A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Four Dolls, by Rumer Godden, with illustrations by Pauline Baynes (whom you may be familiar with as the illustrator of The Chronicles of Narnia). This is actually a collection of four doll stories: Impunity Jane, The Fairy Doll, The Story of Holly and Ivy (which I’ve read before but apparently forgot in its entirety), and Candy Floss. I particularly enjoyed The Fairy Doll, which is one of those Godden stories where a Child Makes a Thing (in this case a fairy house for the fairy doll out of a bicycle basket that becomes a cave), and Candy Floss, about a doll who lives in a coconut shy at a fair.

Also Rosemary Sutcliff’s short story “Shifting Sands,” which excited me immensely by beginning with a reference to 1850 - surely the most recent date of any Rosemary Sutcliff story! But 1850 is simply a reference to the year that the shifting dunes revealed the ruins of Skara Brae, and the story itself is about the last days before the village was buried beneath the sand. ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’m in the middle of my next Le Carre, Smiley’s People, in which we learn that Connie has retired to the countryside with five hundred pets and a girlfriend. Someone surely has written their thesis about Queerness in Le Carre.

What I Plan to Read Next

Before I move on from the Brontes, I’d like to read one more biography, preferably something more or less recent. I’ve had a rec for Juliet Barker’s The Brontes. Any other contenders?

Wednesday Reading Meme a day late this week on account of the New Year!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Penelope Lively’s A Stitch in Time, because I thought it was a time-slip novel, but in fact there’s a lot of musing about the nature of time and only the dimmest glimmers of timeslip: the squeak of a swing that’s no longer there, the glimpse of a long-ago girl’s face in the glass before her old sampler. Bit of a disappointment really.

Also Susan Cooper’s The Magic Maker: A Portrait of John Langstaff, Creator of the Christmas Revels. I read this solely because Susan Cooper wrote it, as I’d never heard of the Christmas Revels, although now that I’ve read this book I’d love to attend one. Revels differ from other performances in that they have a strong participatory element: the audience sings along with many of the songs and joins the dance at the end. Alas, the Revels seem to be mostly a coastal phenomenon: they started in Boston and spread to New York, California, Portland… Some of these locations have spring and autumn revels, too.

Cooper fans may be interested to learn that it was Jack Langstaff’s encouragement that propelled King of Shadows from a mere idea to a finished book. In fact, he gave her a copy of John Bennett’s Master Skylark, so there is a direct connection between these two “boy meets Shakespeare” books!

What I’m Reading Now

Charlotte Bronte has just left the Heger pensionnat in Brussels and returned to Yorkshire for good. Elizabeth Gaskell doesn’t mention her unrequited love for M. Heger, and neither, interestingly, does Mr. Shorter, who annotated the 1900 edition. Since all the principals were dead at that point (not only Charlotte herself but her father, her husband, the Hegers, etc) one might imagine he would feel more freedom to talk about it, but apparently not.

What I Plan to Read Next

I was planning to read Penelope Lively’s Astercote and The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, which are also supposed to be timeslip, but now I feel suspicious as to the actual amount of timeslip they contain. Has anyone read them? Do the characters from the past and present actually meet?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Gary Paulsen’s Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books, in which Paulsen details the various wilderness experiences that shaped Hatchet. Everything in the book is either something that happened to him (like getting stomped by an angry moose) or something that he tried to make sure it would work - like spending four hours striking flint rocks in a cave wall with a steel hatchet to make sure that you could actually start a fire from the resulting sparks.

The one thing he simply couldn’t do is eat a raw turtle egg. As Paulsen notes, Brian was starving when he managed it, and maybe Paulsen could have done it too if he had been hungry enough, but as a well-fed man training his sled dogs for the Iditarod, no.

I also finished Stella Gibbons’ Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, a collection of short stories, only two of which are Christmas-related. I was a bit disappointed at first to realize it’s not a Christmas collection, but once I recovered from my pique I enjoyed myself for the most part. The story where a charmingly eccentric woman accidentally destroys the happy life she’s carefully built by trying to do a kind deed will haunt me, though.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte. More specifically, I’ve begun a 1900 reprint of the third edition, where Gaskell removed sundry items, such as the assertion that Patrick Bronte had cut up one of his wife’s silk dresses and sawn the backs off of chairs. (Presumably chair backs are inimical to giving one’s offspring a suitably spartan upbringing?) But I know where they were, because the edition has footnotes by Clement K. Shorter, which mention these charges specifically in order to refute them, thus inadvertently renewing these charges once again.

Ever since this book was published, there has been controversy over whether Gaskell overstated the miseries of the Brontes’ lives, so I was amused to find this letter from Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor in the introduction. “Though not so gloomy as the truth,” Taylor wrote to Gaskell, “it [that is, the biography] is perhaps as much so as people will accept without calling it exaggerated, and feeling the desire to doubt and contradict it.”

Apparently there is a third position, which is that Gaskell actually understated matters!

What I Plan to Read Next

Does anyone have any recs for nonfiction books about the French Revolution?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I was beginning to feel crushed beneath the gloom and doom of the books I’m reading. (A Place of Greater Safety: everyone’s gonna die. The Honourable Schoolboy: not everyone is going to die, but someone is sure going to die horribly. Simon Sort of Says: everyone already died in a school shooting. Okay, not actually, there are no literal ghosts in this book. The hero’s tragic backstory is that he’s the only child in his classroom who survived, though.)

So I picked up How Right You Are, Jeeves from the library. Important to introduce variety into one’s reading diet! This one had a bit less Jeeves than is perhaps ideal (he’s gone for at least half the book), but no one AT ANY POINT was in danger of death, dismemberment, total psychological dissolution, etc., and there was an extremely funny sequence where Bertie bonds with Sir Roderick Glossop, the eminent brain specialist.

I also reread Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree, the sequel to The Good Master, which is less about the Problem of Tomboys (although there is a great scene where Kate beats all the boys in the horse race… having promised that she will give up riding astride thereafter) and more about the Problem of War, which is especially poignant when you realize it was published in 1938. The subplot about how the Jews are, in fact, very nice people! and an integral part of Hungary! (and, by extension, all of humanity!) feels depressingly relevant again today.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started my semi-annual reread of Jostein Gaarder’s The Christmas Mystery, a book about an advent calendar which unfolds in 24 chapters. I find this book-as-advent-calendar structure enchanting and long to emulate it, but have discovered it’s quite hard to do, actually, which makes me appreciate the book even more on this reread.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been contemplating how many more Smiley books to read. The next one, Smiley’s People, is the final book of the Karla Trilogy, so of course I have to read that, and after that there are just two more (The Secret Pilgrim and A Legacy of Spies), but published long afterward which always makes me rather doubtful… Has anyone read them? What did you think?

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.