A Certain Slant of Light

I’m leaving for my trip to Massachusetts tomorrow! So I’m posting my Wednesday Reading Meme today to sweep the decks clean before I go.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I finished Mary Stewart’s The Last Enchantment, the final book of the original Merlin trilogy, although Stewart went ahead and published a fourth book a few years later. The Last Enchantment nonetheless feels like a conclusion - I’d be certainly very surprised if Merlin narrates the next book - for it takes us through the end of Merlin’s story, and indeed beyond the usual end: he’s buried alive in his crystal cave, as is his usual end, but here he’s rescued and at the end of the book is living in retirement, an old man tired yet content, frequently visited by the king.

We were particularly interested in the book’s ambiguous treatment of Nimue. Is she truly in love with Merlin? Pretending to love him to steal his power? Not stealing his power at all, but learning all his skills so she can take up his mantel as Arthur’s sorcerer, just as Merlin bade her?

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the third book in the Regeneration trilogy, alternates between Billy Prior, who is headed back to the front now that he’s been released from Craiglockhart, and his counselor Rivers, who spends most of the book ill to the point of delirium, recollecting his fieldwork among the headhunters of Melanesia. The colonial rulers of Melanesia had forbidden headhunting, and because their entire culture had been organized around the headhunt, they were basically pining away in despair.

Rivers doesn’t draw a direct parallel, but there’s clearly a meditation here about war as a bearer of cultural meaning - whose cultural meaning is perhaps divorced from anything that a reasonable person might consider a “war aim.” The point of the headhunt is the headhunt. It’s not meant to win territory or settle a point of politics by other means or Defeat Autocracy; the point is to take heads. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

( Spoilers )

Nghi Vo’s When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is a sequel to The Empress of Salt and Fortune, also featuring a cleric who travels the countryside collecting knowledge/stories, also very concerned with how stories change depending who tell them. In this case, Chih is telling the story of a human-tiger romance to a trio of tigers who may eat them… or might leave Chih alive to go home and correct the record with what the tigers consider the real version, although they are grumpily aware that Chih will probably just put it down as a competing version, equal in weight with the clearly incorrect human story!

Finally, there’s a new Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel out! Jessi’s Secret Language is one that I read as a kid (in general I read all the Very Special Episode books about disabilities), and it was fun to revisit it now, especially because I’ve actually seen a production of Coppelia, the ballet that Jessi stars in. In fact, I think my desire to see that ballet stems from this book! (Almost all my other ballet feelings come from Princess Tutu. Someday I WILL see Swan Lake and Giselle.)

What I’m Reading Now

In Dracula, Dracula has end-run our heroes! They have now split up to chase him, one team by land and one by waterway… Will they be able to kill him before he reaches his castle stronghold??

What I Plan to Read Next

To my distress, I have discovered that I weeded Jane Langton’s The Diamond in the Window from my collection! So I’ll only be taking The Fledgling and the recently-acquired The Astonishing Stereoscope to Massachusetts with me.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“...they, too, are in love with what happened to them, because it is not only war, but also their youth. Their first love.”

Svetlana Aleksievich makes this comment near the beginning of The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, and I’ve chewed over it for a long time because left to my own devices I would not have gotten that out of the interviews that make up the backbone of this book. Maybe because I tend to think of “first love” through a romantic haze, as a positive force? When of course a first love can be destructive, albeit not often as brutally destructive as the Eastern Front of World War II.

Maybe “in love with” here means “obsessed with,” which is certainly true. Many of the women Aleksievich interviewed comment that to a great extent they still live in the war, that their memories feel more real than current reality - they can’t stand anything red because it reminds them of blood, they can’t cut up a chicken because it looks too much like human flesh. (One of them comments “maybe I should have had psychotherapy,” but that clearly was just not available at all.)

The story that haunts me is the partisan who was tortured by the Nazis, managed to escape back home, and then could only be soothed by her mother’s presence; she screamed and screamed in agony whenever her mother had to step away to, say, make dinner for the family. Most of the stories aren’t so severe in their outward manifestations, but just the unending agony…

After The Unwomanly Face of War I needed something lighter, and therefore fell on Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood, a romance between a man who has become a woodland spirit and a Victorian folklorist. Great forest atmosphere, but I wanted a deeper connection between Tobias and Henry Silver.

What I’m Reading Now

Last Wednesday, I wrote that I wanted to finish Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Elizabeth Seeger’s The Pageant of Chinese History, and Mary Renault’s North Face before my vacation begins November 1... and then neglected all three books disgracefully all week. I really ought to prioritize North Face, as it’s an interlibrary loan, but a female English tutor has just started flirting with a man with the coy observation, “We must admit the masterpieces are all by men,” and… must we? Even the Greeks acknowledged the genius of Sappho!

We’re entering the home stretch on Dracula! There are two action-packed weeks left to go, and I for one am I tenterhooks. Will they defeat the Count and save Mina? ONLY TIME WILL TELL.

What I Plan to Read Next

I will be traveling from November 1 - 10, so this is entirely up for grabs. Could be a little! Could be a lot! Who can say?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This week’s Wednesday Reading Meme brought to you by littlerhymes! We have finished Mary Stewart’s The Hollow Hills! I enjoyed it more than The Crystal Cave: Merlin spends way less time getting kicked in the face by life, and everything bucks up once young Arthur appears on the scene. Love his friend Bedwyr with his little crush on Arthur! (You really don’t see much of Bedwyr in most recent adaptations. Is it because the name Bedwyr sounds goofy to modern ears?)

littlerhymes also sent me Christine Pullein-Thompson’s Stolen Ponies, a pony book from the 1970s in which the five children set out to find out who is stealing the ponies on the moors… only for one of the children to get dreadfully lost, which takes up most of the rest of the book, until he stumbles on the pony thief by accident! The plotting is odd and meandering and the characterization not very sharp - especially for the ponies, who are interchangeable as bicycles.

What I’m Reading Now

littlerhymes and I have begun The Last Enchantments! We have concluded that the entire fall of Camelot could have been avoided if Merlin had kidnapped Mordred and had him raised by some kindly country squire, rather like Arthur himself. Alas there is no way to communicate this conclusion to Merlin himself, so unfortunately he’s still on a collision course to maybe attempting to drown a baby.

In The Wounded Name, Aymar has been reunited with his cousin/ladylove, whom he insists on not explaining the true reason for his disgrace, as it occurred in part because he thought she was in danger of being executed as a spy! I’m sure this will not backfire on him in any way.

Things have been pretty quiet on the Dracula front - the calm before the storm, of course - which has given me time to reflect that when I first read this in high school I thought it was a typical Victorian novel. Reading it now, with greater understanding of Victorian literature, I can see that while none of the details specifically are atypical, the sheer density of Stalwart Manhood is a lot even by Victorian standards.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been writing up a storm this month, which doesn’t leave much time for reading, so I’ve jettisoned my goal of clearing off my TBR shelf before I head to Massachusetts at the beginning of November. My new goal is to polish off the books I’ve got out from the library: Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Elizabeth Seeger’s The Pageant of Chinese History (last of the Newbery Honors for a while!), and Mary Renault’s North Face.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“Seems weird that we have this one random heterosexual in this book,” I said, eyeing Billy Prior doubtfully as I read Pat Barker’s Regeneration. Well, now I’ve read the sequel, The Eye in the Door, and it turns out Billy Prior is also as queer a nine-bob note, so balance has been restored to the universe.

Overall I feel that Billy Prior is not as compelling as Rivers or Sassoon or Wilfred Owen (who do have the incomparable advantage of being real people), and this book is therefore not quite as strong as the first - but maybe that’s an unfair thing to ask, anyway. My favorite character is Rivers: his cool, detached, analytical voice, even when he’s looking at his own emotions, not so much experiencing them as peering at them under a magnifying glass.

I loved the atmosphere of Elizabeth Brooks’ The Orphan of Salt Winds, which is set at the delicious gothic decaying house of Salt Winds, beside a treacherous marsh alongside the sea. But both of the dual timelines deflated at the end, which was a disappointment. ( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

D. K. Broster clearly just decided to throw ALL her favorite hurt/comfort tropes in The Wounded Name and I am HERE for it. Since I last posted, Laurent has been taken captive, only to discover that Aymar has also been taken captive, and Aymar is TERRIBLY WOUNDED! SoLaurent volunteers to share Aymar’s cell, because only constant nursing can save Aymar from death, and no one else will take it on because Aymar stands accused of betraying his own men!!!

Yes, you heard that right. The wounds to Aymar’s body are as nothing to the wounds in his HEART. Of course Laurent is convinced to the bottom of his soul that Aymar couldn’t possibly be guilty… but Doubts are beginning to creep in.

In Dracula, the men have FINALLY realized that leaving Mina out of the loop is a TERRIBLE idea, but TOO LATE, Dracula has already begun to feed on Mina! It’s fine, though, because that means that now Mina has a psychic connection to Dracula, which will surely help them track him down and stake him?

What I Plan to Read Next

At the beginning of November I’m going on a trip to Massachusetts, and I’m contemplating what to bring along for a little You Are Here reading! A reread of The Witch of Blackbird Pond perhaps? Maybe I should take another crack at Walden?

The trip encompasses a visit to Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, which is now a museum; I plan to at long last buy myself a copy. I KNOW, it’s shocking I don’t have one. Maybe I should also read a biography of LMA, or a critical analysis of her work, or something like that? Let me know if you have any recs.

A wild edition of Books I Quit Partway Through appears. I got about halfway through Montague Glass’s Potash & Perlmutter: Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures, a series of comic vignettes about two Jewish men who co-own a cloak and garment business in New York City in the early twentieth century. (Glass himself was Jewish, and although he wasn’t in the cloak and garment trade he must have done a ton of research, because there’s loads of interesting detail.) But after the halfway mark I realized I still couldn’t reliably tell our two heroes apart, and decided that life was too short for books that are merely okay.

There are some funny lines. When they first meet, Abe bites into a dill pickle that squirts in Morris’s eye; Morris replies, “S'all right…I seen what you was doing and I should of ordered an umbrella instead of a glass of water already.” But basically it’s a humorous book where a lot of the humor has been lost to the sands of time.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Naomi Mitchison’s The Big House, which has a lovely Scottish flavor not only to the dialogue but the narrative, and the way that the sentences are constructed. I’ve seen the book described as a Tam Lin retelling, but it’s not so much a retelling as a fractal remix, and the story gets retold, and retold again, and then again, and each time it’s further from the original but also nonetheless referring back to it.

In traveling in and out of fairyland to help their friend the piper Donald Ferguson, Su and Winkie also travel back and forth through time, so the book is also a meditation on the history of Scotland (not so much the Jacobites as the enclosures), and on the class system of the British Isles, and on the wheel of fortune in the medieval sense: the fact that fortunes rise and fall and a family that is on top of the world one century may be nothing much in another.

The book is a bit of a mess: the pacing is choppy and it doesn’t really all come together. But I admire it for its ambitions even though it doesn’t quite fulfill them.

What I’m Reading Now

D. K. Broster’s The Wounded Name. I started reading this the other day while accompanying a friend shoe-shopping, and she asked what I was reading, and I explained, well, it’s this book from the 1920s… set near the end of the Napoleonic Wars… and our heroes have just met for the very first time, and one of them slipped into the flood-swollen river and the other leaped in after him to save him from drowning…

Kayla considered the matter. “So 1920s Boys Love,” she concluded.

In Dracula, Van Helsing has at long last dropped the V word! You know, now that Lucy is dead and it won’t help her at all. Don’t mind me! Just gonna die mad about it!

What I Plan to Read Next

At war with the interlibrary loan office yet again, this time over Mary Renault’s North Face. Wikipedia lists it (inaccurately, as it turns out) as The North Face and I foolishly requested it under that title. Apparently the interlibrary loan office copy-pasted the title into Worldcat and then promptly gave up when it didn’t work, rather than, say, searching “Mary Renault” and making the obvious inference about the titles.

Now I realize that I did give them the wrong title, but also it took me, an untrained amateur, about two minutes to google my way to an answer, so I really feel that they could have managed it!

Years ago my friend Rachel and I watched the delightful movie Fried Green Tomatoes, and I vowed to read the book that it was based on, Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Finally I’ve fulfilled that vow, and I’m happy to say that the book was worth the wait!

The story spans most of twentieth century, starting in the 1910s when young Idgie Threadgoode declares on the eve of her sister’s wedding that she’ll never wear a dress again (and attends the wedding in a cute little suit), and ending in the 1980s (when the book was written), when Idgie’s sister-in-law Ninnie Threadgoode reminisces about the old days that Whistle Stop Cafe to Evelyn Couch, a miserable housewife whose unexpected friendship with Ninnie gives her the strength to change her unhappy life.

It also spans much of the country, as the characters include railway men, men-about-town, and tramps on the road during the Great Depression. But the action always circles back to Whistle Stop, a town that sprang up to serve the railway lines and died as the train lines died after World War II.

And the narrative style is just as lively and wide-ranging, dancing back and forth across the time span of the story, switching easily from regular narration to reminiscence to newspaper clippings. I particularly enjoyed the amateur Whistle Stop newsheet, completed by Dot Weems and including a lot of blog-style updates on her life, not least the doings of her beloved but somewhat feckless husband.

Unexpectedly, Evelyn’s story was my second favorite part of the book: I loved her slow shift from lethargic depression to an overpowering rage at the world that treats women so shabbily, leading first to the invention of an imaginary superheroine alter ego Towanda and then to Evelyn’s own emancipation, in becoming a Mary Kaye saleswoman so successful that she wins herself a pink Cadillac, in which of course she goes to visit her beloved Whistle Stop. (Her journey to empowerment also includes a trip to weight-loss camp, a peak 80s moment that is my least favorite part of the book, but it’s fairly short.)

My favorite part of the book was of course Ruth and Idgie’s love affair, which begins in the 1920s when Ruth comes to stay with the Threadgoode family while she teaches at the local Sunday school. “Idgie has a little crush,” mother Threadgoode tells all the Threadgoode children, but Idgie’s “little crush” is so massive that it’s visible from space, and all the other kids have to flee the breakfast table to have a good laugh after they see Idgie attempting to have table manners to impress Ruth.

Ruth loves Idgie too, but she’s engaged, and she has to provide a home for her sick mother, so she goes back and marries the man… But he’s an abusive asshole, and as soon as Ruth’s mother dies Ruth sends a note to Idgie, consisting only of a passage from the Book of Ruth, the bit about “whither thou goest I will go.” Idgie and her brothers (accompanied by Big George, the Black man who will later make the barbecue at the Whistle Stop Cafe) zoom right on over to pick Ruth up, carrying out her trunk right in front of her furious but helpless husband Frank.

(Frank later disappears in suspicious circumstances. His death is never pinned on anybody.)

The Threadgoodes are so delighted to have Ruth back that they come running out of the house to greet her - right after admonishing each other that they mustn’t be too enthusiastic or they might scare the poor girl away! And when it turns out Ruth is pregnant, the Threadgoode clan gives Idgie the money to start the Whistle Stop Cafe, as she has a family to provide for now. Ruth and Idgie’s Whistle Stop Cafe becomes a fixture of the town, remembered fondly by Ninnie Threadgoode and referred to often in Dot Weems’ newsletter.

This is a fascinating picture of a community that is so totally accepting of Ruth and Idgie that accepting almost feels like the wrong word: it implies that there might be an alternative state of non-acceptance, which no one in the town of Whistle Stop appears to even consider feeling with regard to Ruth & Idgie’s romance. (In contrast, many locals definitely feel unaccepting of Ruth and Idgie’s decision to sell food from their cafe to the local Black population. Black customers have to take their food for carryout, and they get it at the back door, and the local Klan still protests.)

Is the town’s attitude toward Ruth and Idgie historically accurate for a small southern town in the mid-twentieth-century? I have no idea. Whatever else it may be, it certainly is adorable.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled. I really meant to save this final Mrs. Pollifax book for a rainy day… but I felt an overwhelming urge to read it now, and who am I to resist an overwhelming urge? Gilman brought back John Sebastian Farrell to team up with Mrs. Pollifax for the denouement, thus bringing the series full circle from Mrs. Pollifax’s first adventure with Farrell. A satisfying end.

As this is the last Mrs. Pollifax book, I figured it was now or never on Mrs. Pollifax - Spy, the Mrs. Pollifax movie starring Rosalind Russell as Mrs. Pollifax. Russell is a goddamn delight, but I was sorry ( Spoilers )

Last January I bombed out of Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, but I gave it another try with littlerhymes and we powered through! It helped perhaps that I went into it knowing that this is going to be the book where Everyone Is Mean to Merlin, and not in a tragic woobie way either: that’s just how the bannock crumbles in the harsh world of Dark Ages Britain.

What I’m Reading Now

Elizabeth Brooks’ The Orphan of Salt Winds, a delicious novel which has performed the difficult feat of making both its historical and its modern-day plotlines equally gothic. On the eve of World War II, orphan Virginia is adopted by the young couple who own the seaside house Salt Winds, in what the reader quickly senses is a doomed attempt to save their rickety marriage. In the modern day, Virginia in her old age finds a curlew skull on the doorstep of Salt Winds, which she believes is a sign that tomorrow night she must walk into the marsh to drown… No idea where this is headed, but loving every minute of it.

In Dracula, Lucy has DIED. Could this all have been avoided if Van Helsing had been a literal more liberal in sharing information so that everyone was on the same page about the necessity of the garlic flowers and keeping a constant watch over her at night? MAYBE. littlerhymes and I also agreed that PERHAPS if Mina had been summoned, her blood might have saved Lucy: the love of a good woman etc. Lucy Westenra, killed by heteronormativity…

What I Plan to Read Next

Onward in the Merlin Chronicles!

Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony: Stories (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) is a mind-bending experience and with certain caveats I highly recommend it. Many of the stories are built around the question “What if this really weird thing was just a totally normal custom that almost everyone takes for granted?”, and by “really weird” I mean that in the first story, “A First-Rate Material,” the custom in question is “what if after people died we took their hair and skin and bones and nails and made them into fashionable high-end clothing and furniture?”

A lot of stories of this ilk are designed to leave the reader thinking “thank God we don’t do that,” but Murata plays her premises totally straight. The title story, “Life Ceremony,” refers to a custom where the mourners at a funeral gather to eat the deceased. The mourners are supposed to try to find a partner for the night, and they go outside and have some nookie right there in the hopes of getting inseminated to increase the falling birthrate.

The above-mentioned caveat arises from the fact that I realize not everyone wants to read a story where mourners enthusiastically inform a widow, “Your husband is really tasty!”, or the heroine muses tenderly over seeing her work friend’s body transformed into meatballs. What could be a greater act of love than eating the dead? Well, uh, that’s certainly a culturally specific way to look at things. “It really is a good custom,” muses a mourner. “We partake of life, we create life…”

“I feel like it’s human instinct to want to eat human flesh,” someone else comments.

Maho, our narrator, recalls an incident when she was a child, when cannibalism was still taboo: as a joke, she said she wanted to eat human flesh, and the teacher scolded her as the other kids in the class cried. “Instinct doesn’t exist. Morals don’t exist. They were just fake sensibilities that came from a world that was constantly transforming,” she grumps.

But her coworker (the one who will later be meatballs) tries to help her see this in a new perspective: “Everyone always says that things like common sense or instinct or morals are carved in stone. But that’s not true - actually, they’re always changing… And this isn’t something that happened all of a sudden, like you seem to think. It’s always been that way. Things keep transforming.”

This is the theory that animates many of these stories: most people, most of the time, consider the customs of their society natural, instinctual, right. Of course there are outliers. In both “A First-Rate Material” and “Life Ceremony,” there are people who oppose these customs on principle, and also people who don’t partake for personal reasons. One of Maho’s friends got food poisoning at a life ceremony and therefore can’t stand the taste of human flesh - a fact that he apologetically explains at the ceremony, so that no one thinks he’s one of those killjoy weirdos who think it’s wrong to eat the dead.

Some of the stories explore this idea with less cannibalism. In “Two’s Family,” Yoshiko and Kikue bought a house and raised children and grew old together - and people assume they are a lesbian couple, and grow very uncomfortable upon learning that they’re best friends who have never had sex with each other. (Yoshiko has never had sex at all; Kikue has lots of lovers.) It’s not that these people necessarily approve of lesbianism, even, but at least then Yoshiko and Kikue’s relationship would fit the established pattern of “life partners are supposed to have sex with each other.”

One of my favorite stories, “Body Magic,” has a very interesting take on the contrast between knowledge about sex as a social construct and expectation, and knowledge of sex as an internally experienced thing. “It’s not that you don’t want to know, Ruri, it’s that you want to be free, isn’t it?”

We are controlled by these social expectations; not just controlled but created. “We kept responding back and forth in our community, turned ourselves into a character, and started behaving according to that character. I began to think that maybe nobody had such a thing as a real self.”

I truly intended not to buy any more books till I finished the items on my to-read shelf, but I was in Bloomington on Saturday and when I stopped by Caveat Emptor, Pat Barker’s Regeneration was on display, and it demanded to be read.

Regeneration is the first book of the Regeneration trilogy. (I have already put the other two on hold at the library.) Siegfried Sassoon has just sent a declaration denouncing the war to the newspapers, and his friend Robert Graves, desperate to keep Sassoon from being court-martialed (also perhaps desperate to avoid facing the reasons why he has not made a similar declaration when he agrees with Sassoon), has arranged for Sassoon to face a Medical Board that can pronounce him mentally incompetent and send him to Craiglockheart, the premier hospital for shell-shock cases.

Here Sassoon meets Rivers, the competent, compassionate doctor in charge, a sensitive and empathetic man who sees the damage the war has wrought to the young men in his care. And yet it’s his job to convince Sassoon to go back.

They develop a thorny and ethically complicated friendship: a sort of ongoing cat-and-mouse conversation where both are the cat and both are the mouse and both half-want to be caught. Sassoon wants to go back, so he can stop living in this hellish safety while his friends fight. Rivers wants to believe the war isn’t worth it, so he can stop sending young men back to die. And yet with equal force they also both believe the opposite thing: Sassoon that he must stay out of the war to complete his protest, Rivers that the war has to be fought.

This friendship forms the backbone of the book, but threaded throughout are other subplots involving Rivers’ other patients, as well as the developing theories of shell-shock and the treatment thereof. There is a hellish chapter where Rivers witnesses another doctor treating a man’s psychologically-induced mutism with hours of electroshock. I would put “treating” in quotation marks, except that the method does in fact work… but at what cost?

(There is one chapter where Rivers visits a released patient who is now living in a seaside cottage, where said patient suffers a brief but comprehensive nervous breakdown during a storm. Glad I didn’t read this book while I was writing The Larks Still Bravely Singing or the comparison might have robbed me of the strength to go on.)

It’s just really good, so well-done. So many of the characters have complicated, contradictory feelings, which they often barely understand (or sometimes can’t bear to confront), and Barker sketches them in with a light deft hand so they’re always comprehensible to the readers.

And I just love books that are structured in part as a conversation between two characters. I’ve seen this done really well in stories featuring an interrogation (Sylvia Louise Engdahl’s The Far Side of Evil; the movie Sophie Scholl - The Final Days) and there is something of that quality here, as well, even though Rivers is a doctor and he is, technically, supposed to help Sassoon get well - where “well” is defined as “ready and willing to go back to battle.” And Rivers is painfully aware that this is a definition of wellness that makes him in a sense Sassoon’s antagonist, indeed the enemy of all his patients, because he is getting them well enough to go off and die.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Melody Warnick’s This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live, a self-help memoir of the little exercises that Warnick did to help herself feel more rooted in her local community. Most of these exercises are low-key, visit-a-local-attraction sort of things, which is useful from a self-help perspective (a small task is much more likely to get done) but not exciting as a memoir.

A while ago, evelyn_b sent me Helen Perry Curtis’s Jean and Company, Unlimited, a 1937 novel based loosely on Curtis’s travels through Europe with her daughters (here telescoped into one daughter, Jean). Curtis was a museum curator as well as a freelance writer (most of the chapters in this book were initially serialized in a magazine) who went to Europe to purchase folk costumes, so we get a LOT of folk costume detail, plus delicious food and fascinating historical tidbits. Absolutely charming. Now I want to go on a European tour too…

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun A Wizard of Earthsea! Attempting to impress his hated rival Jasper, Ged attempted a spell to summon the spirit of a dead person and accidentally also summoned a nameless shadow creature, which is now lurking somewhere in Earthsea waiting to possess Ged so as to use him as a puppet of evil. Well, Ged, maybe you should’ve just stayed with your first master Ogion instead of going to mage school, huh?

(Also relieved that I went into this knowing that Tehanu is going to unpack some of the patriarchal assumptions undergirding Earthsea, because WOW. “Weak as women’s magic, wicked as women’s magic,” huh? Strong words from a story about a boy who summoned a nameless horror from the deep!)

In Dracula, Lucy briefly regained her health… only to take a turn for the worse! Dr. Seward has summoned his mentor Van Helsing from the continent, but Van Helsing seems devastatingly averse to telling anyone what is actually wrong. VAN HELSING, MAYBE IF YOU WERE MORE FORTHCOMING IT MIGHT SAVE HER.

What I Plan to Read Next

Once I’m done with the Newbery Honor books of the 1970s (three left!!!) I’m going to devote myself to the books on my TBR shelf, with the intention of finishing them by November. Then on my Massachusetts trip I can splurge in the used bookstores guilt-free!