A Certain Slant of Light

Books I've Given Up On This Week

I regret to admit (or rather admit without regret) that I got deeply bored about a quarter of the way through Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, and have therefore taken it back to the library. Sorry, Jean-Paul! This is simply not a season of my life where I am interested in you.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

While looking for more Penelope Farmer books, as one does, I discovered that the author of Charlotte Sometimes also occasionally moonlighted as a translator from Hebrew. Specifically, she and Amos Oz teamed up to translate Oz’s book Soumchi, a wistful childhood journey through British-occupied Jerusalem between the world wars.

This is an adult book about children rather than a children’s book - the tip-off lies in the prologue, a melancholy reflection about how everything is changing all the time which is very “adult looking back at childhood.” A gentle period piece about a boy with a massive crush on his classmate Esthie and also absolutely zero common sense, as evidenced by the fact that he keeps making trades where he is fairly obviously getting the worse end of the deal.

Also continuing my Vivien Alcock explorations with A Kind of Thief, a contemporary novel about a girl whose father is arrested for theft. But before he’s marched off by the police, he manages to sneak her the information to pick up a bag at the railroad station. Does receiving these presumably stolen goods make her… a kind of thief?

I think Alcock’s work is stronger (or at least more tailored to my interests) when she’s exploring a fantastical premise. This is fun but not something I would suggest seeking out unless you’re an Alcock completist. (If you are an Alcock completist, I do own a copy and I would be happy to send it to a new home.)

Also zipped through Dorothy Gilman’s Kaleidoscope, the sequel to The Clairvoyant Countess, which I probably should have read first as Kaleidoscope is chock full of spoilers for the earlier book. On the other hand, I’ll probably have forgotten all the spoilers by the time I mosey around to The Clairvoyant Countess, so it’s fine.

Always love Gilman’s older heroines. This book is aptly named, a kaleidoscope of different fractured glimpses of other people’s lives, some of which appear once and some of which are threaded throughout the book. No strong through-line but lots of fun little interweaving stories.

What I’m Reading Now

Grace Lin’s Chinese Menu, a lavishly illustrated compilation of the legendary origin stories of many classic Chinese dishes. Just about the embark on the story of spring rolls.

What I Plan to Read Next

I know I keep saying I’m going to read E. F. Benson’s Queen Lucia, but I’m going to read Queen Lucia for real this time.

I watched the Alec Guinness Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with skygiants and genarti when I visited Massachusetts (a month ago now; where does the time go?), and I’ve been procrastinating writing about it, because how does one review perfection?

It’s so good. Quite possibly the perfect adaptation. Alec Guinness makes an amazing Smiley. Possibly not as plain and tubby as Smiley ought to be, but he’s projecting that as hard as he can nonetheless. And he’s just so good at Smiley’s style of sympathetic understatement where he might not actually be sympathetic to whatever line of bull his horrible loser interlocutor is trying to feed him, but it would take an awfully attentive listener to realize that, and most of the people around him never seem to listen at all.

Much is made in the books of Smiley’s amazing spy skills, and I have accepted this without ever exactly being able to put my finger on what those skills are, except maybe the patience to deep-dive in the files. But the miniseries suggests that Smiley’s other secret weapon is the ability to listen, and not only listen but radiate the aura of attentive, thoughtful, sympathetic listening that makes people want to keep talking.

His not-at-all secret weakness is his adored wife Anne, who is sleeping with a Who’s Who of all the important men in London. Just about everyone Smiley meets taunts him with this in not-very-veiled terms. (“Give my love to Anne,” says an obnoxious acquaintance in the first episode. “Give everybody’s love to Anne!”) Amazing example of a character who is hugely present despite not actually showing up till the final episode, during one of the rare sunny moments of a show that takes place mostly in clouds and rain and darkness. Anne actually is one of the bright spots of Smiley’s life despite also being the bane of his existence.

But it would be a mistake to focus too closely on Smiley, because the whole ensemble cast is excellent, and the production really gives the characterization room to breathe. The first scene simply consists of four men assembling one by one around a table, smoking cigarettes, sipping coffee, flipping through folders of papers, clearing their throats… until at last the final man arrives and the meeting gets started and you see, “Ah, that’s the one in charge.”

That’s Bill Haydon. You don’t learn his name yet, and you also don’t learn for a while that he’s not technically the boss, but also you already know most of what you need to know about him.

The adaptation hews quite close to the book, but not slavishly so; clearly the product of people who love and admire Le Carre’s work but also recognize that the challenges of adapting a written work to a visual medium can require some tweaks.

They did make one change I absolutely loved, which was ( spoilers )

Just gorgeous. Absolutely amazing. I want to watch the sequel Smiley’s People, which has a reprise cast, but I’m also not sure that I’m strong enough to watch two Smiley adaptations in one year, especially since this is the one adapting the book with the most Karla (played by Patrick Stewart) (did not write about the scene in this series where Smiley and Karla face off and Karla just sits there, absolutely silent, and dominating the room in that silence) and I feel they may add a Karla bit that will bring me to my knees like the part under the spoiler cut above.

Clearly I’ll simply have to wait until I visit Boston again to watch Smiley’s People.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

C. S. Forester’s Hornblower and the Atropos, tragically low on gay pining (no Lt. Bush in this book) but chock full of adventure and Hornblower being extremely hard on himself at all times. We also spend a couple of chapters with Hornblower and Maria together, travelling across England on one of the newfangled canals (I believe that Forester found a detailed description of canal travel in his researches and just had to share, and I am HERE for it), and I think it’s probably for the best that their marriage involves long, long stretches of Hornblower being away at sea, as they clearly find each other very annoying when together.

Forester also appears to have found a detailed description of “how to blow things up underwater in the early 1800s,” and again I am HERE for it. Thank you for building a large proportion of your plot around this knowledge, sir.

I also finished Isaac Bashevis Singer’s A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw, stories of his boyhood before and during World War I, written in Yiddish and translated by a variety of people. I bought this at the Yiddish Book Center and found it interesting, but probably would have done better to purchase one of his short story collections instead. There were too many! I simply couldn’t choose!

What I’m Reading Now

Just started Sartre’s Nausea. So far, so much navel-gazing.

What I Plan to Read Next

HOUSTON my hold on Elisa Malisova and Kateryna Sylvanova's Pioneer Summer has ARRIVED at the library! Yesss please let this tale of gay Young Pioneers in the late Soviet Union live up to all my hopes and dreams.

Still working on my reviews for the movies I saw over spring break! In my defense, we saw many movies - and it still wasn’t as many as I would have liked, as we only managed to hit up one of the films in the Kate the Great film festival at the Brattle.

However, that film was Holiday, starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, one of the all-time great Golden Age of Hollywood screen pairings. Genuinely shocked that I never saw or even heard of this movie before, given how much I love both of the stars.

However, this is perhaps just as well, since it was wonderful to see it for the first time on the big screen. Cary Grant is Johnny Case, a cheerful businessman who just got engaged to Julia, a girl he met a couple weeks ago at a ski resort. Katherine Hepburn is Julia’s disaffected little sister Linda, who Johnny meets for the first time when he visits Julia’s home… which happens to be the family mansion in the heart of Manhattan.

Yes, Johnny Case has been Crazy Rich Asianed. Going home to meet his fiancee’s family, he discovers they’re richer than God. After some initial doubts, however, the patriarch takes to Johnny, an up-and-coming one man with an extremely lucrative business deal in the pipeline. But then Johnny lets slip his true plan. Once he makes his packet, he plans to quit business and spend a few years traveling the world and finding himself.

Julia and father are appalled. What’s the point of making a huge amount of money except to use it to make yet huger amounts of money? But Linda, who is utterly miserable in her gilded cage, is fascinated. Here’s someone who really wants to live!

You can more or less guess the plot from there, but it’s still a delightful ride, with many excellent side characters. Linda and Julia’s drunk gay brother, like Linda miserable and unable to see a route to escape. Johnny’s friends the eccentric professor and his equally eccentric wife, a double act who easily morph into a triple act when Johnny’s on the scene. There’s a delightful moment when they’re singing “Camptown Races” with Linda, having a real good time in the attic while people pretend to have a good time at the huge stuffy engagement/New Year’s Eve party downstairs.

For a movie called Holiday, this is probably one of the least holiday-aesthetic Christmas/New Year’s movies I’ve ever seen. The characters keep commenting on the unusually warm weather they’re having, presumably to try to cover the fact that they are very obviously filming in southern California, and there’s very little in the way of Christmas trees or other decorations either.

However, as long as you don’t go into the movie expecting to get your Christmas on, it’s a fantastic time. Great chemistry between the leads, fantastic family dynamics, some more serious discussions about money and the meaning of life which give a bit of ballast to the levity. Just a jolly good all around time.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Mademoiselle Misfortune, a charming book from the 1930s. Young Alice is the oldest of six look-alike sisters in Paris, and one day overhears the landlady sighing that the girls are six misfortunes for their family: imagine having to pay six dowries! But soon after, a crotchety American lady (the sister of a friend of the family’s) asks Alice to accompany her on a trip through France as her interpreter, in which position Alice comes into her own as a person. Delightful illustrations by Kate Seredy.

I realize there’s no guarantee that an author will ever meet her illustrator, but I hope Brink and Seredy did come to know each other, as based purely on their books I think they could have been besties.

What I’m Reading Now

Frolicking through E. M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in America. No deep thoughts, just enjoying this whirlwind tour of the American literary world in the 1930s. Apparently everyone who was anyone was reading Anthony Adverse, except for our narrator who keeps having to duck conversations about the book.

What I Plan to Read Next

lucymonster and troisoiseaux have convinced me to read some existentialists, so I’m starting with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea because I figure that if I start with Camus, then Camus is where I will also end.

I was very excited to read R. M. Ballantyne’s The Robber Kitten at the archive, because how could you go wrong with a title like that? And the cover seems promising: it features a kitten all dressed up like a highwayman, plumed hat and pistols and all.

Alas, the story is a morality tale, in which a kitten Goes to the Bad (led astray by bad company, we are told, although we never meet a single companion, evil or otherwise), realizes that wickedness has made it wretched, and returns to its grieving mother, who has been crying her heart out over her robber son. Now do any of us really believe that a mother cat would be sorry one of her kittens took to a life a crime?

However, Ballantyne frequently seems to forget that his characters are cats. Item: the robber kitten has to remind himself not to feel afraid as the sun sinks low. SIR you are a CAT you can SEE IN THE DARK. Item: the robber kitten falls out of a try onto his head. SIR you are a CAT you famously LAND ON YOUR FEET. Such a disappointment.

However, by fortunate coincidence I’m reading another book about a larcenous cat, Katherine Applegate’s Pocket Bear, which is narrated by the cat Zephyrina. Until recently a stray, Zephyrina has graciously consented to accept a home with Dasha and her mother Elizaveta, recent refugees from the war in Ukraine. To show her appreciation, she likes to bring back interesting finds that she has scavenged, especially toys for Dasha’s Second Chances Home for the Tossed and Treasured.

This has resulted in a wagon in front of the Second Chances Home for the Tossed and Treasures, full of Zephyrina’s recent finds, with an apologetic sign saying “Our Cat Is a Burglar,” to which Zephyrina objects. One: our cat? She is her own cat, thank you very much. Two: a burglar? What a way to refer to the Robin Hood of felines.

Zephyina is a deliciously recognizable type of cat, the previous stray who proudly believes that she is BAD! BAD TO THE BONE! but actually is a not-so-secret softie. In Zephyrina’s case, that softness manifests first with her friendship with Pocket Bear, a tiny teddy first sewn during World War I to accompany a soldier to war in his pocket.

Now over a hundred years old, Pocket Bear still remembers that formative military service. He calls the other toys in the Second Chance Home his troops, and worries over them like a kindly general. He calls Zephyrina “Corporal Z.” She cheekily sketches a salute and brings home more liberated-not-stolen toys.

The story kicks off when she brings home an old bear from a trash can. A very old bear; a possible antique, which might bring in a lot of money, which Dasha and Elizaveta desperately need to establish a new life in the United States. But can they get Dasha and Elizaveta the money they need and also find the old bear a loving home…?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I went to the library to get one of the 2026 Newbery books, but instead got ambushed by Kate DiCamillo’s Lost Evangeline, which features a TINY GIRL standing on a SPOOL OF THREAD. How was I to resist?

Sadly the book did not focus on tiny Evangeline repurposing objects for her tiny world: spool of thread as stool, etc. But it DID feature a scene where Evangeline rides a cat, which seems like atonement for Kate DiCamillo’s The Tiger Rising where there’s a girl riding a tiger on the cover and then no one rides a tiger in the book at all, except in a dream which I think we can all agree does NOT count.

littlerhymes and I have also finished H.M.S. Surprise! (How many “surprise” puns did we make while reading this book? Many.) Jack does indeed start the book by losing the massive fortune from the Spanish treasure ships, although the Admiralty gives him nearly ten thousand pounds to make up, which would be a pretty tidy fortune in itself if (a) one were not comparing itself to hundreds of thousands of pounds of prize money, and (b) it didn’t all go to pay off Jack’s eleven thousand pounds of debt.

So he and Sophia STILL can’t marry, and indeed even though Jack has made another fortune by the end of this book, it ends with them still unwed… The next book had better open with a wedding, my god.

In news of Stephen’s matrimonial endeavors, Diana Villiers almost promises to marry him, then elopes with a rich American. Stephen is heartbroken but tbh I think Jack has a point when he says that this is the best thing that could have happened to Stephen, given that the man fights a duel for her in this book and would inevitably have to fight many more should they ever wed.

I see this is the book where the movie got the scene of Stephen operating on himself, which in the book occurs even though there are other surgeons available. Stephen doesn’t trust them! (Probably fair.) He will operate on himself in the mirror, moving his own ribs aside to get out the bullet lodged in his chest! Agonizing. This man is so metal. I could never.

What I’m Reading Now

Mikhail Zygar’s The Empire Must Die: Russia’s Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917, which I found on my Kindle marked as unread but clearly did read at some point, because I marked the passage where a young Nicholas II (not yet Nicholas II as his father is still alive) attempts to say something about politics at the dinner table, only for said father to start throwing bread rolls at him. Ah, the perfect way to train the heir to an empire: discourage any and all attempts to take an interest in politics.

Anyway, since I’m enjoying the book and have clearly forgotten it completely, I’m traipsing through it again. The defunct Narodniks, now regrouped as the SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries), have begun assassinating ministers again.

What I Plan to Read Next

Yesterday at the library I was simply unable to resist Katherine Applegate’s Pocket Bear.

I haven’t quite finished the 2017 books yet, but I had some extra time at work Friday and what better use of that time than to go through my 2019 reading list and decide which authors to revisit? So here we are.


Katherine Applegate - Pocket Bear

Grace Lin - Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Foods

Shaun Tan - The Arrival. I read Tales of the City in 2019 and found it pretty downbeat, but littlerhymes clued me in that Tan also wrote picture books so of course I have to give those a try.

C. S. Lewis - considering The World’s Last Night and Other Essays, although I’m also interested in Studies in Words

Toni Morrison - Beloved

Ben MacIntyre - Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy

Lisa See - Daughters of the Sun and Moon. Her newest book! Not yet out, in fact.

Jacqueline Woodson

Penelope Farmer - Soumchi. Apparently Farmer moonlighted as a translator from Hebrew. (the university library has Eve: Her Story, but also a book called Soumchi which appears to be written by an Israeli writer named Amos Oz, but nonetheless has Farmer’s name attached in the catalog. Did she translate? Or write the preface? May check it out just to solve the mystery.)

Dorothy Gilman

George Gissing - Demos. After New Grub Street, I felt I had to explore Gissing further, and according to Wikipedia, George Orwell thought Demos was one of Gissing’s best novels.

E. M. Delafield - The Provincial Lady in Wartime

George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier

Vivien Alcock - A Kind of Thief. I found this book at a used bookstore so it has become my next Alcock

William Dean Howells - Their Wedding Journey

Booth Tarkington - Penrod. I’ve meant to explore more Booth Tarkington since I read Seventeen. At last I’m getting around to it!

Barbara Cooney - Letting Swift River Go. When I visited asakiyume we went to the Quabbin on a foggy day, and asakiyume mentioned that Cooney illustrated a book about the building of the Quabbin, so of course that's next on my list.

Susan Cooper - torn between Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children and Green Boy

William Bowen - Merrimeg. Bowen was a children’s fantasy author in the 1920s. I’d really like to read his book The Enchanted Forest, but it doesn’t appear to be on Gutenberg or FadedPage, so I’ll content myself with Merrimeg for now.

When I posted about George Gissing’s The Odd Women, I commented that it was indeed an odd book, but I think I undersold or perhaps did not yet understand the sheer oddness of Gissing’s work, not only in a 19th century English context but just in terms of English literature in general.

This is even more obvious in New Grub Street, which takes as its cast a motley crew of struggling writers in 1880s London, and as its themes money and love. More specifically, its themes are:

1. Poverty is horrible and degrading and undermines every other facet of life; and

2. Money is a necessary but not sufficient condition for love. That is to say, you can have money but not love, but love without money cannot last.

Of course these themes are implied in other books (think of Jane Austen’s characters breathlessly discussing the marriage prospects of so-and-so who has thus-and-such pounds a year), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them expounded with Gissing’s brutal clarity. It’s bracing, stimulating not always to total agreement but certainly to deeper thought, for instance about the fact that people marry not only because they fall in love with an individual but because they love the image of the lifestyle and status they think they’ll have with that person.

Gissing has the Zola-like gift of creating an ensemble cast of characters who illustrate different facets of his theme while also being interesting and individual people in their own right. Gissing is trying to give them all a fair shake, to portray them all so clearly that we can see why they act the way they do. Readers may or may not find it in our hearts to sympathize, but that will be our own decision, not a result of Gissing putting his finger on the scale.

--Sensitive Edwin Reardon, who married upper-middle-class Amy on the strength of one well-received novel and now suffering immense writer’s block. Amy fell in love with both Edwin and the idea of being a successful novelist’s wife, and is appalled to see this dream crumbling under what appears to her to be his refusal to work.

As I’ve struggled with writer’s block for the past couple of years, I feel a great sympathy for Edwin: he quite literally cannot write anything good right now! It’s not his fault! But I can also see why it doesn’t look that way to Amy and her family, especially because the social rules of 1880s London mean there is no graceful road of retreat. Not only is it impossible for Amy to get a job (this is literally unthinkable: not one character ever even imagines it), but now that Edwin has set up as a full-time writer, the whole family would lose caste if he took a job for wages.

--Jasper Milvain, debonair man about town who approaches writing as a business and forthrightly says his goal is to earn a thousand pounds a year. A character type who in many books would be a villain, and I won’t say that he’s not just a bit villainous at times, but he’s also a complex character who definitely has a point. In the tradition of an Austen baddie, he ends up perfectly happy with himself and his choices.

--Alfred Yule, a cranky aging writer of moderate abilities who was never very financially successful, and married a working class woman because he never made enough to support a wife of his own class. There’s a section where Gissing lists a whole bunch of similarly positioned writers who made a similar decision and makes it clear that he thinks this is pretty much always a mistake that will lead to marital disharmony.

--Marian Yule, Alfred Yule’s daughter and assistant, who is to an ever-greater extent perhaps simply writing his articles for him. (We also get a glimpse of two other women writers in Jasper’s sisters, who at Jasper’s suggestion take to writing Sunday school stories to support themselves.)

--Whelpdale, an unsuccessful writer who makes a success of it telling other writers how to write to market. A jolly young man despite all his setbacks.

--Harold Biffen, an extremely poor though talented writer of the realist school who sticks fast to his principles and loves discussing Greek and Latin literature with Edwin Reardon. Would be the tragically romantic starving artist in a garret in another book. Unfortunately wound up in a Gissing book instead.

Having set these and various other figures going, Gissing simply observes them, like a naturalist watching a particularly interesting species of cockatoos. The result is absorbing, as skygiants and genarti can attest, having been subjected to various rants and wails as I tore through the back half of the book. Highly recommended on account of quality, recommended cautiously on account of emotional intensity.

(I actually wrote this review before my trip, then ran out of time to post it.)

Sometimes you just know, just from looking at a book’s cover, that this book is in some way For You. Such is the case with Sara Pennypacker’s Pax, with its Jon Klassen cover of a fox standing on a wooded hill gazing across a plain at a sunset. I’ve looked at this book for years and always meant to read it and somehow never quite picked it up.

But at last I’ve read it, and I was correct that it IS for me, full of solid fox action (which you would expect from the cover) and also surprisingly serious musings about war (which you would not guess from the cover, but it works).

War is coming to the country. Which country? The country, which is similar to America but perhaps not America. With whom? The enemy. What for? The water. Why? Because the humans are war-sick. This vagueness might not work for me in a different book, but here it works well to highlight the destructiveness of war, not only for people but for the land and the animals.

Peter’s father has joined the army. Since Peter’s mother is dead, he’s going to live with his grandfather, which means he needs to get rid of his pet fox Pax. So Peter’s father drives him to an isolated road, and Peter throws Pax’s favorite toy into the woods, and Pax chases after it.

But as soon as Peter arrives at his grandfather’s house, he realizes he’s made a horrible mistake. There’s nothing for it: he’s got to run away and trek cross-country to find Pax.

Meanwhile, Pax intends to sit by the side of the road and wait for his boy. But hunger and thirst force him to begin exploring the forest, where he meets other foxes… and they discover that the human armies are drawing closer.

Really enjoyed this. Great fox POV. There’s a sequel, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Pax lives. Don’t want to give too many spoilers, but I found Peter’s journey unexpected and satisfying, and Pax’s journey pretty much what you might expect from that summary but also satisfying. Sometimes stories hit certain beats for a reason, you know?