A Certain Slant of Light

I read a lot of books about tomboys when I was young. I don’t know how much this was a result of my reading preferences and how much it simply reflected the prevalence of tomboy books in the 1990s, but either way I came away from it with the impression that all proper heroines dislike women’s work in general and sewing in particular.

I didn’t exactly have a big a-ha! moment when I read Tamora Pierce’s Sandry’s Book, but reading about a heroine whose stitchery is literally magic did start putting the dominoes in place to knock out an epiphany eventually.

In fact, one of the things that the Circle of Magic books do really well is take a particular false dichotomy in feminist pop culture - women’s work sucks and all true heroines hate it OR women’s work is valuable and it’s actually more feminist to have a heroine who loves it (I think this one is often a defensive reaction to the plethora of tomboy books) - and basically explode it. Sandry has sewing magic (traditionally feminine); Daja has blacksmithing magic (traditionally masculine); and Tris has weather magic, which is not gendered on the grounds that it is generally beyond the ken of us mere mortals, and they’re all powerful mages with absolutely necessary skills.

In recent years I’ve become a very strong proponent of the importance of having multiple heroines, or at least multiple important female characters, because there’s only so much variety you can show with one character, you know? Especially if she has to be exemplary because she’s the only female character in the thing and therefore is supposed to somehow represent all women everywhere.

(This insight I think is also applicable to characters from other marginalized groups.)

Other fine qualities about Sandry’s Book in particular and the Circle of Magic quartet in general:

The found family vibes are top notch, A++.

Lark and Rosethorn. I totally didn’t get that they were a couple the first time I read the books (or the second, third, fourth…), but I doubt the book would have been published with any more explicit acknowledgment of that fact, and it blew my tiny mind when I heard about it years later.

The general existence of Tris. (Did the “Tris goes to Lightsbridge” book ever happen? I’m not as up on my recent Tamora Pierce books as I should be. I still haven’t read Battle Magic. Should I read Battle Magic?)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, which has made me want to read his other books, of which there are many… because if there’s one thing I need, it’s a new author to follow, right?

I put off reading Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place because I got the impression somewhere that it was a self-righteous tract about how lying is always a sin, even if you’re lying to the Nazis to protect the Jews hidden in your attic. But now that I’ve read it I’m pretty sure this is actually just the way some Evangelical readers interpret the book, because Corrie had some relatives who followed this philosophy and it worked out for them, through either divine intervention or luck, depending on your view.

Corrie herself lies when necessary, although with pangs of conscience, because she had been raised in the belief system that lying is always wrong. But she doesn’t only lie when forced to it, but actually practices lying: the family shakes her awake at midnight to simulate a possible arrest by the Nazis, so she’ll have practice answering “We have no Jews here” rather than mumbling, groggy and disoriented, “Oh, they’re behind the false wall.”

Willa Cather’s My Antonia is another book I put off reading, in this case because I had the impression that Antonia gets raped at some point in the book, which also turns out to be incorrect. Maybe I should try to stop gathering impressions of books that I haven’t read, although probably it’s not entirely avoidable.

But actually in this case the delay worked out well, because I don’t think I would have appreciated the book as much when I was younger. It’s a slow book, with a lot of description of the Nebraska prairies and the different immigrant groups settling the country and not a lot of action: the narrator, Jim Burden, is often an onlooker rather than a participant, a little bit in love with Antonia and some of her friends (also strong immigrant girls), but not so much that the book ever becomes a love story. Or rather, it’s about love of a time and a place rather than a person.

What I’m Reading Now

The very first chapter of Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women burnt up my hope that maybe the heroines would remain friends for the entire book, but it also got me all invested so I kept reading. All of See’s books seem to have this ur-scene where the heroines’ friendship shatters when they confront each other over some great betrayal - I don’t know why she feels the need to repeat it over and over, but I should probably just accept it and stop hoping for something else.

And although it does share this tic with See’s other work, this book is one of her best - perhaps not quite up there with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but then that is the first See book I read so it may have an unfair advantage. The Island of Sea Women is set on Jeju Island, where women deep sea divers are traditionally the main support for their families, and this portrayal of a traditional society where women have a lot more power and freedom than in many traditional societies is so interesting.

I’ve also been reading Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, which is an unexpectedly delightful look at office culture in interwar Britain. Lord Peter has taken a job as a copy writer for an advertising firm in order to investigate a murder, using his two middle names, Death Bredon, and yes Dorothy Sayers did in fact give her detective the name Death, Lord Peter is the Most Extra and I love it.

What I Plan to Read Next

evelyn_b, we had talked about maybe reading Kristin Lavransdattar in tandem. Are you still interested? I’ve acquired a copy, so we could start whenever is convenient for you.

I’ve also realized that Andrea Cheng’s The Year of the Book, which I read last year, is in fact the first book of a five-book series (although alas there will be no more after that: Cheng died a few years ago), so now I want to read them all.

Spring is coming! We had a tiny two-day foretaste of seventy degree temperatures earlier this week, after which point the highs plummeted back to forty, but it was enough of a taste that I’ve begun to turn my thoughts to my garden.

The sage and thyme are perennials, so they should plump up again once the warm weather comes; they’ve haven’t entirely shriveled even now, but they do look a little limp after the rigors of winter. I’ll need a new basil, of course (if you can only grow one herb, it’s probably worthwhile to make it basil), and probably rosemary, and I’m thinking chives, because they’re supposed to be very easy to grow and if you sprinkle it on top of, for instance, little cheesy toasts, they instantly look classy. (It also adds a mild flavor boost, but it is very mild.)

The herbs will grow on the sunny spot alongside the brick wall. I’ve also got two raised beds, and I’m thinking one of them - the small sunny one, also close to the house - I might use for tomatoes. As for the big bed - I’m thinking I might branch out to flowers - one of my friends gave me a little round red flower bowl that I’ve put on the bookcase next to my desk, and what could be more Anne of Green Gables than filling it with my own flowers?

However, I’ve never grown flowers before, so we’ll see if this one goes through.

Stretch goals:

A compost heap, or a compost bin or whatever the cool kids use for compost these days. (It looks like expensive composters have become a sort of status symbol.) I like the idea of turning heaps of kitchen scraps into usable soil, although if I go this route obviously I’ll need to do some research on how precisely one goes about doing that.

Raspberry canes. I love raspberries, and if I put a lattice up along the fence the raspberries could grow up it without sacrificing any other garden space (although I would have to excavate from actual soil from beneath the current covering of big rocks). Fresh raspberries! Sun-warmed! I love picking berries too, so that’s a bonus.

After I finished season 3 of Shetland I decided that I was going to stop watching the show, but then the library got season 4 and the flesh is weak and I watched it.

My original plan was a better plan. Season 4 of Shetland is a mess.

( Things that happen in season 4 of Shetland )

We finished The Librarians! I had mixed feelings about the show all the way through, but they did such a bang-up job on the last two episodes that I felt more disappointed than I expected that it was over.

( Spoilers, of course )

The problem with reading a book about something you already know way too much about is that you will either love it or you will hate it. Carolyn Carpan's Sisters, Schoolgirls, and Sleuths: Girls' Series Books in America unfortunately fell in the "hate it" category for me, because I disagree with many of Carpan's choices about what to include in this book and also many of the conclusions that she draws.

1. American girls' series is such a broad topic - we're talking literally hundreds of series, many with dozens if not hundreds of books - that it may not be possible to discuss it all in one book, certainly not a book less than 150 pages long.

2. Carpan doesn't seem to realize that there are two kinds of girls' series: single-author girls' series with literary aspirations, like Elsie Dinsmore or the Little Colonel or Betsy-Tacy, and mass-produced girls' series cranked out by ghost writers, like Nancy Drew or Sweet Valley High or the Babysitters Club. She's more interested in the second, and the book probably would have been more successful if she had focused solely on the Stratemeyer syndicate or girls' mystery books, which take up the bulk of the book anyway.

But as it is, the book starts with a chapter on Elsie Dinsmore, which is unfortunate both because Carpan doesn't seem to understand Elsie, and because including Elsie makes it harder to justify excluding (or mentioning only briefly) many other popular and influential single-author girls' series. If you've set yourself up to survey everything then you need to hit EVERYTHING, you know?

3. Carpan asserts that "the compliant Elsie Dinsmore...is the model heroine for the hundreds of other girls' series protagonists that followed her" (7), which is QUITE A STRETCH. The only piece of evidence Carpan offers in support of it is that Nancy Drew, like Elsie, lives in a single-parent household with her indulgent father... except Elsie's father, unlike Nancy's, is so un-indulgent that he forbids Elsie to eat that dangerous luxury jam, so actually I think this is a case where an accidental similarity (single fathers) shows how very different the two series are.

It's possible that Elsie has a successor in some specifically Christian series, but the overarching theme in the Elsie books - the importance of daughters' instant, implicit, cheerful obedience to their fathers, except when the father's commands go against the word of God - is as far as I know sui generis among secular girls' series.

In fact, I can't think of any other girls' series where the parent-child relationship is the most important theme of the story. Even in the Little House books (another series Carpan leaves out entirely!), where Ma and Pa are important characters, Laura's coming of age and her relationship with her sister Mary (and to a lesser extent Carrie) are just as important.

4. Also, insofar as there is one "model heroine for the hundreds of other girls' series protagonists," it's obviously Jo March, because she's the ur-heroine of American girls' books in general and because Little Women is the first book in a series of either three or four books, depending whether you count Little Women and Good Wives separately.

5. Chapters 3 to 8 move chronologically through books from the 1920s to the 1980s. The analysis seems stronger - I got the sense that these are the books Carpan really cares about, not the ones she had to read to try to make her survey complete - but it could also just be that her analysis seems stronger to me because I'm not familiar with most of the books she writes about, so I can't knowledgeably disagree.

6. I SUPER disagreed with a lot of Carpan's choices once she reached the 1990s, not least of which is the fact that somewhere around the sixties and seventies she seems to have narrowed her focus from "books for girls" to "books for teenage girls" without quite seeming to notice. How else could you possibly justify the fact that she devotes one paragraph to the incredibly popular Babysitters Club series?

(Also, she dings BSC because "by promoting babysitting the series may encourage preteen and teen readers to focus on mothering as their primary goal in life" (123), which I think shows a complete failure to actually engage with the series, which is about entrepreneurship and friendship and developing your own individual strengths and talents as much as it is about babysitting, and also shows the shallowness of Carpan's intellectual framework for this book, which might without oversimplification be described as Marriage and Motherhood Bad, Sports and Careers Good.)

But then, Meg Cabot gets only a paragraph as well, and her series are definitely aimed at teenage girls, so who knows what's up with that.

There's also no mention at all of horse series (Heartland and Thoroughbred ought to fall in the teen-girl purview, even if Saddle Club and Pony Pals are too young), only brief mention of magic-themed series - Carpan mentions Cate Tiernan's Sweep but not Daughters of the Moon or Circle of Three - and for some reason a whole section devoted to Goosebumps and Fear Street, which insofar as they were gendered were marketed at boys.

I’ve hit book fifty on 100 Books that Influenced Me, which means I’m halfway through! So I thought I’d better pick a particularly important book to celebrate, which of course means Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling, although every time I try to write about this book I’m always afraid that I’m going to fail to do it justice.

The heart of the story is Martha and Ivy’s friendship, which begins when they’re in second grade. Martha Abbott - or Mouse, as her family calls her, because she’s shy and timid and tear-prone in a family of hearty extroverted overachievers - meets Ivy when Ivy shows up in class one day, and soon after they become friends when they discover that they both love imaginative games. Snyder has books with real magic and books with perhaps-magic and books, like this one, which are in the workaday non-magical world but full of imaginative games, but all three variations feel magical to me because she’s so good - probably the best children’s writer that I know - at writing imaginative games.

(Although if you have other favorites I am happy to hear about them, because I’m always looking for other authors who do this well.)

One of the games they play a bit later in the book, Green-sky, is about a land where people live in the treetops, so captured Snyder’s own imagination that she wrote a whole Green Sky Trilogy, although the story is rather different than Martha and Ivy’s. They play it in Bent Oaks Grove, which is full of climbing trees with twisted branches, and a cave and a rock that they use for an altar.

But there’s one problem: Ivy is a Carson, one of the younger members of a family of ne’er-do-wells who live in a crumbling old house on the edge of town. Martha doesn’t mind at all: Ivy has explained to her that she’s not really a Carson at all, but a changeling, a magical creature switched at birth for a human baby. Her Aunt Evaline told her about changelings, when Ivy lived with her in Harley’s Crossing, which is where Ivy learned about all sorts of interesting magical things that play into their games.

But Martha’s family looks on the friendship with restrained disapproval. The Abbotts are sturdy, respectable people (Martha’s father is a corporate lawyer) while the Carsons are in and out of jail. But Ivy is after all a very small Carson, and the Abbotts are perhaps hoping the friendship will run its course before she becomes a big one.

But as Martha and Ivy get older, it becomes harder for them to blot out the wider world with games. The social divide between them is powerful enough to disrupt their friendship even though they remain loyal to each other. Imagination runs into reality and loses.

There is a subset of children’s books that revolve around the theme “Reality trumps imagination,” possibly a reaction against children’s books where “imagination is magic!” and solves problems with suspicious ease. Janet Taylor Lisle’s Afternoon of the Elves is a particularly clear example of the genre: imagination shatters upon contact with reality and then the book ends, with the wreckage.

The Changeling is different because, after breaking things, it puts it all back together again. Imagination is not literally magic and you can’t live in a fantasy forever, but that doesn’t mean imagination is powerless. At its best, imagination creates: it builds things, not just cloud castles but things that are real and solid for all that they are incorporeal, like Martha and Ivy’s friendship, and that friendship is ultimately stronger than the social forces that nearly rip it apart.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ben MacIntyre’s The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. I intended to get some other things done on Sunday, but instead I spent the afternoon reading this book and eating cookies and it was a good life choice. MacIntyre is one of those nonfiction writers with an irresistibly readable style, augmented in his case by an irresistibly readable choice of subject matter: spies!

In this book, MacIntyre is telling the story of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB man who became a spy for MI6 out of genuine ideological conversion (always a more interesting story than someone who becomes a spy for money, like Aldrich Ames, who becomes a subplot in this book because his story intersected with Gordievsky’s).

I was particularly fascinated by the internal KGB politics - in particular, by the way the whole agency became infected with the paranoid conviction that the US was going to launch a nuclear first strike any day now once the paranoiac-in-chief, Andropov (first leader of the KGB and then of the Soviet Union in general), became obsessed with the idea. It’s kind of hilarious - all these big tough guys quaking in their boots over literally nothing! - but also sort of sad, and perhaps Gordievsky’s greatest accomplishment was to convince Reagan and Thatcher that no, this wasn’t just bluster, the KGB truly feared a first strike, and both of them became less belligerent toward the USSR in response.

On a whim I read Sara Zarr and Tara Altebrando’s Roomies, because it was on a list of books about female friendship and I needed a new book on Overdrive. It’s a YA novel, structured around the emails that two future roommates exchange the summer before they go to college. I didn’t think it would have space to do all the plotlines justice: both girls have their best-friend-from-high-school plotlines, boyfriend plotlines, and family plotlines, and there’s the getting-to-know-your-potential-roommate plotline that ties them together - but actually I thought the book did most of them justice, although I wanted a little bit more from EB’s difficult relationship with her mom: it turns around a little too fast for me in the end.

And I finished the final Billabong book, Billabong Riders, and it feels like the end of an era: littlerhymes and I have been reading these books for over two years now. What shall we doooo now that it’s over? (Actually we’ve already discussed reading the Anne of Green Gables series next, so I think we shall be fine.)

In some ways it doesn’t feel like the last book in the series - there’s no big series-ending event (Norah’s already gotten married and had her first child, both of which books often use as convenient stopping points) and no particular push to get in at least a cameo appearance from all the best-beloved side characters. But on the other hand it is a very typical Billabong book, with all the old gang (plus Tommy) going off on a cattle-herding adventure, so in that way it’s a satisfying cap to the series.

What I’m Reading Now

Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons goes along at a fairly even domestic family memoir keel until you get to the part where Jackson writes about Bennington College - and then even the restraints of the genre can’t hold back her rage: fury positively smokes out of her as she writes about the life of the faculty wife and the adoring students who crowd around her husband.

What I Plan to Read Next

The newest Lisa See book, The Island of Sea Women! There are very few contemporary authors whose work I keep up with, but I do snap up new Lisa See books, because I like that she writes about women’s friendships and I have not yet given up hope that eventually she’ll write a book where the friends remain friends for the whole story.

I’ve never like the idea of making a bucket list - the built-in reminder of one’s looming mortality just put me off - but one of the blogs I follow recently suggested the idea of a dreams list, which has no implied (and depressingly literal) deadline, and I’ve taken to it like a duck to water. It turns out that it’s very useful to have a place to write down things like “Have brunch at Milktooth” (I for one want to try to sourdough sweet potato doughnuts with the cranberry curd), because otherwise the idea will simply recur to me fleetingly at times, generally when there’s nothing to be done about it

The list has also alerted me to a hitherto-unrecognized brunch obsession, because I keep sticking brunch places on it. What can I say? Everyone loves breakfast food, it’s cheaper than dinner, often there are salmon eggs benedicts, and I still dream of finding a place to buy the perfect cinnamon roll.

Although I could always add “learn to bake cinnamon rolls” to the list. Baking bread is already on there, and I’ve been waffling about whether to add pastry.

In the days of yore, I used to post poems occasionally, and I think I ought to do it again, at least occasionally. Everyone’s day is better for a little poetry in it, right?

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
By A. E. Housman

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.