A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read Barbara Robinson’s The Best Halloween Ever, which I impulse-bought last week, and… I’m actually pretty sure I read this before, and totally forgot about it because it’s a totally forgettable book. OH SELF.

What I’m Reading Now

I got this year’s Newbery book, The Girl Who Drank the Moon! It seems promising so far! Admittedly, so far I’ve only read about five pages…

I’ve also gotten started a book from the Unread Book Club, Robin McKinley’s A Knot in the Grain, which is a collection of short stories that I have long owned and vaguely meant to read and never quite gotten around to because, honestly, I’ve never been that hot on either short stories or Robin McKinley. Or, I mean, I enjoy McKinley’s books - I have fond memories of both Beauty and Rose Daughter, say; but if you asked me to tell you which of those two Beauty and the Beast retellings was which, I’d be dead in the water. They don’t stick in my mind.

Although I will probably remember the Death of Marat dessert in Sunshine to my dying days. Also the cinnamon rolls that sold out every day, and Sunshine’s customers tried to bribe her to keep some behind the counter for them. Mmmmm.

Anyway! A Knot in the Grain is okay so far. The stories feel a bit insubstantial, which is the problem I often have with short stories: there’s not enough time to really get to know the characters or the world. Although so far they’ve all taken place in the same world as The Hero and the Crown (another McKinley book I’ve read but barely remember), which presumably helps if you do remember it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I was planning to read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for my next reading challenge (“a book over 600 pages long”), but I might change that to Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism if the library gets it to me in time. It seems everyone else has decided 2017 is a good time to read that book, too.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’ve knocked two books off the TBR pile! Although actually, I think they were both rereads, but it’s been so long since I’ve read them (if in fact I did read them before) that I don’t remember them at all.

Joan Blos’s A Gathering of Days is a Newbery book, so I almost certainly read it during the Newbery Project 1.0 (when I was eleven), but I reread it just in case I hadn’t and subsequently realized that I’d forgotten this because it’s a super forgettable book. But also it’s pretty short and there’s some fun bits of American history in the 1830s info sprinkled in, so I’m not sorry I reread it.

Janet Taylor Lisle’s A Message from the Match Girl is one of those books where there’s maaaaaybe something magic going on but it’s never quite certain either way. I approached this book with trepidation once I realized this, because Lisle wrote another book (Afternoon of the Elves) that sort of feints in this direction but turns out to have no magic at all, not even the “is it or isn’t it?” kind, and I felt quite betrayed.

But A Message from the Match Girl manages its balancing act a little better, which oddly is probably why I forgot it almost totally after reading it (I did get a few whiffs of memory as I reread: the scene where they find a package in the pocket of the bronze Match Girl statue at the park lodged somewhere in my mind). It’s competent at what it does, so it didn’t upset me, but Lisle doesn’t do it as well as Zilpha Keatley Snyder (or for that matter Elizabeth Marie Pope, in The Perilous Gard), so I didn’t remember it particularly either.

What I’m Reading Now

The Hunger Games! I’ve just finished part 2 and OH MY GOD, KATNISS, I am amazed that she’s still on her feet and moving forward rather than a sobbing wreck.

Over the years I’ve picked up a lot of spoilers for these books, not on purpose, just by vague osmosis. On the one hand I wonder what reading these would be like without knowing beforehand, say, that the rules of the game would be changed so that two tribunes from the same district could both win (I expected that to happen much earlier in the book, honestly), but on the other hand I think this would be absolutely gut-wrenching to read without being spoiled for a lot of it beforehand and honestly I am okay with not having my gut wrenched right now.

What I Plan to Read Next

Catching Fire and Mockingjay. I’ve also, in much lighter reading fare, borrowed the first Miss Read book from my mother, who promises that it is about charming English village things (the first book in called Village School) which sounds just delightful right now. I think it will be my new bedtime book.

I finished Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, which fulfills my first challenge for the 2017 Reading Challenge! *pause for cheering and kazoos* This book has been on my TBR list since 2008, so I'm glad I finally read it, but I have mixed feelings about it as a book; it spends more time musing philosophically than I think any novel that is not Sophie's World ought to do, and quite a bit of that philosophical musing is about the Nature of the Invalid, which gets tiresome. "Can the healthy and the sick ever bridge the chasm between them? PROBABLY NOT."

It's a bit like an A Passage to India of illness, now that I think about it.

The characters are finely enough observed that I think they would have stood the test of time much better if the narrative left more room for interpretation. Too finely observed to be sympathetic in some ways; I understood and even empathized with Hofmiller's bad decisions, because he makes them entirely - as the title suggests - out of pity (I think a modern Hofmiller would call his feeling sympathy; it's not as condescending as pity implies) - and yet some of them are horrible decisions, like the time that he wildly exaggerates the likelihood that a new treatment will help Edith, a young woman partially paralyzed by I think polio, although the book never specifies the disease.

Well, he wants to make her happy, which is understandable and yet so terribly, terribly, wickedly short-sighted. And having set himself on this path, he's too weak to pull himself out of it; he begs Edith's doctor not to tell her that Hofmiller exaggerated (even though the doctor intends to do this in the gentlest way possible: Hofmiller is a layman, didn't understand the technicalities, certainly no suggestion that he was exaggerating on purpose because it was just so pleasant to be the bearer of good news, etc. etc.). Hofmiller promises that he'll tell her himself when the time comes, and I guess the doctor must be taken in by Hofmiller's cavalry uniform and the honor and backbone it seems to promise he possesses, because he agrees to this dubious plan.

In the event, Hofmiller is never put into a position where he has to confess, but I don't believe he ever would have managed it. The keystone of his character seems to be that he does whatever he thinks will be most approved by the people he's with at the time; and at no point would Edith or her father ever want to hear that this new treatment is in fact totally unsuitable for Edith's condition.

What I liked about this book - and also what made it painful to read - is that the Hofmiller's flaws are so small and common and in ordinary circumstances would probably cause only small problems, but he finds himself in a situation where they end up leading to tragedy. It's a sort of small-scale Greek tragedy - a small and sordid tragic flaw, leading despite Hofmiller's good intentions to a bitter ending.

I have come into possession of a pair of bookshelves, so I decided it was time to move my books from my parents' house down to my apartment. And, as I was going to have to get them all off the shelves and box them up anyway, I figured that I might as well sort them.

There were a lot of books.

( All the books! )

What surprised me most was that I actually found quite a number that I haven't read. Now admittedly, some of these were children's books that my mother bought for us lo these many years ago and we simply never got around to reading them, but still. I now have an actual physical unread book pile!

( The untead book pile )

It is a bit intimidating. I only transported some of the unread books to Indianapolis with me, as I figured that having the whole pile constantly under my eye might give me vapors.

I haven not yet managed to transfer all the books from my car into my room and thence onto the bookshelves, but once I do I will probably post pictures of that too. There's already a shelf and a half devoted to Isobelle Carmody. Why must she write such very long books?