A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I mentioned last week how much I was enjoying Hilary McKay’s The Time of Green Magic, and I continued to enjoy it all the way through. Just the kind of children’s fantasy I like: an old house all covered in ivy, magic that is strange and lovely and just a bit scary (as unknown and unknowable things should be), and just enough real world issues (in this case, the children in a blended family learning to get along) to give the story some emotional ballast without making the magic a mere metaphor for anything.

I also finished Marilyn Kluger’s The Wild Flavor, part food memoir and part foraging manual for wild foods in the Midwest and Northeast. Morels! Persimmons! Hickory nuts! And more! An inspiring read for anyone with foraging aspirations, and an appetizing read for anyone who likes reading about food.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Lord Peter, a collection of all of Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey short stories. The second story begins with Peter Wimsey admiring a comely French girl who turns out ( spoilers, if anyone cares about spoilers for a hundred year old short story? )

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got the Max in the Land of Lies! How will our twelve-year-old spy handle himself in Nazi Germany?? Tune in to find out!

As always on my birthday, I am having my annual birthday sale. This year, since I’m planning to raise prices post-sale ($3.99 for a novella, $5.99 for a novel), I decided to put everything on sale for one big final blow-out. So currently all my novellas are $0.99, and all my novels are $2.99.

Do you like Cold War spies falling in love on an American road trip, even though they're from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain? Then give Honeytrap a try!

If a Civil War soldier woke up from an enchanted sleep in 1965, how long would it take for him to cotton on that men are no longer allowed to touch? Find out in The Sleeping Soldier!

Are you interested in an m/m World War II retelling of Beauty and the Beast? Then Briarley may be for you!

How about a couple of boys riding the rails and falling in love during the Great Depression? Tramps and Vagabonds has your back.

Do you like watching post-World War I woobies suffer beautifully by the seaside? The Larks Still Bravely Singing may be warbling your name.

More Cold War spies, but this time CHRISTMAS! Deck the Halls with Secret Agents is a holly jolly short return to a favorite theme.

Do you like throuples and World War II and retellings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Then A Garter as a Lesser Gift may be coming to a Green Chapel near you.

Do you like throuples and pining and strawberry shortcake in post-Civil War America? Then give The Threefold Tie a try.

Do you want Cold War spies (again!), but this time they're the leads in the fandom that our two heroines are obsessed with? And kind of role-play as while trying out the joys of "your interpretation of this character is so incorrect" hatesex? Enemies to Lovers is calling your name.

You know it is when there's this new girl in school that you're sooo obsessed with because you both love art, and then you have an obsessive friendship ending in a terrible falling out, and then meet again years later in Florence? Have a gelato with Ashlin and Olivia.

And finally, a couple of oddballs. A retelling of Little Red Riding Hood in pre-Revolutionary Russia! Kind of f/f if you want to be! The Wolf and the Girl features forays both into the Russian forest and the nascent French silent film industry.

Last but not least, if your inner eleven-year-old yearns for a magical timeslip story, there's The Time Traveling Popcorn Ball

This week I’m doing Wednesday Reading Meme a day early, as tomorrow is MY BIRTHDAY and I will therefore be frolicking through birthday festivities.

Books I Quit Reading

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which I’ve meant to read for ages because it’s been recced to hell and back. It’s an excellent example of literary fiction, which unfortunately means it’s reminding me why I don’t read much modern literary fiction, which is that I find it depressing. Olive is just so mean?? She’s so contemptuous to her husband in chapter one that I was actually rooting for him to ditch her and run away with his pharmacy clerk, and I never root for male characters to leave their wives.

I read a few more chapters, but then I realized I was actively dreading picking it up again, and life is simply too short.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Nothing this week! The birthday festivities have already begun, and I spent the weekend in Bloomington, meeting a friend’s new baby and having cocktails at a speakeasy, where we had the best seats in the house watching the bartender make the drinks. He had a wonderful contraption for blowing a giant smoke-filled bubble over a drink, which clung to the rim of the glass until you popped it, and then the smoke wisped away in the dimness of the bar.

What I’m Reading Now

Hilary McKay’s The Time of Green Magic, which is a magical house children’s fantasy, and I LOVE a magical house children’s fantasy. Gorgeous. The heroine is already slipping into the books she reads, tasting the sea salt on her lips. Excited to report back.

What I Plan to Read Next

Blue Balliett’s Out of the Wild Night.

A few weeks ago, I was browsing the children’s section at the library, and I sent skygiants a photo of a book. “It’s about a Jewish boy who is evacuated during World War II and becomes a spy! Also he has a kobold and a dybbuk living on his shoulders!” I said. “You should read it!”

I was hoping hereby to offload the book onto someone else instead of adding it to my ever-growing to-read list, but of course this backfired and instead we both had to read Adam Gidwitz’s Max in the House of Spies.

Max, a child genius with a special gift for radios, escapes Germany on the Kindertransport in 1938. He ends up living with the Montagus, where he slowly realizes that Uncle Ewen Montagu is a spy, and sets his little heart on becoming a spy too so he can go back to Berlin and rescue his parents.

(“That Ewen Montagu?” some of you are saying. Yes, that Ewen Montagu, and this book also includes Jean Leslie, Cholmondeley, and Lord Rothschild who keeps blowing stuff up. I didn’t realize at first that these were real people, but skygiants and genarti clued me in, and now at last I’m going to read Ben McIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat, which Gidwitz mentions in the bibliography as the book that inspired this duology.)

(Also I didn’t realize going into it that this was a duology, but I just happened to see the second book on the processing cart when I was processing library books with my mother, which is fortunate because otherwise when I reached the cliffhanger ending my scream might have been heard round the world.)

Because Max is the plucky hero of a children’s adventure novel, he does in fact manage to finagle Ewen Montagu into recruiting him, and ends up going through a thrilling training regimen at Lord Rothschild’s manor, where he meets the aforementioned Jean Leslie, Cholmondeley, and Lord Rothschild. Fun training exercises ensue! (Fun for the reader, not for Max.)

Meanwhile, the kobold and the dybbuk are sitting on Max’s shoulders providing color commentary, which during the spy training mostly becomes focused on “I can’t believe they are sending an ACTUAL CHILD to spy in NAZI GERMANY.”

Now on the one hand, they certainly have a real-world point, but on the other hand, we’re not in the real world here. We’re in a children’s adventure novel, and it’s a convention of the genre that children can and should have deadly adventures, just like it’s a convention of cozy mysteries that one quirkily charming small town can have 50 murders in an indeterminate but relatively short time span without having any impact on that quirky charm.

No one reading this (well, no child reading this, adults can be spoilsports) is going, “Gosh, I hope they don’t send Max on a spy adventure.” We’re all rooting for him to go forth and spy! “Children shouldn’t be sent into deadly peril” is merely a killjoy obstacle to the adventure we all crave! The emotional dynamic here undercuts the moral point.

I also don’t think it quite worked to saddle Max with two mischief spirits who get up to no mischief beyond serving as a sort of mobile peanut gallery. I enjoyed Stein and Berg, but I also felt that the book would have been stronger without them, actually.

Criticisms aside! I really enjoyed this book, and I’m mad at myself that I didn’t get the sequel before I finished it, because it ends on a cliffhanger and now I will have to WAIT to find out what HAPPENS and the suspense is killing me.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finally wrapped up Harold R. Peat’s Private Peat, a World War I memoir written in 1917 by a guy who looks, according to the frontispiece, like pre-serum Steve Rogers. Despite looking like a strong breeze would blow him over, he bluffed his way into the Canadian army soon after war was declared (he told the recruiting sergeant that he had family in Belgium, whom he needed to avenge) and fought for two years before being too injured to return to the front.

But even injured, Peat continues to serve the war effort by writing this memoir to whip up war support among Americans, who by this time have declared war but are still dragging their feet about the whole thing, in part because even at this late date many Americans doubted the atrocity stories about German troops. Peat always emphasizes that the only atrocities he is mentioning are ones where he saw the evidence with his own eyes, especially the Belgian girls raped and impregnated by German soldiers.

One begins to suspect that British war propaganda, usually lauded as so effectively, actually backfired, not only after the war but to a great extent during the war itself. The sensational accounts were so sensational that they made many people disbelieve real accounts of rapes and mass executions.

My latest Newbery is Padraic Colum’s The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside, which is about Colum’s own countryside not merely in the sense of Ireland but in the quite literal sense of stories that come from the specific area where he grew up, close to the Big Tree of Bunlahy. He relates the tale of the local manor, stories of local people, local variants of folktales, all in a lively and entertaining voice. An excellent read if you like folktales.

Finally, I finished William Dean Howells’ Literary Friends and Acquaintances, which really ought to be called Literary Friends and Acquaintances of the 1860s and 70s, because although he’s writing in 1900 he’s not writing about anyone more recent than that, possibly because they’re still alive to object if he says anything too nice about them. Howells is not sharing hot gossip on anyone; he’s reminiscing about people that he knew and liked and wants to present in a good light, Longfellow and Lowell and Whittier and Professor Child (of Child Ballad fame) and so forth and so on. A restful book.

What I’ve Reading Now

Nothing that requires a progress report right now.

What I Plan to Read Next

Howells wrote so charmingly about his friend the Norwegian-American author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen that I decided to read one of his books. Gutenberg doesn’t have Gunnar, the one Howells identifies as most famous, but they do have Boyhood in Norway: Stories of Boy-life in the Land of the Midnight Sun, and as you know I LOVE a good childhood memoir.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Lo these many years ago, after my grandma died, I helped sort out her bookshelves, which held books all the way back from her book-loving aunts and uncles in the early 1900s. As I was at the time in a graduate program, staring down a Ph.D. thesis set roughly in that era, I took a few books that seemed representative, including George Barr McCutcheon’s The Alternative, as McCutcheon was a famous Hoosier humorist of the time period.

So was Booth Tarkington, whose work is still very funny, so I approached McCutcheon’s book with high hopes. However, this is perhaps not the place to start with McCutcheon, as it’s a bit of weightless romantic Christmas fluff that barely cracks one hundred pages despite largish type and beautiful green leafy borders around each page.

Beautifully printed, though. I might keep it just as a lovely example of the printer’s trade.

I’m not usually a bit audiobook person, but when troisoiseaux told me that Michael Schur (showrunner for, among other things, The Good Place) read his own audiobook WITH THE CAST OF THE GOOD PLACE, of course I had to listen to it. A fun romp through the history of moral philosophy, focusing most heavily on Aristotelian virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and Kant.

Schur is good at amusing descriptions of different moral approaches to problems, but less strong when he wanders off the beaten path to discuss, say, what moral philosophy has to say about engaging with the art of terrible people (or chicken sandwiches made by chicken sandwich companies with politics you abhor, etc.). He ultimately comes down on the side of “I guess you gotta decide for yourself,” which isn’t really guidance, especially after he’s just run through why he thinks virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and Kant’s Categorical Imperative suggest that you should give up that literal or metaphorical chicken sandwich. Have some guts, man! Either stand by your moral reasoning, or offer a counterargument why actually it’s FINE if we all chow down on some Chik-Fil-A.

What I’m Reading Now

Padraic Colum’s The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside. Colum won a couple of other Newbery Honors, both of which I felt were dry and dull, but apparently all Colum needed was the inspiration of writing about his very own corner of Ireland to blossom into a fascinating storyteller. I’m doling the book out one tale a night and it’s still going to end far too soon.

What I Plan to Read Next

Evelina has arrived!

Recently I finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and have not yet been able to write about it, because I need time to digest it. But Kimmerer recently released a shorter companion book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which is a distillation of certain ideas from Braiding Sweetgrass, and also easier to digest simply by virtue of being much shorter.

The Serviceberry’s basic idea is this: our current extractive industrial economies are rattling down the road straight toward ecological catastrophe. What other economic models could we follow instead?

And as a model, Kimmerer offers the serviceberry itself. As she notes, Western economics is founded on the idea of scarcity. But while scarcity is a condition that occurs in nature, it’s not a constant. In the natural world, abundance is just as common as scarcity. A serviceberry tree after a rainy spring has more than enough berries for birds and squirrels and humans.

Serviceberries are thus one model of a gift economy. They invite humans to understand “natural resources” not as a source to be exploited but as a gift from the earth, which like all gifts creates a reciprocal relationship between the giver and the receiver. We take, but also give. (In the case of the serviceberries, by spreading the seeds.)

And, furthermore, Kimmerer suggests, modern society could use traditional gift economies as a model for one possible way forward out of our current economic race toward climate catastrophe. There are already small-scale attempts in Little Free Libraries and free farm stands and Freecycle and the Buy Nothing movement, everything from the traditional mutual aid in churches to the new forms of digital gift economy exemplified in, for instance, fandom.

This last is not something Kimmerer discusses, but fandom is my own most extensive experience with a gift economy, where people write fic or draw fanart and post it with no expectation of direct payment behind perhaps a few comments - but also the more diffuse payment of helping create an environment where other people also post their fan creations for everyone to enjoy.

Now, at this point in my life, I’ve mostly moved over to selling stories for regular old money, because we have not (yet) learned how to leverage the gift economy so that it can pay for, let’s say, a two-month road trip. But, on the other hand, so many of the friends that I stayed with on that road trip were people I met through fandom, or through book reviews or nature photos on Dreamwidth or Livejournal. The road trip would not have been possible without the money, but it also would not have been possible without the web of relationships created by the gift economy.

***

While I was reading The Serviceberry, I discovered a couple of serviceberry trees on a street near my house, in a location that made it clear they had been planted by the city. Visions of serviceberry muffins dancing in my head, I went out to pick some berries - keeping a weather eye on the road, as picking berries from a public tree felt vaguely illicit.

But berry-picking is an absorbing occupation, and I didn’t notice the man walking his dog until he was almost upon me. “What are you doing?” he asked, curious, with some slight accent I didn’t recognize.

“Picking serviceberries,” I explained. “Would you like to try one?”

He would and he did. “It’s good,” he said, a little surprised. “Better than blueberries.”

And we said good evening, and I went back to picking serviceberries as he and his dog walked on.

The university where I work happens to have a bronze cast of Degas’ “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen”, so before I read Camille Laurens’ book of the same name (recommended by troisoiseaux), I went to have a good long look at the sculpture.

It’s less than life-size - perhaps two-thirds, one-half the size of the actual fourteen-year-old dancer. You can see the bronze creases in her stockings at the ankles and knees, the places where socks begin to wear out. Her forehead slopes back sharply, more sharply really than I think the human forehead can. Her hair hangs down her back in a rope braid, which is tied with a golden satin ribbon. A real ribbon, fabric rather than bronze.

She wears, too, a cloth tutu, and the curator told us (when I visited with my parents months ago) that the tutu has to be replaced every now and then, always to great debate about exactly how it should look, as the tutu on Degas’ original statue (wax, not bronze) was long gone when collectors decided to make a metal cast. How long should it be? What color? What kind of fabric?

The one at my university is about knee-length, much pleated, creamy pale layers of some fabric that might be tulle, the outer layer purposely frayed for the bottom quarter inch or so. The dancer’s feet are in the fourth position, but her hands are behind her back, and seem rather large for her size.

Thus prepared, I dived into Camille Laurens’ Little Dancer Age Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas’ Masterpiece, translated by Willard Wood. Laurens is attempting to write a biography of Marie van Goethem, the girl who posed for the famous sculpture, but as there is very little material about Marie, it becomes a hodgepodge of other things, including a partial biography of Degas (and indeed it’s filed under his name at my library).

The book is also about the historical conditions of the young dancers at the Paris Opera, who were called rats and generally assumed to offer sexual favors on the side, giving the ballet a scandalous vibe that most 21st century viewers probably don’t pick up from looking at Degas’ pictures, since nowadays ballet is seen as a refined high art. (Is a picture, or a sculpture, worth a thousand words? Or can it tell us anything that we don’t already know?)

And it’s about the initial reception of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, which more or less universally appalled viewers when it was first exhibited. Was it because Degas modeled the sculpture’s head to fit what was then considered the physiognomy of criminals? (Hence the sharply sloping forehead.) The association of ballet dancers with prostitution, which perhaps becomes a little queasy-making when you look at this flat-chested statue of a child?

Or the fact that the original statue was modeled in grayish wax, so the little dancer must have looked just a little corpse-like? A completely different viewing experience than the bronze cast I studied so carefully.

Degas, Laurens notes, was upset about the restoration attempts on a famous painting in the Louvre, a Rembrandt if I recall correctly. It was not the quality of the attempt that he objected to, but the fact that an attempt was made at all. Art, Degas thought, is a living thing; and like all living things, an artwork has its time to die.

I’ve never owned my own TV before, but one of my friends had an extra which became mine when I moved into the Hummingbird Cottage. A Target gift card had just come into my possession as a housewarming gift, so I traipsed off to Target for a DVD player.

“I didn’t know we sold those anymore,” the bemused clerk informed me. (Target does, however, have a large record selection. Also WiFi enabled record players. What a time to be alive.)

Undeterred, I made my purchase, and drove home happily dreaming of all the new movies and shows I would watch.

I did in fact manage to watch a couple of new movies: Studio Ghibli’s The Red Turtle, a wordless movie about a man marooned on an island who ends up marrying a turtle who turns into a woman (as turtles are wont to do), and Werner Herzog’s Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, which is a fascinating documentary about trappers in the taiga, although it does keep saying things like “These trappers are almost untouched by modern civilization” as the trappers zoom off in their snow mobiles. I mean. Maybe a little touched by modern civilization?

However, what I’ve mostly been doing is rewatching old favorites. I rewatched the Romola Garai Emma and the pre-Raphaelite miniseries Desperate Romantics (both of which I own), and contemplated borrowing the 2006 Jane Eyre and 2008 Sense and Sensibility miniseries from the library before deciding that no, it was better to wait till I could find them used somewhere, and therefore enjoy the thrill of the hunt.

(I have not yet found either of those miniseries, but on my last visit to Half Price Books I DID find a copy of the 1981 Brideshead Revisited miniseries for a mere $10!!! which was instantly stolen by a friend who hasn’t seen it yet. Which is fair enough I guess.)

I did get the first two seasons of The Vicar of Dibley from the library, and have now started in on their Poirot collection, and was disconcerted to discover that with Poirot in particular I have barely any memory of the show. Things like the bit where Miss Lemon says “Poirot looked middle-aged even as a baby,” yes. The solutions to the mysteries? No. Gone. Might as well have never watched the show. Which is convenient for a rewatch, admittedly.

As much as I’m enjoying my rewatches, however (season one of Downton Abbey next?), I would like to stir a few new-to-me things into the mix as well.

1. I’ve started the 1981 sitcom A Fine Romance, because (a) it stars Judi Dench, and (b) the episodes are half an hour long. (I’m a sucker for shows with half hour episodes.) It’s cute, but I’m not totally sold yet. Will give it a few more episodes and see how I feel.

2. On the topic of half hour shows (actually 22-minute shows), I’ve heard Abbott Elementary is fantastic. Yes? No? Maybe so?

3. Given my love of Poirot, I was looking thoughtfully at the Miss Marple adaptations. But alas they’re all two hours long, and I turn into a pumpkin at about 60 minutes.

4. Has anyone seen Flambards? Would you recommend it? I’m considering it because it’s on the shelf at the library and I have a vague memory of someone, somewhere, gushing about it, except maybe they were gushing about the book that it’s based on and not the show.

5. I attempted to watch a Vanity Fair miniseries, by which I mean that I got a copy out of the library and then never even put it in the DVD player because the thought of watching Becky Sharp be mean to people while smiling sweetly was too stressful. Strongly suspect I would feel the same way about the classic 1979 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries, which is unfortunate as it would be the perfect capper for my George Smiley readings.

6. However, as a general rule, I do enjoy book to miniseries adaptations, especially if they’re period pieces and the episodes are less than an hour long. So please let me know if you have recs!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I feel that I ought to have something intelligent to say about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but honestly I don’t have a lot to say intelligent or otherwise. Woolf is one of those writers where I respect her skill as a prose stylist, but almost never connect with her work outside of A Room of One’s Own. I thought it might be a fiction/nonfiction thing, where I didn’t vibe with her fiction but liked her nonfiction. But then I read a book of her essays and also wasn’t feeling it, so maybe A Room of One’s Own was just a one-hit wonder for me.

I also finished Alice Alison Lide and Margaret Alison’s Johansen’s Ood-le-Uk the Wanderer, a 1931 Newbery Honor winner written by two sisters. (The Alison sisters are one of three sibling pairs to win Newbery recognition, the others being brother-sister pair Dillwyn and Anne Parrish and brothers James and Christopher Collier.)

Ood-le-Uk is a fifteen-year-old Inuit boy who is swept out to sea on an ice flow, eventually landing in Siberia where he is taken in by the Chukchi and nearly human-sacrificed by the shaman, only to be saved at the last minute by the talisman he wears: a cross in a little wooden box that washed across the sea to his home in Alaska. Does he later meet a Russian Orthodox priest who changes his life by telling him about Christianity? One hundred percent.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve just started an Alice in Wonderland reread, in the copy given to me by my friend Micky, with a note in the front that assures me that the book is just as “chaotic and confusing” as the story my friend Emma and I wrote in sixth grade. It occurs to me that this may not have been a compliment to our magnum opus.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m going in with Fanny Burney’s Evelina.