A Certain Slant of Light

As so often happens with nonfiction books, the subtitle of C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature is quite misleading. It suggests that the book is full of interesting tidbits about, say, Chaucer, whereas in fact the book is much more focused on the classical authors who shaped the medieval image of the heavens - hence “the discarded image,” largely swept away by later thinkers, but still surviving in odd phrases here and there.

I was particularly fascinated by the chapter about which ancient authors were popular and relatively accessible during the medieval period. For instance, their most direct access to Plato came through a Latin translation of Timaeus, but they had many works by neo-Platonists, and it was through this neo-Platonist filter that they had their own Platonic age of thought. (The neo-Platonists had actually been the last great holdouts against Christianity, so it’s fascinating to see them simply get folded into it here.)

The book also goes into great detail about the Image itself. I won’t try to summarize it all here, but a few bits I found especially interesting:

1. The medieval model was indeed geocentric, but Lewis points out that this does not mean that medieval thinkers considered the Earth especially important. In fact, they considered the Earth a mere infinitesimal dot, the lowest spot in the universe and the ultimate destination for the universe’s refuse. A person standing on Earth was looking up and up and up into infinitely more beautiful, perfect, higher and more important spheres.

2. The medieval thinker also thought the universe was suffused with sunlight and music (the music of the spheres); the idea of space as cold, dark, and scary came about later.

3. The belief in the influence of the planets on earthly life remained strong, and the Church had to exert a great deal of energy against the idea of astrological determinism.

4. There’s also a chapter about the longaevi, the Good Folk, with a fascinating discussion about the different meanings assigned to these beings - meanings so divergent that Spenser could write The Faerie Queen as a compliment to Queen Elizabeth, while at the same time people were sometimes tried for witchcraft on the charge of traffic with the fairy folk. (As Lewis notes, witchcraft trials were far more a Renaissance than a medieval phenomenon.)

Also, book gives insight into certain aspects of Lewis’s own fiction, in particular that bit in That Hideous Strength where Lewis starts talking about the seven genders and then just sort of wanders off in the middle of gender #4. “How can you tell us there are seven genders and then only give us four?” I demanded. Well, now I think that to Lewis (the medievalist) it was perfectly obvious that the seven genders were male, female, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury. The other planets weren’t discovered till later and Earth of course doesn’t count on account of being the cesspit of the universe.

And he didn’t spend much time explaining what exactly Jupiter gender was like because, to his steeped-in-medieval-literature mind, this was perfectly obvious. The Jupiter character is “Kingly; but we must think of a King at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. The Jovial character is cheerful, festive yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous.” I believe extrapolating this temperament into a gender is Lewis’s innovation, but he could be working off a classical source.

However, sadly, this book does not cast any light on what crimes the star might have committed in order to be banished to an island in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. However, it seems likely these also have an ancient or medieval source, so perhaps someday I will find out!

I was cautiously optimistic about this year’s Newbery winner, Renée Watson’s All the Blues in the Sky, because I liked Watson’s earlier book Piecing Me Together. However, these hopes collapsed when I realized that this is yet another example of my least favorite Newbery genre: Books in Verse About Death.

There is probably someone, someone, who could make me enjoy a Book in Verse about Death, but unfortunate Watson is not that person, or at least this book is not that book.

Our heroine is Sage, who recently lost her best friend when she was hit by a drunk driver while walking to Sage’s house for Sage’s birthday. Sage is now part of the grief group at school, where she sits inwardly sneering at the two members who lost people after a long illness (a grandmother to dementia, and a twin sister to leukemia), because THEY don’t know what it’s like to lose someone unexpectedly.

And, you know, technically this is true. But one feels that at some point someone should point out to Sage that she doesn’t know what it’s like to live in the Valley of the Shadow of Death for years, watching a loved one slowly wither away.

And okay fine, Sage’s Aunt Ini does eventually point out that everyone grieves differently and you can’t directly compare grief etc etc. However, there’s a scene where Sage screams at these girls that they don’t understand anything, and I really, really wanted one of them to scream back that they might not understand her grief but at least they’re TRYING, unlike Sage who very obviously doesn’t give a damn about them. Like, her disdain is so obvious that the other members of Grief Group (the ones who also lost people unexpectedly and are therefore acceptable to Sage) comment that Sage doesn’t like the girls whose relatives died long, slow, agonizing deaths, and Sage responds that it’s because they “don’t know how good they had it.”

But of course no one screams back at Sage. Of course when Sage apologizes, everyone accepts it, instead of telling her to stuff her apology where the sun don’t shine, or at least pointing out the fact that she blew up about how the others don’t understand her pain when she hasn’t been trying even slightly to understand theirs.

And then! And then! ( spoilers for the ending )

I was excited about Ghost Story: The Turn of the Screw, because it stars Michelle Dockery and Dan Stevens (pre-Downton Abbey!), and the screenplay was written by Sandy Welch, also responsible for the screenplays of such winners as the Romola Garai Emma and the 2006 Jane Eyre.

However, this adaptation leaned very hard on the Edmund Wilson interpretation of The Turn of the Screw, which is that the “ghosts” are in fact products of the repressed governess’s overheated imagination. And whoever had charge of the filming clearly felt that one should never imply when one could show, so we are treated to multiple scenes of evil Peter Quinn having sex with the former governess, sexually assaulting the maids, etc, which I feel is a counterproductive choice in a ghost story.

They also introduced a frame story where the governess is in an asylum, with Dan Stevens as her psychiatrist. I always enjoy seeing Dan Stevens but I must admit that here his entire plotline seems superfluous. Why keep cutting away from the central story? It constantly undermines the atmosphere of claustrophobic horror that the ghost story is trying to build up.

So I was all set to complain about the film, but in fact I’ve been thinking about the story on and off since I saw it. Is the governess truly seeing ghosts? What did happen to the children before our governess arrived? And what truly happened in the end? So I suppose I must crankily admit that the film is effective even if it’s not artful.

Will this finally inspire me to read Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw? Probably not, as I’ve never fully recovered from how much I hated Daisy Miller. But maybe someday.

In 2005, my family went on a three week trip to Australia and New Zealand, on which I embarked determined to bring back gems of antipodal literature.

Unfortunately, I was not very internet savvy at that point, so I didn’t successfully manage to search for the titles of these gems. Presumably I could have asked the booksellers, but this literally didn’t occur to me until I was writing this post, so clearly that was a non-starter.

So mostly I purchased the complete works of Isobelle Carmody, plus some of Lynley Dodd’s Slinki Malinki books (happy to report that my niece now enjoys them). But I did consider Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This?, before concluding that this book would obviously make it to the United States before long.

I was correct! The book made it to the United States within a year or two after that trip. I proceeded not to read it for another twenty years.

But finally I have read it. At this point it’s kind of a period piece of my own youth. CDs! DVDs! Young people who use their cell phones to actually call each other! Be still my beating heart.

But also, the character who is so relentlessly fat-shamed by her mother and her classmates that she informs our heroine that she wishes she could become anorexic. Unable to achieve this fatal disease, she instead takes up smoking. She ultimately gives it up when she gets a boyfriend who likes her curves, but still. Oh, 2005, how I don’t miss you. What an awful year. Awful decade in fact. Sometimes I feel like an old curmudgeon shaking my metaphorical cane at The State of the World These Days, so it’s cheering in a way to be reminded that I hated the world when I was a teenager, too.

“But Aster,” you complain. “The actual book? Do you have any thoughts about Does My Head Look Big in This?”

Well, to be honest, the book also reminded me that I had a tortured relationship with contemporary YA even before its Twilightification. It also seemed to me that the move from children’s literature to YA echoed the arc of Fern’s character growth in Charlotte’s Web: at the start she saves Wilbur the runt pig and spends hours listening to the talking animals, but at the end all she cares about is some stupid boy who took her for a ride on the Ferris wheel. It’s a shift from wonder and possibility and talking animals to boring romance and clothes and makeup (or boring sports if the main character is a boy).

As an adult I have more tolerance for this sort of thing, but I suspect that in my youth I would have been horrified that our heroine starts wearing the hijab full-time and still spends most of her time thinking about clothes and makeup and boys. To my seventeen-year-old mind, the chief benefit of wearing the hijab would be never having to think about any of those things ever again! Or at least until you’re ready to get married. (I recognize that this is not how it actually works, but it’s still what I would have thought.)

So in fact it’s a good thing that I waited 20 years to read the book, because I probably would not have much appreciated the book in 2005. But in 2026, it’s given me a nice wander down memory lane.

Although Lieutenant Hornblower is the second book chronologically in the Hornblower series, it was one of the later books written in the series. So, although the narrator is in fact Lieutenant Bush rather than Hornblower himself, it is very much a Hornblower book, which has the presumably unintentional effect of making Bush sound absolutely obsessed with Hornblower.

Oh, sure, he’s constantly running down Hornblower’s appearance (he looks like a scarecrow! He looked like he dressed in the dark and forgot to straighten his clothes!)... but that just shows he’s extremely aware of Hornblower’s appearance, as he rarely comments on how anyone else looks. He stares at Hornblower’s beautiful, skillful, fascinating hands (yes, he actually describes them as fascinating), and wonders if admiring a junior lieutenant smacks of French equalitarianism. He watches Hornblower drink a bucket of water from the well, which sluices down his chin and soaks his white shirt, and “The very sight of him was enough to make Bush, who had already had one drink from the well, feel consumed with thirst all over again.”

I mean yes they did just complete a sneak attack during which no one had a drink in the tropical heat for at least 12 hours, but also WOW. That’s what seeing Hornblower in a wet shirt does to a man, huh!

And then Bush is wounded, and the last thing he remembers before he blacks out is Hornblower’s pleading, tender voice… his gentle hands… the feeling of being safe and comforted by Hornblower’s presence… And once he’s in hospital on land, Hornblower brings him an entire basket of tropical fruit, and Bush is so bowled over he barely manages a “Thank you,” and then they just gaze at each other, which, let’s be real, is probably Hornblower’s preferred love language: Significant Looks.

Then later on Hornblower gets appointed captain, and Bush is so thrilled and so drunk that he ends the night stumbling down the hall, both arms around Hornblower’s neck, bellowing “FOR HE’S A JOLLY GOOD FELLOW” at the top of his lungs as Hornblower helps him to bed. One presumes that Forester simply cut out before Bush dragged Hornblower in for a sloppy drunken kiss and Hornblower patted him awkwardly on the shoulder and fled.

So yes, all the people who recced Hornblower on the grounds that it is very slashy are 100% right. Amazing. This may in fact be the high point of slashiness for the series, as it seems unlikely that Hornblower POV is ever going to be quite as obsessed with Bush as Bush is with Hornblower (the series after all is not called Lieutenant Bush), but we shall see.

Oh, as for the actual plot, ( spoilers )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

D. E. Stevenson’s The House on the Cliff. This was Stevenson’s last novel, and although it’s technically set at the time it was written (the 1960s), it feels more like an interwar period piece. But otherwise it’s classic charming Stevenson. Young Elfrida Jane inherits a house in Cornwall from her estranged grandparents (who disinherited Elfrida’s mother after she married an actor), and the book is all about her settling into the neighborhood, reveling in the possession of her own home, learning about farming and gardening, and swimming on the delightful little beach at the base of the cliffs.

E. M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in London. Somehow Stevensons and Delafields often end up going together in my reading, although I think Delafield at her grimmest gets much darker than Stevenson, who doesn’t have a grim mode. In any case, the Provincial Lady books feature Delafield at her most sprightly. In this book, the Provincial Lady uses the funds from her first book (Diary of a Provincial Lady) to get a flat in London, and also meets many literary people on the strength of her newfound literary fame.

Finally, I zipped through Jane Langton’s Her Majesty, Grace Jones. After a neighbor tells Grace that she looks just like the little English princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, Grace Jones decides that she’s obviously a secret, third Windsor sister, growing up in secret in America to take the throne once she gets older! Mostly family hijinks. The kids put on a circus, which is always great fun.

What I’m Reading Now

Hilary McKay’s latest, Rosa by Starlight. Loving this book! Finally, a book that remembers fictional orphans are for Gothic Whump and Adventure and Magic. I believe we may be getting a literal magic cat and I’m so excited.

What I Plan to Read Next

I am going to give Project Hail Mary a try if it kills me. Baffling that I feel so resistant to it, because I really liked The Martian! But here we are.

Like many of Solzhenitsyn’s books, In the First Circle has a tortured publication history. It was first written in the 1950s, revised in vain hope of official Soviet publication in 1964, published in the West in 1968, and then republished for the first time in its full form in 2008, which is the version I read. So if you’ve read the book but this review sounds like it came out of an alternate universe, possibly you read the earlier version.

The biggest change was to the action that kicks off the novel. In the first published version, Volodin makes a telephone call to a doctor to warn him not to share information about an experimental drug with his Western colleagues, as the security apparatus would consider that a traitorous act. In the 2008 version, Volodin calls the US embassy to warn them that a Soviet spy is going to try to steal the secrets of the nuclear bomb.

In both versions, this telephone call kicks off a flurry of activity in a sharaksha - that is, a special secret prison where prisoners with scientific skills work on making inventions for the state. One of these inventions is a process for identifying the voice of a caller on an anonymous phone call, which has just jumped to number one priority for the security services.

In other hands, this premise might set off a suspenseful game of spy-vs-spy. In fact, the New York Times review quoted on the cover says the story is “filled with suspense,” which frankly makes me suspect that the reviewer read a synopsis rather than the book, which could not be less interested in suspense.

Instead, Solzhenitsyn uses this incident as a kaleidoscope to explore not only the world of the sharaksha, but all the many lives touched by the existence of this special prison: not just the prisoners themselves, but the guards, the guards’ supervisors, the entire security apparatus up to Stalin himself, not to mention the prisoner Nerzhin’s wife and her fellow grad students and the young man she’s been flirting with, even as Nerzhin flirts with one of the female state employees in the prison…

Ostensibly, the First Circle of the title is a reference to the sharaksha, Dante’s first circle of Hell where the virtuous pagans live: the nicest part of Hell, but still Hell. But in fact it seemed to me that this circle expanded to include the lives of everyone touched by the prison, perhaps everyone in the Soviet Union in 1950. A grad student struggling over whether to turn informer or risk having her thesis failed if she refuses. A minion of Stalin’s struggling to find a reply when Stalin puckishly suggests that if they bring the death penalty back, the minion might be the first to go! Stalin himself, miserable and alone, isolated by the terror he has created in everyone around him.

What will you do to make yourself comfortable? Who will you hurt to make your own life better? Solzhenitsyn is not an ascetic for asceticism’s sake - some of the most charming scenes in the book are little moments of comfort that the prisoners have managed to scrape out - but he is absolutely opposed to purchasing comfort, safety, or indeed even survival at the cost of someone else.

(Once Solzhenitsyn was exiled to America, Americans were apparently distressed by his disdain for American materialism, but we really should have seen it coming. We are after all a nation of people largely happy to treat “Well of course Amazon exploits its workers and undermines local businesses and is simply overall evil, but it’s so convenient” as a clinching moral argument in favor of shopping at Amazon.)

A note about how to read this book: I struggled for the first hundred pages or so because I was trying to keep track of all the characters. As Solzhenitsyn introduces a new batch of characters every five chapters or so, this swiftly becomes impossible, especially because he never stops doing this. You might expect that at some point he’d decide he’s assembled the whole cast, but no, right up till quite near the end he’s happy to hare off for two chapters to go on a digression (fascinating! Rich in psychological and philosophical detail!) about a character we’re never going to see again.

As you can imagine, trying to keep track of all these characters (each of whom has their own little cast of side characters) is very frustrating, and my reading experience became much more pleasant when I realized it was also unnecessary. Much better just to read the book like you’re floating down a river. The most important characters will bob up again and again, so you’ll come to know them quite well. Other characters may just be islands that you’ll float past, interesting in their own right of course, but it’s also fine if you can’t remember all the details about Yakonov and his ex-girlfriend who goes to church because the regime is anti-church, which all occurred decades ago so why are we having two chapters about it now? Well, because it’s another little chip of colored glass in our kaleidoscope, that’s why.

And if it turns out a character you thought was an island is actually a boat who keeps floating along, so you do need to know that name after all? Well, that’s why there’s a character index at the start of the book.

Solzhenitsyn is not the least interested in suspense, in plot. He’s interested in character, in exploring different viewpoints on how to live in the world, and in exploring different facets of that world until it feels like a real and breathing place. The book is nearly 750 pages, but in the end, I still wanted to keep on exploring.

At certain moments in Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, one feels that one has stepped into the middle of a barfight that’s been running for decades and shows no sign of stopping.

This barfight has a number of different sub-fights (Captain Cook: heroic scientific explorer or wicked vanguard of British imperialism?), but because this book is focused on Captain Cook’s final voyage, it deals most prominently with one question: did the Hawaiians actually believe that Cook was a god?

Arguing for the affirmative: Hawaiians had a well-established cultural tradition of men who were also gods. Their own high kings were considered gods, so it would not have been a stretch to look at the leader of an expedition from overseas and go, “Hmm, maybe this guy is also a god.” When Hawaiian historian Samuel Mānaiakalani Kamakau gathered evidence from Hawaiian elders in the mid-1800s, they did indeed tell him that they had all believed (at first) that Cook was Lono. Mark Twain learned the same thing when he visited in the 1860s. The crews of Cook’s two ships also believed that Cook had been acclaimed as a god.

Arguing against: saying the Hawaiians believed Cook was a god makes them look gullible and naive, and plays right into paternalistic, racist, imperialist beliefs about “primitive natives.”

Readers, I would like to suggest a third way. What if Cook was Lono?

When he walked into that ceremony in Kealakekua Bay, accepted the homage of the Hawaiian people, and ascended the tower where the priests spoke to the gods, he became Lono. He stepped into the role of Lono; he was inhabited by Lono. One may quibble about the exact mechanism, but the basic fact remains that the Hawaiians were right.

But in becoming Lono, Cook stepped directly on the path to his own destruction. In his own cultural terms, he had committed blasphemy, broken the first commandment: thou shalt have no other gods before me. In inhabiting the role of a man who was also a god, he had committed a crime against the One True God.

But, at the same time, he was stepping into a role that every Christian child knows. In Cook’s belief system, there was once a man who was God, and He died a violent death.

(In fact, one of Cook’s men argued that Cook died a genuine martyr, accepting his death - “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” - but he was almost certainly trying to cover his own ass for cowardice. He was in a boat just offshore when Cook died, and rowed away rather than rowing in to help.)

In the Hawaiian belief system, meanwhile, Cook’s identity of Lono did not make his death inevitable - yet. As long as he inhabited Lono’s role properly, he was safe.

But first, Cook outstayed Lono’s season, which lasts for four months and then departs. But Cook did not depart punctually. Great tension had grown up before he left.

And once he left, storms forced him back to Kealakekua. He arrived months before the time for Lono’s return, at which point the Hawaiians began to wonder: was this man Lono after all? Now both cultures were aligned, and Cook’s death became inevitable. The theft of one of Cook’s launches led to a confrontation on the beach at Kealakekua, which ended with Cook’s violent death.

The Newbery Project is BACK, baby! Yesterday, the American Library Association announced the 2026 Newbery winners, which means I’ve got five hot fresh Newbery books to read.

After winning a Newbery Honor in 2018 for Piecing Me Together, Renee Watson went for gold this year with All the Blues in the Sky. I quite liked Piecing Me Together, so I’m hopeful I’ll enjoy this new one as well.

Daniel Nayeri is also a familiar Newbery name: he got an honor in 2024 for The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams, which I thought was pretty mediocre to be honest. But perhaps I’ll be more impressed by The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story.

Although this is Karina Yan Glaser’s first Newbery, I’m familiar with her Vanderbeekers series, which is a sort of modern-day version of the Melendys. I read the first book and thought it was okay, but not so okay that I wanted to read on… so we’ll see how I feel about The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli.

Finally, two books by new-to-me authors: Aubrey Hartman’s The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest, and María Dolores Águila’s A Sea of Lemon Trees: The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez. The title of the first is giving me flashbacks to Scary Stories for Young Foxes, which was perhaps the Newbery’s first foray into horror. Fox horror possibly its own genre now? Will report back as I learn more.

I’ve been enjoying Dorothy Lathrop’s books so much that I checked the university catalog to see if they had any other books by her, and discovered that she illustrated a book of poems by Sara Teasdale! Teasdale has been one of my favorites since we read “There Will Come Soft Rains” in high school, so of course I had to give it a go.

I’m working my way through the book slowly, a poem a night. I ought to save this one till next October, but I haven’t the patience, so here it is.

Late October
By Sara Teasdale

I found ten kinds of wild flower growing
On a steely day that looked like snowing:
Queen Anne’s lace, and blue heal-all,
A buttercup, straggling, grown too tall,
A rusty aster, a chicory flower–
Ten I found in half an hour.
The air was blurred with dry leaves flying,
Gold and scarlet, gaily dying.
A squirrel ran off with a nut in his mouth,
And always, always, flying south,
Twittering, the birds went by,
Flickering sharp against the sky,
Some in great bows, some in wedges,
Some in bands with wavering edges;
Flocks and flocks were flying over
With the north wind for their drover.
“Flowers,” I said, “you’d better go,
Surely it’s coming on for snow,”–
They did not heed me, nor heed the birds,
Twittering thin, far-fallen words–
The others through of to-morrow, but they
Only remembered yesterday.