two books with me to read during the hours of down time, the idea of R.'s very first ever solo had me too nauseated to read. (She did great, winning her category--easily done given she was the only one in her category!--and coming in 5th place overall for junior recreational solos.) The three hour trip to and from the competition wiped out a large chunk of my reading time too although we happily listened to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on CD again to pass the time in the car. So despite starting a load of books, I didn't do them enough justice to say I traveled through their pages this week. With any luck, this coming week will be better and calmer.