A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Cannot BELIEVE I waited all these years to read Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Gib Rides Home. The book is loosely inspired by Snyder’s own father’s childhood, and features a Dickensian orphanage! horsies! a horseless carriage! a lonely child finding a home! and just in general is a fantastic homage, as the character of Gib is loveable and memorable and recognizably a child while also being clearly the kind of child who would grow up into the calm, steadfast, loving father Snyder describes in the afterword.

What I’m Reading Now

I had good intentions of traipsing slowly through Charlotte Bronte’s Villette so we could all savor it together, but alas, I’ve been unable to restrain myself, and have galloped through the first few chapters. Alone in the world, with but a little money in her pocket and an even more meager stock of French, Lucy decides to set forth across the Channel to seek her fortunes on the continent. On the crossing, she meets Ginevra Fanshawe, a pretty flibbertigibbet who is headed to a pensionnat in Villette (capital city of Labassecour, for which read Belgium), and for no better reason goes to Villette herself, and soon finds herself ensconced as an English teacher in the self-same pensionnat.

Selfish, boastful, vain, but a saving open straightforwardness in her desire to be admired, Ginevra is one of the delights of the book.

Notwithstanding these foibles, and various others needless to mention—but by no means of a refined or elevating character—how pretty she was! How charming she looked, when she came down on a sunny Sunday morning, well-dressed and well-humoured, robed in pale lilac silk, and with her fair long curls reposing on her white shoulders.

What I Plan to Read Next

Obviously Gib and the Gray Ghost, the sequel to Gib Rides Home. These came out during the PEAK of my Zilpha Keatley Snyder obsession, so I’m truly baffled that I didn’t read them at the time.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Gary Paulsen’s Alida’s Song, one of the trio of memoirs about his grandmother, who essentially raised him because his parents were a catastrophe. In this book, fourteen-year-old Gary spends a summer working at the farm where his grandmother is the cook. Amazing food descriptions, and jaw-dropping the amount that you can eat when you’re doing heavy farm labor all day. At one point Gary eats a four-foot-long sausage, which you eat by dipping in melted butter, and also rolls and plums and milk potatoes, and this is after a lunch of mashed potatoes and fresh-baked bread and rhubarb preserves and venison and pork and beef and blood sausage and apple pie for dessert.

A lovely book, in the way that the Little House books are lovely, just descriptions of everyday life and music and food.

Also Gerald Durrell’s The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure, the sequel to The Fantastic Flying Journey, in which the Dollybutt children and their eccentric uncle Lancelot fly back in time… to rescue the dinosaurs from a big game hunter who stole Uncle Lancelot’s first prototype of a time machine! My God, Durrell was having a good time writing these.

Also Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891-1937, edited by Melissa Edmundson. I cannot escape the conclusion that Edmundson used the best stories in the original Women’s Weird, as this collection is definitely weaker, but it does include a ghost story by L. M. Montgomery that fully justifies all my maunderings about L. M. M. Gothic.

What I’m Reading Now

We’ve reached the bit where Shirley loses its way, by which of course I mean the part where the book stops focusing on Caroline and Shirley’s friendship. Caroline has reunited with her long-lost mother, and Shirley I believe is about to embark on a romance.

What I Plan to Read Next

A few days ago, I was looking at a book at the library, which seems since to have disappeared into the ether. Can you help me find it? It’s a children’s or young adult novel, and I thought the author was Ursula K. Le Guin. But none of the books in her bibliography on Wikipedia sound right, so it may be some other author around the same area of the alphabet. It begins with the main character at work at the local convenience store and checking out cars as he walks home.

Kicking myself for not getting the title. Baffled by its disappearance. I helpfully put it on the re-shelving cart after looking at it, and God knows where it ended up reshelved.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Twelve Great Black Cats, and Other Eerie Scottish Tales, a delightfully spooky set of ghost and ghost-adjacent stories. My only criticism is that the title is Twelve Great Black Cats and there are only ten stories and the mismatch offends my sense of the fitness of things.

Also Gerald Durrell’s The Fantastic Flying Journey, in which three children go on a round the world adventure in a hot air balloon! after taking a powder that allows them to speak to animals!!! with their fat and lovably foolish uncle Lancelot who I am almost certain is Durrell’s self-caricature. (He keeps getting himself in dangerous situation - chased by a rhino etc - and then sternly warning the children that they need to be more careful, as they attempt not to giggle.)

Not quite as good as his memoirs, but still fun. It obeys to a T the cardinal rule of children’s fantasy: asking yourself “What would I have liked to read about when I was eleven?” and then writing it.

The 2024 Newbery Honor books continued strong with Pedro Martín’s Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir, a graphic novel about a trip to visit his parents’ hometown in Mexico that the whole family (nine kids!) took sometime in the 1970s. (Young Pedro’s favorite TV show is Happy Days, and he yearns to be as cool as The Fonz.) Lots of fun! I especially loved the sequences about Pedro’s grandfather’s work as a mule driver during the Mexican Revolution, which Pedro envisions in superhero style.

What I’m Reading Now

Not much progress on Shirley this week, as I was traveling over the weekend. Shirley and Caroline have planned a romantic getaway trip to Scotland, and also started a plan for the relief of the poor of the parish who have been thrown out of work by the war and the new cloth-making machines.

What I Plan to Read Next

This Saturday I have a date with John Le Carré’s The Looking Glass War.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

D. K. Broster’s Couching at the Door, a suitably chilling short story collection for Halloween. Again, the creepiest story in the last section was the one with no magic. Cousins Ellen and Caroline are visiting Italy, only Caroline is spoiling the trip by reading the Baedeker loudly at every sight. Ellen, miserable, bitter, trampled-upon in this as everything else, wishes that she could have just one day without Caroline… and realizes that she can. All she has to do is kill Caroline!

“That seems excessive,” I gasped, even as Ellen strangled Caroline with a silk scarf. Thereafter Ellen jaunted off to Florence, had a lovely day despite concerns that Caroline might appear at any moment, and more or less instantly lost all her money. It’s unclear if Ellen is wholly incompetent because Caroline has tyrannized over her for so long, or if Caroline has dominated Ellen because she truly can’t look after herself on account of being just a touch insane, as witness her conviction that the dead Caroline will reappear and take over her life again.

I also read Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Trespassers, in which a brother and sister sneak into a neglected mansion, and find a wonderful old nursery full of delightful toys, and possibly also a ghost. Wonderful atmosphere, reminiscent of The Velvet Room. Goes off a bit into Problem Novel territory once the owners of the house show up. I enjoyed Grub’s doom and gloom attacks, as I was also a child prone to doom and gloom attacks.

Also Gerald Durrell’s The Overloaded Ark. This was Durrell’s first book, and he hit the ground not quite running, but certainly skipping along at a good clip. It’s not quite as funny as his later books (I only laughed aloud once) and the metaphors are not quite as astoundingly apt (though I did love the comparison of a bat’s nose to a Tudor rose), but still a very Durrell read.

And a surprise read! As I was checking the graphic novel shelves for Pedro Martin’s Newbery Honor Mexikid, I stumbled upon a hitherto unsuspected Hayao Miyazaki graphic novel, Shuna’s Journey, translated by Alex Dudok de Wit. Miyazaki wrote and illustrated this book in the early eighties, and it prefigures much of his later work: the hero and heroine who trade off saving each other, the fascination with strange machines and stranger creatures, the wide vistas of grass blowing in the wind.

What I’m Reading Now

Creeping along in Shirley. Caroline Helstone is madly in love with her distant cousins Robert Moore, who loves her too but has (I’m pretty sure) decided that a man in his position must marry an heiress, and therefore has crushed Caroline’s heart on the rocks.

What I Plan to Read Next

Mexikid is still checked out, so my next Newbery Honor book will be Daniel Nayeri’s The Many Assassinations of Samir, Seller of Dreams. I flipped through and it has charming illustrations.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Like John le Carré’s first Smiley novel Call for the Dead, his second A Murder of Quality is more of a murder mystery than the sort of spy story for which he was later acclaimed. In fact, this book has almost no spy content at all, but it does expand upon one of le Carré’s other great themes, which might be described as “They fuck you up, your public schools.” (Public schools meaning posh English boarding schools.)

Also Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Ghosts Go Haunting, with excellent silhouette illustrations by Nonny Hogrogian. A delicious collection of Scottish ghost stories, which would be perfect for reading around a campfire - one of those books with a wonderful cadence to the writing that would clearly read aloud well.

What I’m Reading Now

You will be unsurprised to hear that there are no fairy references at all while Jane Eyre is under St. John’s oppressive influence. As Jane notes, to please him she must “disown half my nature”; and as St. John is interested in Jane merely as a yoke-fellow in his missionary work, believing that she is “formed for labour, not for love,” he of course sees nothing elf-like about her. (St. John is one of the most chilling men in literature, because he crushes people so completely while believing devoutly that he intends nothing but good. Rosamunde Oliver had a lucky escape in not becoming his wife.)

But just when all appears lost, and Jane quivers on the cusp of accepting St. John’s offer of marriage, the uncanny touches her again. Across the distance she hears Rochester cry, “Jane! Jane! Jane!”, and knows that she must go to him.

Jane insists this is no witchcraft - no magic - that Nature “was roused, and did—no miracle—but her best.” Well, perhaps. Or perhaps it seems natural because we have been so thoroughly primed to see Jane herself as an elfin creature, with one foot in the world of magic, and a touch of the uncanny about Rochester as well.

What I Plan to Read Next

My next le Carré is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Everyone tells me that this is the book where le Carré starts scourging your soul with a purifying fire, and I can’t wait.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

If you want an entertaining and fast-paced read about the life of Alexander the Great, I would 100% recommend Mary Renault’s The Nature of Alexander. If, however, you want a fair and balanced view of the man, well, listen, Alexander is Mary Renault’s best beloved blorbo (she is probably rising from her grave in wrath over this word choice, but if the shoe fits!), and all the chroniclers who say mean things about him are wrong and biased and probably using him as a vehicle to complain about later Roman tyrants without rousing the ire of the emperors. So THERE.

A fantastic read, but probably worth triangulating with a couple of other biographies if you want to have a clearer view of Alexander.

I also finished Daphne Du Maurier’s The Doll: The Lost Short Stories. The subtitle makes it sound like these stories were dug out of a box in someone’s attic, but in fact they were all previously published, most of them earlier in Du Maurier’s career, so not “lost” so much as “no longer readily available.” The quality is variable, but the good stories are excellent. I quite liked the title story (the first appearance of a hauntingly unavailable woman named Rebecca, although clearly quite a different Rebecca than the Rebecca of the novel) and the two stories about a streetwalker named Maizie.

And I read Agnes Danforth Hewes’ Glory of the Seas. I must confess I groaned when I saw that Hewes had won three Newbery Honors, as I found the first one (Spice and the Devil’s Cave) a real slog, but Glory of the Seas was quite readable even though our hero John did spend a lot of the book carrying the idiot ball. His intensely abolitionist uncle, who resigns the bench rather than enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, keeps sneaking out at night and having meetings at odd hours with his friend Garrison (publisher of The Liberator). Could he possibly be involved in the Underground Railroad!

Okay I realize that this is perhaps far more obvious to me, the reader of a work of historical fiction, than it would be for a person at the time to realize that his uncle the judge is in fact flagrantly breaking the law… but still I think John should at least perhaps suspect it a LITTLE.

(Having said this, I also spent most of the book convinced that John’s friend Benny Paradiso the merry brown-faced Italian boy was in fact a runaway slave pretending to be an Italian, and it turned out that no, he’s just exactly what he says he is. So clearly I can be misled by genre expectations just as well as John can be misled by expectations about behavior expected from his uncle the judge!)

What I’m Reading Now

In Jane Eyre, the awful truth has been revealed. Rochester already has a wife! In his attic! Because she is mad!!!! Rochester tries to convince Jane that Bertha doesn’t count as his wife, so if he and Jane lived together as husband and wife they would be married in SPIRIT. He also reveals to her that he has lived with at least three mistresses over the past decade or so and remembers them all now with horror. Jane, who wasn’t born yesterday, concludes that he would eventually look on her with horror as well, and heads out into the wide world with nothing but twenty shillings in her pocket, preferring to die on the moors rather than live to be loathed by her beloved.

I think that even if Jane did yield to Rochester’s entreaties to live as his mistress, it’s even money whether she or Rochester would grow tired of the arrangement first. I think Rochester would in time grow tired of a Jane who had lost her self-respect (as Jane would do, if she yielded from passion rather than genuine conviction of principle), but perhaps not as fast as Jane would tire of living without self-respect. Then off she’d go, just in the south of France rather than the moors of Yorkshire.

What I Plan to Read Next

Halloween reading! I’ve got a nice set of ghost stories this year. First on my list is Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Ghosts Go Haunting, and then I’m hoping for D. K. Broster’s Couching at the Door.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Gerald Durrell’s The Ark’s Anniversary, a book commemorating not only the twenty-fifth anniversary of Durrell’s zoo, but also his triumph in establishing captive breeding as an important practice for saving desperately endangered species. “If captive breeding was mentioned twenty-five years ago within the hearing of a group of earnest conservations,” he notes, “they flinched and spoke loudly of other things, rather as if you had the bad taste to confess that you thought necrophilia a suitable means of birth control.”

His earlier books tend to be pure romps, whether they are memoirs of his family or his animal collecting adventures. This one is a little bit more political (“When ecology becomes a luxury then we are all dead,” he comments with exasperation, with regard to certain obstructive politicians), but still very funny, as in this description of a colleague who lost his luggage on a flight.

In one hand Tom clasped what seemed to be all his worldly goods in a briefcase which had apparently been constructed out of the skin of an ancient crocodile suffering from leprosy. His suit looked as though it had been slept in by seventeen tramps and then discarded as being of no further service… His tie – at one time I have no doubt a magnificent piece of neckwear – looked as though it had been seized and thoughtful masticated by one of the less intelligent dinosaurs and then regurgigated. His shoes completed the whole ensemble: Charles Chaplin spent years trying to get his shoes to look like that without success…

littlerhymes and I also finished Ghost Hawk, which we put on our list because Susan Cooper wrote it and it was available in both our countries. I have in the past sung the praises of going into books sight unseen, but in this case I wish we had done a bit of research, because it turns out that this is a book about how Colonialism Is Bad. This is of course laudable, but as with books about how Women Had It Tough in the Ancient World (or indeed simply in The Past), I feel I’ve done my time with this one, and indeed also with Slavery Is Bad, Racism Is Bad, War Is Bad, etc. etc. I’ve got it. I’ve grasped the concept. I don’t need to read another book about it.

Because it’s Cooper, the prose is of course beautiful, and she evokes the woodlands of Massachusetts just as in other books she evokes the mountains of Wales or the Scottish lochs. But I did feel it was really more about its message than about a story.

What I’m Reading Now

After a long hiatus in fairy allusions, Jane Eyre comes back strong when Jane meets Rochester. In fact, the first reappearance of the fairy allusions is from Jane toward Rochester: when Jane first hears Rochester’s horse on the road, she half-convinces herself that this is the sound of the gytrash, a fairy creature who preys on unwary travelers.

Once Jane sees him, the fairy illusion is dispelled, or rather passes from Jane to Rochester, because next time he sees her, he teases, “And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on that stile?”

“For whom, sir?” asks Jane, startled.

“For the men in green: it was a proper moonlight evening for them. Did I break through one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the causeway?”

And Jane falls instantly in with his joke: “The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago,” said I, speaking as seriously as he had done. “And not even in Hay Lane, or the fields about it, could you find a trace of them. I don’t think either summer or harvest, or winter moon, will ever shine on their revels more.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I have after all acquired Elizabeth Wein’s Cobalt Squadron.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last, another Newbery Honor book! I guessed that Anne Dempster Kyle’s Apprentice of Florence would be about an apprentice artist during the Renaissance, and I was mostly wrong. There is a secondary character who becomes an apprentice to Ghirlandiao! But our hero Neno is an apprentice to a silk merchant, who gets sent to manage the merchant’s affairs in Constantinople just in time to be on the scene when the city falls! Fortunately for Neno, Neno’s father once saved the Grand Vizier’s son from drowning (which is why the Grand Vizier freed Neno’s father from slavery, thus enabling him to return to Italy and father Neno), and now the Grand Vizier returns the favor by saving Neno.

When we first meet Neno, his father has been missing for years, and near the end of the book we discover it’s because he went on a voyage, got marooned by mutineers, and accidentally discovered America. After returning to Europe (crossing a portion of the Atlantic in a dugout canoe, which ruined his health), he dies in Neno’s arms, but not before telling Neno his story and presenting him with a disk bearing a feathered serpent as proof of its veracity. Neno tells Cosimo de Medici of this fantastic potential new trade route. Cosimo de Medici politely scoffs.

Also Mary Stolz’s A Wonderful, Terrible Time, a secondhand acquisition from my beloved Von’s. Best friends Mady and Sue Ellen are enjoying a quiet but happy summer in their relatively poor Black urban neighborhood, having tea parties with their dolls, stringing beads, visiting the local dime store and deciding what they’d buy if they had money. But then, by a wonderful chance, they have the opportunity to spend two weeks at a summer camp.

The book description puzzlingly does not mention the summer camp aspect, which seems like one of the main selling points of the book to me! Delightful summer camp descriptions. There is a three-legged raccoon who became the camp pet after being rescued from a trap who is an absolute delight. I also enjoyed the contrast between the two girls, who in some ways are more like sisters than best friends: constantly thrown together because they grew up in adjoining apartments, they love each other and enjoy playing together, but they are also radically different people. Dreamy, animal-loving Mady adores summer camp, while Sue Ellen can’t wait to get back home.

I enjoyed this book, but I don’t feel a need to keep it. Would another Mary Stolz fan like a crack at it? I’d be happy to pop it in the mail.

What I’m Reading Now

Not a lot of forward motion in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes this week. Otherwise, I think I’m actually only working on a few books right now? Two buddy reads, plus Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor, which I’ve almost finished. Oh, and I started Phyllis Ann Karr’s Frostflower and Thorn... will this become Book that Travels through the Dreamwidth Circle, a la At Amberleaf Fair?

What I Plan to Read Next

My hold on Ellis Peters’ Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Heart just came in at the library!

An unusual edition of What I’ve Given Up Reading: I fell at the last hurdle of my Read All the Patrice Kindl project when I discovered that her final book Don’t You Trust Me? is narrated by a sociopath. I just don’t enjoy that sort of thing, and despite being so very close (so close!!!) to finishing Kindl’s entire oeuvre, I just couldn’t stick it out past the first couple of chapters.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Chantemerle! ( spoilers )

This is Broster’s first book, co-written with her friend G. W. Taylor. Her key themes of honor and hurt/comfort are already in place, but not as highly developed as they would become in later books. Louis in particular spends much of the book getting wounded, as befits the charmingly languid favorite with a not-so-secret core of steel.

I also limped to the end of Naomi Mitchison’s When the Bough Breaks, a collection of short stories set in the Roman Empire, mostly around the time of Vercingetorix’s rebellion. I really enjoyed the short stories and also the novelette, which is set during the age of the early Christian church and in fact appears to be fanfic for Paul’s Letter to Philemon - an interesting glimpse of various different belief systems in Rome at the time.

However, the final novella is about - well, like most of Mitchison’s work, it’s about a lot of things, but a couple of those things are “Women had it rough in classical antiquity,” and also “Women’s inability to control their own reproductive choices really limits their options in life, huh?” And, you know, fair enough, but I feel that I’ve gotten the message on this one, and if I never read another novel about it ever again that would be just fine.

I also found the ending very distasteful.( Spoilers )

The problem is that you can’t always tell at the outset how hard a book is going to lean on this angle. If I were too suspicious about “Is this a book about how it sucks to be a woman in classical antiquity?”, I would never have read Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday, which I adored.

What I’m Reading Now

Ever since I’ve read Jeanine Basinger’s Silent Stars, I’ve vaguely intended to read an Anita Loos book, and a chance encounter with one of her novels in the Reading Room at Shakespeare and Company has at last lit a fire under me. Since you can’t buy the Reading Room books, I have contented myself with the Gutenberg version of Gentleman Prefer Blondes, the diary of a ditzy kept woman who is always wiring her admirer for more money so she can “improve her mind” by, say, buying a diamond tiara.

What I Plan to Read Next

Despite the aggravating aspects of When the Bough Breaks, it did whet my appetite for more novels set in ancient Rome. I think it is at last time for Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Susan Cooper’s Victory! I began this in a dilatory fashion, then littlerhymes decided to spend a sultry vacation day at the library and zipped through the book, so then I had to zip too.

A good book for zipping, as it turns out! Very pacy, which is especially impressive as this is a dual timeline novel, and my experience is that usually one of the timelines drags. Usually the modern-day one, since the character in the Past is usually spying on the Nazis or becoming a pirate or something, while the modern-day character is, like, sipping coffee in a Starbucks while googling the adventures of Past character.

Sam does indeed have a more exciting story, as he finds himself on Admiral Nelson’s flagship Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar. But Molly’s modern-day story has a splash of magic to spice it up, as Molly finds Sam’s souvenir swatch of the Victory’s flag, and it kicks off some sort of mystical connection between them, which comes to a head when Molly and her grandfather visit the Victory at Portsmouth…

I expected a bit more to come of this mystical connection, to be honest, and instead it seemed that the book sort of petered off at the end. But nonetheless, an enjoyable read on the whole.

I also completed William Dean Howells’ Italian Journeys. Howells was the American consul in Venice during the Civil War, and this book, originally published in 1867, is an account of his vacations throughout Italy during that time. This time period was also, of course, in the midst of the reunification of Italy, and as my copy is a reprint of an edition that Howells lightly updated in the 1890s, there is an interesting palimpsest effect. He’ll describe, for instance, the Austrian soldiers still in northern Italy in the 1860s, then note that they are long gone now.

There’s a particularly charming bit where he describes a woman at the opera, wearing a white dress and carrying a fan that is red on one side and green on the other… the forbidden Italian colors! And every Italian in the opera knew it, and glowed with pleasure at the demonstration.

He also occasionally modifies his own reflections, as in this note on the unfinished excavations of Herculaneum. “[Herculaneum] was never perfectly dug out of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last century, together with other excavations, when they endangered the foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself so hot upon the poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should not myself, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of classic civilization, like to have my house tumbled about my ears.)”

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Chantemerle, where Gilbert has renounced his claim on Lucienne in favor of Louis! Gilbert’s religious advisor/father figure is hopeful that in sacrificing his betrothal, Gilbert will at last be able to accept the Catholic Church, and thus become a suitable leader for the deeply religious peasants of the Vendee. We shall see! Slightly concerned that this theme will lead to Gilbert drinking the cup of renunciation to its dregs and dying for the Vendee. But no, I still think this will end in a double wedding of four cousins… although it must be admitted that I am often unwisely hopeful about the endings of Broster books.

What I Plan to Read Next

skygiants and genarti and I are going to read Franny Billingsley’s The Robber Girl.