osprey_archer | Entries tagged with books: 2022

Back in the late aughts, when I was first reading Jane Austen’s novels, there was some internet chatter about whether Jane Austen wrote romances. As many of the commentators involved were using “romance novels” as a synonym for “sentimental dreck” these conversations were not very productive, but it’s worth revisiting the question with the definition of romance novel as “a love story with a happy ending.”

Working from that definition, I think it varies from book to book. Northanger Abbey, for instance, is a satisfying romance novel. Not only does it end with a happily ever after between the two romantic leads, but a significant proportion of the book is devoted to developing Henry and Catherine’s relationship. They dance, they go for walks, they have witty banter.

Sense and Sensibility, on the other hand, is not. Sense and Sensibility is so uninterested in developing Elinor and Edward’s relationship that it sums up their entire process of falling in love in about a sentence. Sense and Sensibility is, in fact, an anti-romantic novel, an argument against the capital-R notions of Romance to which Marianne is attached. As Elinor says:

”And after all, Marianne, after all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one’s happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant—it is not fit—it is not possible that it should be so.”

Ironically, Elinor is the only person in the book who does marry her first love, but her happiness clearly does not depend entirely on Edward: it depends also on her mother and her sisters, and on her own efforts, which is the point she’s trying to get across to Marianne here. If you won’t even try to pull yourself together for your own sake, Marianne, how about you do it because it hurts us so much to see you in agony?

During that aforementioned early-aughts Austen read, Sense and Sensibility was my least favorite Austen novel. I found Marianne’s heartbreak over Willoughby an absolute slog to read, and it annoyed me that (as I thought) Elinor was taken in by Willoughby’s excuses at the end.

Upon reread, though, I have a lot more appreciation for the book. I think I’m more willing now to follow a book where it wants me to go rather than demanding it conform to my wishes, so when Jane Austen decided to spend a few chapters on a deep-dive into heartbreak, I went along with it rather than muttering “I’m tired of all this WALLOWING, when is something going to HAPPEN?”

And Elinor is at least as annoyed as I was to find herself swayed by Willoughby’s excuses: she feels “a tenderness, a regret, rather in proportion, as she soon acknowledged within herself—to his wishes than to his merits.” Her reason still condemns his actions, but his personal charm has swayed her to feel sorry for his suffering at losing Marianne. Of course it’s not perfectly rational to be swayed by that charm, but who among us is perfectly rational, especially under the intensely emotional circumstance of watching day and night by the bedside of a potentially dying sister? Elinor has barely slept for three days. Of course she’s in a mood to be swayed.

And after the influence of Willoughby’s magnetism fades, Elinor’s judgment of him remains unchanged: “The whole of his behavior, from the beginning to the end of the affair, has been grounded on selfishness.”

Another characteristic of early-aughts criticism was the tendency to demand that characters should be perfectly rational actors at all times - as defined by the critic, who may not make allowance for the fact that the character, say, does not know she’s in a horror movie, and therefore has no reason to believe going into the basement is a terrible idea. I’ve come to see this as an invidious kind of criticism: it locks readers into their own narrow viewpoint, instead of approaching books with openness and curiosity.

If a character - particularly a character in a beloved classic like Jane Austen - behaves in a way that the reader doesn’t understand, it’s often a sign that “there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.” It’s an opportunity to expand your understanding to encompass these compelling yet baffling characters.

Another batch of Newbery Honor books from the 1970s! This time I had one dud: Mary Q. Steele’s Journey Outside, a fantasy novel that feels like an allegory, always a hard sell for me. Our hero has grown up on a flotilla of rafts on an underground river that goes round and round in a vast circle. One day he escapes above ground and journeys through the lands that he finds there, stumbling on a valley of good-hearted but feckless communist shepherds, a giant mountain man who spends all his time making food for the birds (and never notices that the birds are in turn becoming food for the tigers), a bunch of desert people who live off the tasteless flesh of a horrible cactus…

These different groups are presumably meant to represent something, but they’re all too schematic to feel real as people. All the shepherds are cheerful but incapable of planning ahead, all the cactus people repeat certain set phrases, and although the mountain man like the cheese stands alone, he never varies from the character established the first moment we meet him: he talks constantly about food and never listens to anything anyone else says.

Happily, the other three books in this batch were more enjoyable. My favorite (to my surprise, as I haven’t enjoyed his other books!) was William Steig’s Abel’s Island. During a thunderstorm, anthropomorphic mouse Abel gets washed away down a stream, tearing him away from his civilized city lifestyle and his beloved wife Amanda. He washes up on an island, and for a year he gathers his own food, weaves himself clothing out of grass, makes a home for himself in a hollow log, discovers his metier as a sculptor when he makes sculptures of all his absent loved ones to help himself feel close to them… A dreamy, meditative wilderness survival story.

I went into Johanna Reiss’s The Upstairs Room with the suspicion that I’d already read it, as I read a lot of Holocaust novels as a child. Indeed I did read this book as a kid: the scene that clinched it is the part where the girls spend a day in a wheat field (their first day outside in two years) and Annie gets heatstroke.

As a kid I was totally focused on the story (I think I was under the impression it was a novel, which may have contributed to my confusion over whether I’d read it before), but rereading it as an adult, I also appreciated Reiss’s stylistic choices. She occasionally dips into stream-of-consciousness prose as Annie tries to pass the long, long hours trapped in a single room, and it’s really effective at showing the thought-splintering boredom of her life, which is exacerbated by the ever-present background of tension and fear.

I know there are one or two people who read this journal who are interested in books with Jewish protagonists that are not about the Holocaust, and you might be interested in Sulamith Ish-kashor’s Our Eddie, which is set in 1920s London and then New York. Eddie’s father is a gifted teacher and a fiercely devoted Zionist who pours all his emotional energy into his students and his causes and has nothing left for his children. He keeps turning down lucrative opportunities because they clash with his principles, leaving him at loggerheads with his eldest son Eddie, who tries to pick up the financial slack.

I really enjoyed the book’s sense of place, both in London and New York, and the finely-drawn portrait of the family. Despite the title, the book is not just about Eddie, but an ensemble piece about all the children, especially the narrator Sibyl. Eddie is the one who gets the title because ( Spoilers )

Virginia Hamilton’s 1972 Newbery winner The Planet of Junior Brown is an exceptionally odd book. It begins with Junior Brown and Buddy Clark admiring the model of the solar system that Mr. Pool, the school janitor, has hung up in the secret back room that he has constructed behind the false back of one of the school’s broom closets.

I’m afraid that upon learning of Mr. Pool’s secret room for hanging out with junior high students, my instant reaction was, “Is Mr. Pool a child molestor?” He is not, and the book at no point expects you to see Mr. Pool as anything but a fine stand-up guy. Nonetheless I couldn’t get over the feeling that Mr. Poole was bad news, a feeling only exacerbated when it turned out that Buddy and Junior have been skipping school to hang out in this closet for the past two and a half months.

This is especially baffling because it’s apparently motive-less: Hamilton seems to consider sitting in a closet such an obvious improvement over school that it requires no explanation, and thus no explanation is offered. Junior and Buddy are not being bullied. (This is especially noteworthy because the book reminds us constantly that Junior is very fat, as round as the tenth planet that Mr. Pool added to the solar system and called “the planet of Junior Brown.”) They both get good grades, so they aren’t overwhelmed by the classwork. They might be bored in class, but as boring as high school classes can be, they are not more boring than sitting in a tiny closet all day.

(Hopefully you ask: “Are Buddy and Junior making out in that closet?” This would certainly give their closet-dwelling lifestyle an impetus, but Junior and Buddy’s friendship doesn’t give off that vibe at all.)

Near the end of the book, Junior and Buddy get caught playing hooky. Rather than return to class, Junior decides to run away from home. (Buddy is already living on the streets as part of a network of homeless boys, who run safehouses they call “planets.”) Buddy Clark, Mr. Pool, and the narrative all agree that this is the best possible course of action. Buddy assures Junior that his mother (who is prone to debilitating asthma attacks, especially in times of stress) will know that Junior is fine, even though there appears to be no plan in place to let her know that he is, in fact, fine.

Also, Junior is not, in fact, fine. He has started to hallucinate. His after-school piano teacher Miss Peebles has not let him play for months, because the relative who is visiting her can’t stand noise… but it turns out that the only two people who can see this relative are Miss Peebles and Junior Brown.

In a stunning moment of common sense, Mr. Pool says, “Junior needs help.” But this visit to consensual reality instantly collapses. Mr. Pool concludes that clearly the best way to help Junior is for Junior to run away from home to live on Buddy’s planet.

Buddy’s planet is a dark, debris-filled, unelectrified basement, only accessible by rope ladder. The rope ladder is too weak to bear Junior’s weight, so the only way for him to get down there is for Mr. Pool to construct a hoist. I sincerely hope that hoist is going to stay in the planet’s doorway from now on, because otherwise Junior will be trapped in the basement.

I am not convinced! Actually! That the nightmare basement is going to be the best thing for Junior Brown’s mental health! But apparently Hamilton thinks it will be just hunky-dory, because that’s where the book stops.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Elizabeth Wein’s “No Human Hands to Touch,” the Medraut/Morgause companion piece to The Winter Prince published in Sirens and Other Demon Lovers, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is exactly as “Dead Dove, Do Not Eat” as you might imagine from the fact that Medraut spends a large proportion of The Winter Prince waking up with screaming nightmares about his incestuous affair with his mother.

( Spoilers (need I tell you they are disturbing spoilers?) )

This has been quite a week for creepy sex books, because I also read Anne Serre’s The Governesses (translated by Mark Hutchinson), an exceptionally strange French novella about three governesses who show up at a country house where there are no children. Never fear: the governesses come with their own batch of little boys in tow! Not that they spend much time actually looking after the children, mind: most of their time goes to enticing strange men in the estate and devouring them out in the woods. (The devouring is probably a sexual metaphor, but it wouldn’t exactly surprise me if the governesses were vampires. Or fae. Or some other supernatural bitey creature.)

A weird, atmospheric, sex-drenched book. I have no idea what it’s trying to say, if indeed it is saying anything - might just be an exercise in vibes? Odd and interesting.

And now for something completely different: Rebecca Caudill’s Tree of Freedom, a Newbery Honor book from 1950 set during the American Revolution. When the Venable family moves from North Carolina to Kentucky, young Stephanie Venable takes along a seed from an apple tree, which in turn sprouted from a seed brought across the Atlantic when her Huguenot ancestors fled persecution in France. Inspired by her brother Noel’s patriotic fervor, she names the resulting sapling the Tree of Freedom, even though the seed at one point gets eaten by a chicken (!) and then Stephanie cuts the chicken’s crop open to get at the seed (!!) and then sews the crop back up (!!!!!!)... but don’t worry, both seed and chicken are fine. (Would a chicken be fine after that? Maybe I don't want to think about this too deeply.)

What I’m Reading Now

In Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist, Mrs. Pollifax is on her way to Jordan to pick up the manuscript of a novel by a recently murdered Iraqi author! In her undercover role as an innocent tourist, she has returned to her roots with a truly massive floral hat, and I love her.

In Dracula, Lucy is feeling better! Thank God her illness is all over. She’s definitely going to survive till her wedding at the end of September.

What I Plan to Read Next

I would like to track down a copy of Elizabeth Wein’s other extended Lion Hunters’ ‘verse story, “Fire,” but we shall see. In the meantime

littlerhymes has sent me a copy of Cherith Baldry’s Exiled from Camelot, the woobiest Kay novel, which I am VERY much looking forward to reading.

In Kim Todd’s Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters”,
Todd mention that girl stunt report Caroline Lockhart also wrote novels, including The Lady Doc, a publication from 1912 which daringly involved abortion and lesbians! So of course I had to go read it.

When we first meet our protagonist, Dr. Emma Harpe, she sits with “her elbows on her knees, her feet wide apart, her face buried in her hands… unfeminine even in her tears.” She has just performed an operation (never named, but strongly implied to be an abortion) on her best friend Alice Freoff, who died on the operating table. The medical authorities, who take a dim view of (a) abortions and (b) killing patients, force Dr. Harpe out of town, and she flees to the west, where she fetches up in the up and coming town of Crowheart.

As Crowheart has no physician, Dr. Harpe is welcomed with open arms, and quickly establishes herself as a popular physician. She is respected not only professionally but socially: the working men make her “more or less the target of coarse jokes, as is any woman who leaves the beaten track, yet the general feeling toward her was one of friendliness, and she has “a strong attraction for the women of Crowheart—an attraction that amounted to fascination.”

As with the abortion, the narrative never tells us straight out that Dr. Harpe is a lesbian, but it’s about as blunt as it can get. As Dr. Harpe explains to Mrs. Augusta Symes,“I like women anyhow; men bore me mostly. I had a desperate 'crush' at boarding-school, but she quit me cold when she married. I've taken a great shine to you, Gus.”

Mr. Symes is less than enthusiastic about this new-found intimacy, but he’s also powerless to stop it: Dr. Harpe holds a piece of blackmail over his head (I believe he got Augusta pregnant before he married her, but like so much else, this is never directly stated) which would ruin him in the town. In fact, it’s such a powerful piece of blackmail that Dr. Harpe uses it to force Mr. Symes to appoint her as the company doctor for a new irrigation scheme that he’s promoting.

If Dr. Harpe were a competent doctor this might not be too bad, but unfortunately the botched abortion is characteristic of her skill. She became a doctor not out of any sense of vocation, but because a doctor is “exempt from many of the restrictions and conventionalities which hampered her sex.” In fairly short order, one of the workers from the irrigation projects dies of blood poisoning because Dr. Harpe didn’t properly clean his wounded arm.

Beneath her surface swaggering charm, Dr. Harpe has a vein of petty selfishness. She takes against the belle of Crowheart, Essie Tisdale, partly because Essie spurned her advances, but mostly because Essie has got in good with Ogden Van Lennop, a very rich man for whom (purely as a business venture) Dr. Harpe has set her cap.

In pursuit of this vendetta, Dr. Harpe tears up Van Lennop’s love confession to Essie, spreads rumors about Essie’s rides with Van Lennop that end with Essie’s dismissal from her job as waitress at the hotel, arranges for the elderly sheep rancher Dubois to renew his suit to Essie just when Essie is at her most down and out, and then helps frame Essie for Dubois’s murder! (which conveniently takes place before the marriage could be consummated, so Essie is still a virgin when, of course, she reunites with Van Lennop at the end of the book.) (Years earlier, Dubois had abandoned his Indian wife and their two boys so they nearly starved in the Canadian winter, and the boys showed up to get their revenge at this extremely convenient time.) (Fortunately Essie turns out to have rich relations and the town just decides she’s not guilty and they never liked Dubois anyway and the murder thread mostly gets dropped.)

Unfortunately for Dr. Harpe, this stream of pettiness blows up in her face. When Symes breaks free of Dr. Harpe’s blackmail (because incidentally Van Lennop has ruined his crooked irrigation scheme, so Symes has nothing back to lose; there’s a lot going on in this book), he screams, “You human sponge! You parasite! Do you think I'm blind because I've been dumb? Go! you—DEGENERATE!”

On her way out of town, Dr. Harpe pauses briefly at the Symes’ house to ask Augusta to go with her, only Augusta refuses, and Dr. Harpe chokes her almost to death! And the book ends as it began, with Dr. Harpe flinging herself on a train to begin a new life somewhere else.

What’s interesting is how hard Lockhart has to work for Symes’ cry of “DEGENERATE!” It’s not enough that Dr. Harpe is a masculine woman with a profession who professedly gets crushes on women. Lockhart has to make Dr. Harpe a venal, vengeful person, and an incompetent, money-grubbing doctor, in order to ensure that the readers are on board.

Another installment of Newbery Honor books of the 1930s! These three books made an interesting accidental trilogy on the topic of Attitudes Toward Women in the 1930s, with a special sidebar on What Do We Do about Tomboys?

Hilda van Stockum’s A Day on Skates is a charming and richly illustrated chapter book about a class of Dutch schoolchildren whose teacher takes them for a day-long field trip skating on the canals. They keep stopping for delicious treats, hot cocoa and snow pancakes (made with snow mixed into the batter, apparently!) and poffertjes, and it just sounds like a delightful day out. It annoyed me that the boys got all the adventures, though, while the girls got stuck washing the pancake dishes.

Fortunately an antidote was close at hand in Erick Berry’s The Winged Girl of Knossos, a thrilling adventure story loosely inspired by the story of Daedalus and Icarus - except that Icarus is gender-swapped for a daughter, Inas.

We first meet Inas diving for sponges off the coast of Crete, not because she needs sponges but just for the thrill of the thing. Inas is an all-around tomboy who aspires to jump bulls in the next festival in Knossos and loves to test the new gliders that her father has invented. (The only flying-too-close-to-the-sun is metaphorical: the people of Crete suspect black magic in Daidolos’s flying machines.)

Although the Minoans view the gliders with suspicion, they are not at all bothered by Inas’s tomboyishness: Berry’s answer to the Problem of Tomboys is “there is no problem,” and her vision of Minoan culture (based on new-to-the-1930s archaeological information) features a well-developed tomboy tradition: Inas is only one of many female bull-jumpers in Knossos. Moreover, there’s no tension over her tomboyish ways, and Inas gets along easily with more traditionally feminine women: one of her best friends is Princess Ariadne, who has developed an unfortunate interest in that doltish Greek tribute Theseus…

A lot of Inas’s disdain for Theseus arises from the fact that he (like the other Greek tributes) has no idea how to play the bulls: confronted with bulls in the arena, he clubs them inelegantly on the head. This is an excellent character detail that also says so much about Inas’s culture, and its unthinking assumption not merely of superiority but of centrality. If the Minoans know how to play the bulls, then surely all other civilized people must know too.

I really liked this book. Berry’s Knossos feels real and lived-in, her descriptions of bull-jumping are thrilling, and Inas is a delight. Stylistically it feels much more recent than it is: if I hadn’t gone into the book knowing it was written in the 1930s, I might have guessed the 1990s, or even more recent.

I struggled more with Mabel Louise Robinson’s Bright Island, which has a tomboy heroine in what you might call the “I hate all the other girls” mode. Thankful and her four older brothers grew up on an island off the coast of Maine; now only Thankful is left, and her parents decide it’s time for her to go to the mainland to get some schooling and also learn “what a girl is for.” (An actual chapter title!)

She does eventually become friends with her roommate Selina, but mostly because they realize that actually neither of them are interested in their classmate Robert, a handsome boy whose dash and charm obscure his feckless selfishness. (There's a wonderfully done sequence where Robert visits Thankful’s island home and Thankful realizes that, despite his charm, he’s a black hole of self-absorption.) But there’s no real sense of any personal connection between Thankful and Selina.

Near the end of the book, Thankful’s mother falls ill - you can tell this is one of the early Newbery books because she doesn’t die - and as she convalesces, Thankful takes over the housekeeper role, although retaining also many of her earlier tomboy traits, like a preference for old clothes and a habit of taking an early-morning swim in the icy ocean. It’s a gentler and less complete transition than in Caddie Woodlawn, perhaps the ur-tomboy book of the 1930s.

I was getting what you might call vibes from this book, particularly the scene where Thankful throws her girdle into the sea, so I looked Mabel Robinson up on Wikipedia and discovered that she was a lesbian who lived all her adult life with her partner Helen Rose. (Lest you be too impressed by my vibe-spotting, however, I was also getting vibes from Erick Berry, nee Evangel Allena Champlin Best… but she was married twice, so probably not a lesbian.)

I have read Oxus in Summer, the third and final volume and Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock’s Far-Distant Oxus trilogy! In this volume you will find:

Further adventures of the Hunterley children and the Mysterious Maurice, who lives in a hut called Piran-Wisa with his pony Dragonfly and his dog Ellita. (The Cleverton twins don’t show up till nearly the end of the book, possibly because Hull & Whitlock realized they simply crowd the page without adding very much.)

A QUARREL when Maurice thinks that the Hunterleys have been reading his diary to find out more about him! Maurice knocks over a candle which sets Piran Wisa on fire and it BURNS TO THE GROUND.

An attempted reconciliation! The Hunterleys, who did NOT read Maurice’s diary, chase Maurice across the rooftops of a nearby town until he escapes with a daring leap across a wide alley.

A new alliance! Maurice enlists the help of the Deptford family by promising to give them the Persian dagger with the ivory sheath that he beat them out for at an auction. (He paid nearly a hundred pounds. A mysterious RICH boy!)

A DUEL. Bridget challenges one of the Deptford boys, Jeremy, to a duel with riding whips, on the theory that if she wins he’ll have to tell her where Maurice is, but when she wins, he refuses! This leads to

An attempted drowning! Bridget drags Jeremy into the Oxus and holds his head under the water. When he comes up sputtering, he yells that Maurice is hiding out at the highwayman’s grave, and also are you INSANE? (The Deptfords remain convinced that the Hunterleys are dangerously nuts for the rest of the book. I fully realize that if I found myself parachuted into a mid-twentieth century British children’s book, I would be a Deptford, who lies around at home reading and Does Not Understand True Adventure.)

Finally: a reconciliation! The Hunterleys tell Maurice they did not read his diary, and still have no idea who he is. They all have a glorious canter across the moors to reaffirm their bond!

In this volume, you will not find:

A solution to the mystery of Maurice’s background. Where does he come from? Where does he go? “Why do you want to know?” ask Hull & Whitlock, doll-eyed with innocence, but probably also capable of holding you under the waters of the Oxus until you cease and desist your questioning.

I kind of admire the chutzpah BUT ALSO… I do want to know more about Maurice. But this is the last book, so I never will! Is this a clever ploy to ensure that the story stays with readers? MAYBE.

Hull & Whitlock wrote one other book together, a fantasy novel called Crowns, which of course I must read. It appears from Worldcat that Whitlock also pursued a solo writing career, and this fascinating website about horse books calls Whitlock’s short stories “fine, subtle pieces of work” - apparently more focused on the Bond Between Horse and Rider than the Oxus books, which do tend to treat the ponies as vehicles. But her solo books appear to be pretty much unavailable, so I will content myself with Hull & Whitlock’s duo efforts.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

In the days of my youth, my friend Emma recommended A Wizard of Earthsea to me, and I got a few chapters in and didn’t like it and promptly swore off Ursula Le Guin forever. However, the Newbery project forced me to give The Tombs of Atuan a try, and I am enraged to inform you that in fact Le Guin is just as good as everyone has been telling me for years.

Our heroine is Tenar, who at the age of six became high priestess of the Nameless Ones, and as such is called Arha, the Eaten One. (Eaten by the Nameless Ones, you understand.) She is mistress not only of the Tombs of Atuan, but over the Labyrinth, an endless tangle of complicated underground tunnels, and also over the Undertomb, a vast underground cavern where it is blasphemy to strike a light…

Until one day, Arha finds that a man has broken into the Undertomb: a wizard holding a shining staff which lights up the crystals on the walls. She chases him into the Labyrinth and locks the door behind him, so he will never get out, but die of hunger and thirst. Only Arha, fascinated by this intruder into the unvarying routine of her life, can’t resist bringing him water. Such has been the emotional aridness of her childhood that she frames this to herself as a way to torment him: she’ll tell him that the water is in a certain room, and sometimes it will be there and sometimes it won’t!

(After the first time, in fact, she always brings water when she says she will. Can’t miss a chance to ask him about the outside world, after all.)

The book does a fantastic job invoking Arha’s headspace, as well as the physical setting of the underground Undertomb and Labyrinth, these dark, winding, featureless halls that have to be navigated by counting doorways, where it is so easy to get lost. Just an incredibly vivid sense of the space.

What I’m Reading Now

Lina Rather’s Sisters of the Vast Black, recommended by

oracne as Nuns! In! Space!!! You know how I am about nuns, so of course I had to give it a go. The nuns travel through space in a living spaceship, which currently yearns to mate with another ship, thus thrusting the nuns into the theological quandary of whether a spaceship that is also a nunnery can be allowed to breed.

In Dracula, Lucy Westenra grows wan and pale! Worse, Mina has been torn from Lucy's side, rushing across the continent to care for Jonathan Harker, leaving no one but Lucy’s ineffective mother to stand between Lucy and whatever mysterious creature keeps transforming into various red-eyed animals and calling her in the night. Doubtless this is not worrisome in the least.

What I Plan to Read Next

I guess I gotta read the rest of the Earthsea books.

Actually, I have a question about this: my impression is that everyone considers the first four top notch (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu), but I’ve heard less about the last two (Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind). Should I read all of them, or just the first four?

Barred from more active employment by my shoulder injury (got an X-ray; it’s not broken; I have regained most of my range of motion and some of my muscle strength, though it still hurts), I spent the last four days reading more or less non-stop, and motored through Gerald Morris’s entire ten-book Squire’s Tales series. These are more-or-less straightforward retellings of classic King Arthur stories, braided together into novels, and I’ve read enough retellings now not only to enjoy the stories, but to find an extra level of pleasure in the choices that the author has made in the retelling.

Who is the author’s favorite knight? Gawain of Orkney, and Gerald Morris never loses the chance to remind us that Gawain, not that Johnny-come-lately upstart Lancelot, is the best knight in Camelot.

Which other knights does the author love? Morris loves grumpy seneschal Kai, and feels that Kai’s combat skills have been unfairly denigrated in later sources, and therefore occasionally reminds us that Kai killed TWO of the five kings at the Battle of the Five Kings early in Arthur’s reign. He also loves Parsifal, and in fact is generally drawn to fish out of water stories. There is a second knight, Beaufils, who shares Parsifal’s “raised in the woods by mother and never saw another human being till he left home” backstory, and when Palomides arrives in England from the Holy Land (he’s curious about the knights he fought against in the Crusades), he also brings a bemused outsider’s point of view to the world of knighthood. (It occurs to me that his traveling companion Dinadan, a knight who would really rather be a minstrel, is an outsider in another way.)

Morris also loves Gaheris, which is a bold choice. Most people plume for Gareth as second-best Orkney brother, but Morris can’t get over Gareth’s stupidity in not falling in love with Lynet when they went on a whole entire adventure together, and instead falling for her sister Lyonesse whose only real character trait is “beautiful.” (In general Morris is a substance over style guy, to the point of finding style suspicious for its own sake.)

He also, perhaps surprisingly, loves Lancelot, once Lancelot realizes that he’s made a complete ass of himself by trying to embody the image of the perfect knight - winner of tournaments! courtly lover of the most unattainable lady around! - which neglecting the substance of knighthood, which is using one’s strength to protect the weak.

How does the author feel about courtly love? Stupid! Destructive! Incredibly selfish! Morris is emphatically not on Team OT3. He is on Team What If You Honor-Obsessed Chuckleheads Honored Marriage Vows, Hmmm?

How does the author feel about Mordred? The actual worst. He and his armies wander the countryside killing unarmed peasants, occasionally leaving a few survivors specifically so they can inform said survivors that these evil, marauding knights were sent by King Arthur, because Mordred doesn’t want to merely overthrow his uncle-father, he wants to utterly destroy his reputation too.

(Sidebar: how does the author feel about incest? An astute reader who paid attention to Morris’s family tree a couple of books back could figure out that Morgause and Arthur are half-siblings, but Morris absolutely does not draw attention to this fact when he’s revealing Mordred’s parentage. In fact, Arthur didn’t know himself until the Big Reveal: Morgause didn’t bother to tell him at the time. What makes this weird is that Morris’s Morgan La Fay, here a chaotic neutral enchantress who trains a few other characters in the enchanting arts but is also maybe a little bit too into vengeance, is canonically in love with her half-brother Arthur. Maybe Morris found an unrequited and unconsummated crush a less icky way to get in the contractually required Arthurian levels of incest than doubling down on the Morgause/Arthur thing.)

Morris describes his use of history as “like the meat in stew” - there’s a little thrown in for savor, but for the most part he’s aiming to capture for a young modern-day audience something of the feel of the original stories, full of magic and adventure. For me, at least, he succeeded: one can always quibble (the female characters struck me as very nineties, which is both good and bad), but overall I found them fun, fast-paced, and absorbing, just the right tonic when I needed something to distract me from my external woes.

(Well, okay, “fun” is maybe the wrong word for the last book, but that’s just what happens when you go all the way to the end of the Camelot story.)

And they introduced me to a lot of new Arthurian stories, too! I’d never even heard of Beaufils, for instance. No matter how much Arthuriana you read, there’s always more out there.

OKAY SO, I simply blasted through the last two books of Elizabeth Wein’s Lion Hunters series, since The Lion Hunter and The Empty Kingdom are not really two books at all but one big book split in half for, I presume, publication reasons. (The title of the book as a whole is The Mark of Solomon)

You may have imagined that Wein plumbed the depths of whump in The Sunbird, when Telemakos is enslaved at a salt mine, where he carries waterskins slung over his shoulders while blindfolded! with his hands tied at his sides! allowed only a few swallows of water each day!!!, and - okay, actually, that particular vein of whump is tapped. But never fear! Wein finds rich new sources of whump in The Mark of Solomon, not least of which is Telemakos’s ongoing PTSD from, you know, the whole salt mine incident.

However, PTSD on its own is simply insufficient whump for the Lion Hunters series, so the book also explores uncharted new whump territories, not least of which is “my adversary might kill me any day now but is extremely tender to me in the meantime,” A++ absolute catnip I love it.

That’s mostly in The Empty Kingdom. In The Lion Hunter, we kick off with ( spoilers )

The new Persuasion movie has had one good effect, at least: watching it made me decide that it’s time to begin my long-planned Jane Austen reread. Which means Northanger Abbey, and a chance to revisit my beloved Catherine Morland!

Northanger Abbey is both Austen’s first and last novel: it was accepted for publication in 1803, but the publisher sat on it so long that Austen eventually bought the rights back, and then the novel was published posthumously with Persuasion in 1818. After getting the rights back, Austen revised the first half of the novel (or so I recall from that useful source “I think I read this somewhere,” although Wikipedia is not backing me up), which may account for the fact that the book is somewhat lopsided.

The first half is a brilliant, incisive tour de force as naive young Catherine Morland visits Bath with her kindly neighbors and discovers, astonished, that what people say is not always what they mean.

I was about Catherine’s age the first time I read this book, and enjoyed it in part because I could feel affectionately superior to Catherine’s naivete. (As Austen comments, “Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant.”) Rereading it now, I must acknowledge that on my first read I was probably about as naive as Catherine (although perhaps a little better supplied with general knowledge), not only in my own life but as a reader. For instance, it’s only on this reread that I grasped that Isabella Thorpe pursues Catherine as a friend at least in part as a stratagem to attach Catherine’s brother.

The first time around, Isabella didn’t make much impression on me, but upon reread, what an amazing foil she is for Catherine! What absolute comedy gold! The contrast between her professed disdain for young men and the keen interest betrayed by her actions is continually hilarious.

But she also struck me as a somewhat tragic figure this time around. She’s duplicitous because she can’t be open: it would be a gross breach of decorum to openly avow that she needs to marry for money. And yet that need is very real, and artful as she is, she’s not quite artful enough to land that marriage - at least within the confines of this book. As she’s described as a beautiful girl, I imagine she’ll manage it eventually.

It is perhaps in part the lack of Isabella that makes the second half of the book weaker than the first. It’s still entertaining, and the set-pieces sending up gothic tropes still make me laugh, but in comparison to the seemingly effortless first half, these scenes sometimes feel labored.

In particular, the book bobbles in the scene where Henry Tilney discovers that Catherine has been imagining that his father murdered his mother. The narrative strains to force a confession from Catherine’s lips, and once she’s confessed, Henry’s response is oddly muted and impersonal. He takes her to task for imagining such a thing could happen without becoming the gossip of the entire county, but he doesn’t seem the least personally offended on his father’s behalf.

But perhaps he feels that although Catherine is wrong about the facts, she’s hit on an important emotional truth about his father: he’s so demanding and persnickety that he squeezes the life out of everyone around him. Indeed, maybe the exchange brings him a sort of relief. Naive though Catherine is in some ways, she clearly knows just what kind of father-in-law she’d be getting if she married into the Tilney family, and that knowledge may help clear the way for Henry to propose.

I’m barrelling along in Elizabeth Wein’s Lion Hunters series! In A Coalition of Lions, we take a comparative break from the whump. Yes, yes, the book starts with Goewin’s whole family dying as her kingdom falls to invaders, and we also hear an awful lot about that time her friend Priamos lost a battle and then got dragged in front of his conqueror naked and in chains. But that’s all in the past now! In the book itself, life is mostly pretty chill, aside from the fact that Goewin and her intended Constantine just can’t get along… which is extra awkward because Constantine is, currently, the regent of Aksum, where Goewin fled after the aforementioned fall of her kingdom.

But mostly Goewin spends the book meeting people and getting to know this interesting new country that she’s landed in, and through the magic of diplomacy everything works out surprisingly well for everyone. ( Spoilers for A Coalition of Lions and a bit for The Sunbird )

The Sunbird is a return to form, at least in the sheer epic levels of whump, although it’s whump of a different kind than The Winter Prince: slavery instead of incest. Goewin sends her ten-year-old nephew Telemakos on a SPY MISSION to find the traitor who is breaking the plague quarantine, but along the way he gets captured! forced to work in the salt mines! blindfolded at all times, because the salt mine owner has a feeling that this kid is bad news and doesn’t want Telamakos to recognize him! and also he has his hands constantly bound at his sides, so he can’t take the blindfold off!!!!

You might feel that this would impair his usefulness as a slave, but HUSH, let not the realization of true whump admit impediments. This is some grade A suffering right here, with a lagniappe of utterly unnecessary guilt because Telemakos had the opportunity to look at the traitor! and didn’t take it! because the man threatened to cut out Telamakos’s tongue and cut off his hands if Telemakos looked at him!!! “IF ONLY I WAS BRAVER,” sobs Telemakos.

“OH MY GOD YOU ARE EXTREMELY BRAVE ENOUGH,” sobs Goewin, belatedly realizing that perhaps she should not have conspired with the emperor to send, let me repeat, a ten-year-old on an extremely delicate spy mission that involved crossing a desert with a single water skin (which sprung a leak, so he had to turn himself in or else die of thirst, which is how he ended up in the salt mines).

It’s fine, though. Goewin was clearly the pawn of the god of True Whump, and who can resist the blandishments of such a demanding god?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword, in which McClellan spends a year failing to do much of anything with the Army of the Potomac because he is convinced to the bottom of his heart that (1) the Confederate Army outnumbers him two to one (in fact he outnumbered the available Confederate troops at almost all times), and (2) the government in Washington was plotting his downfall (which became true because of his unwillingness to use his army).

Much against my will I feel a certain sympathy for him, because if someone handed me an army, clapped a hand on my shoulder, and intoned “The fate of the nation rides on you, son,” I’m fairly sure that I, too, would instantly become convinced that I was outnumbered two to one, and therefore could do nothing with my army but crouch in a defensive posture while wittering about Dark Forces in Washington trying to undermine my command. But unlike McClellan I was sensible enough not to pursue a military career.

(Generally speaking, the road to political or military success seems to be the ability to accept the existence of opposition on your own side without obsessing over it or seeing said opponents as conspiratorial Dark Forces. Eyes on the prize! Remember that your true enemies are the Confederates and not those annoying dudes in Congress who understand military strategy about as well as an aardvark.)

Also, I zoomed through Enid Blyton’s second St Clare’s book, The O’Sullivan Twins at St Clare’s. The St Clare’s books have not captured my heart quite the way that Malory Towers did (maybe because the twins already have a built-in best friend and so the books don’t go as hard on Friendship?), but they are nice popcorn entertainment.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Elizabeth Wein’s The Lion Hunters (already read A Coalition of Lions and The Sunbird; wrote so much about them it became its own post), and ( Spoilers )

In Dracula, Lucy has sleep-walked down to the graveyard in the middle of the night wearing nothing but her nightgown! Absolutely scandalous. Also, we’ve heard from Jonathan Harker! He has spent the last few weeks in the hospital with brain fever, poor lad, and the hospital staff thinks he’s mad because he keeps nattering on about this vampire stuff, but he’s a very sweet boy and they hope for the best for him.

What I Plan to Read Next

skygiants and I agreed that it would be great if there was a book that gave an entertaining yet erudite discussion of the various surviving medieval Arthurian sagas, because there are clearly many, and they all seem to be bonkers. Thought I’d throw this out there in case anyone knows of such a book!

troisoiseaux kindly consented to join in my Arthurian quest by reading Phyllis Ann Karr’s The Idylls of the Queen with me (companion review over here), which turns out to be an amazing book to read in conjunction with T. H. White’s Once and Future King. In some ways the two books are doing the same thing, rewriting Malory as a modern novel while keeping the action basically the same, but they’re approaching that task from totally different angles.

Karr focuses on a single incident, when a knight dies from eating a poisoned apple at Queen Guenevere’s banquet, and the queen is accused of the murder. Kay, the seneschal, sets out ostensibly in hopes of finding Lancelot to fight as the queen’s champion, but actually in hopes of finding out who really poisoned the apples and therefore saving the queen himself.

Kay, you see, is madly in love with the queen, a choice that puzzled me at first, but actually I think it works really well: this love gives him a streak of idealism which leavens the biting, sardonic sarcasm with which he approaches almost everyone else, apparently on the theory that no one can reject you if you reject them first. He is, as he informs us with a warped sort of pride, the most churlish knight of the Round Table.

Because no one else wants to ride with Kay, he rides out on this quest with Mordred, ALSO one of the least-liked knights of the Round Table. Actually, insofar as he likes anyone (aside from his beloved queen, of course), Kay seems to like Mordred, and even to be sort of happy that they’re going on this quest together, even if Mordred DOES like to rile him up by suggesting the queen might be guilty, apparently for no better reason than Kay gets mad as a hornet every single time.

Mordred, as we discover, is acting out because it is prophesied that he will destroy Camelot, and he’s kind of sort of hoping that one of the other knights will kill him before he does. This shouldn’t be too hard, because the knights are very murdery! incredibly easily riled! just killing each other all the time! and yet they just won’t kill him.

Just as in Elizabeth Wein’s The Winter Prince, Mordred is described as having light hair, but unfortunately in both cases I am incapable of envisioning him with anything but shaggy dark emo hair that falls in his eyes in a perfectly cut slanting bang. He is also supposedly almost forty(!) and has a son (!!) but

troisoiseaux and I agreed that it’s impossible to see him as older than about 27; he has SUCH strong Hamlet vibes.

In between The Winter Prince and Idylls of the Queen I have now developed Mordred feelings and I’m KIND of bitter about it, but what are you going to do? Anyway, he came along on this quest because he hoped that Kay thought Mordred had killed the queen and was therefore going to murder Mordred and thus save Camelot, and he’s most put out when Kay is like “What the fuck my dude, of course you didn’t poison the apple, you are the least unbearable of all of Arthur’s unbearable murdery knights.”

I suspect Karr is drawing the murdery knights directly from Malory and also suspect that it has a very different emotional valence there. In Idylls of the Queen you get the feeling that Kay’s sarcasm is a sort of defense mechanism against the fact that he’s living in the midst of a slow-moving atrocity: his king (who is also his foster brother and former best friend) killed a whole boat full of babies, his fellow knights are just murdering people all the time, and the murders just serve to further blood feuds that go on and on and on…

This could be unbearably depressing if you just looked at it straight on, but Kay’s bitterness holds it at a kind of remove, both for himself and the readers. When he describes the incident of the May Babies he’s actually funny: “Arthur had been bestowing his kingly body as generously as he could upon the ladies of his realm, to the point where he could not be sure how many lords’ children were really bastards of the high king,” he notes sardonically, and so when it is prophesied that one of these children born in May will destroy Camelot, he has to put all to lordly babies on a boat to drown.

It’s such an interesting contrast with The Once and Future King. White’s heroes are essentially the heroic characters in Malory, Arthur and Lancelot and Merlin, although sometimes it pains him to reconcile their heroism to incidents like the May Babies. (He just sort of skips over that incident till the final book, when he can no longer avoid it, and it clearly pains him that Arthur who he has so lovingly painted could do such a thing.)

Karr in contrast offers a jaundiced view of these heroes, especially Merlin, whom Kay sees as an evil mastermind undermining Camelot: otherwise why not tell Arthur that Morgause is his half-sister till after the incest, hmmmm? He also loathes Lancelot, but that’s at least three-quarters jealousy for Lancelot’s relationship with the queen, and the other quarter arises from jealousy for the fact that everyone else loves Lancelot too, not least Arthur, who used to like Kay best, not that anyone remembers that now. Not that Kay cares.

Kay insists that he doesn’t give a damn about anything except the queen (possibly because the queen is one of the few people in Camelot who is nice to him, churl or not), while in fact giving so many damns about so many things that he might actually die if he ever once allowed himself to consider just how much he cares, and how little he is cared about in return.

I don’t know exactly when the Newbery Award fully embraced doom & gloom as an improving aesthetic for children’s literature, but by the 1970s the trend seems to have been firmly in place. See for instance James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier’s My Brother Sam Is Dead, a book that was on my childhood bookshelves which I never actually read because, well, look at that title. This is a very post-Vietnam “war is hell” book, and it is about as grueling as “war is hell” books usually are, although it was thoughtful of the authors to tell us who was going to die in the title instead of saving it for a fun surprise. (Although there are some fun surprise deaths, too.)

Sam starts the book by signing up to fight in the American Revolution, a messy affair that sets neighbor against neighbor, especially in the mostly Tory town from which Sam hails and in which his little brother, our narrator Tim, still lives. This is not the kind of book where anyone gets to die heroically in battle, so my money was on Sam dying of cholera or something of that ilk, but ( Spoilers! An upsetting death! )

Scott O’Dell’s Sing Down the Moon is also pretty miserable. Our heroine, the Navajo girl Bright Morning, gets kidnapped and sold into slavery. She heroically escapes, with the help of her fiance Tall Boy, who is maimed in the attempt, which permanently spoils his disposition! (My general impression is that men in Scott O’Dell novels are useless at best.) They arrive back in the Canyon de Chelly just in time for the U.S. Cavalry to round up the whole tribe and march them to Bosque Redondo, a hellhole with alkaline soil unsuited to growing anything. Bright Morning and Tall Boy (now married) escape back to the Canyon de Chelly to have their baby, and… that’s where the book ends.

In a way it feels wrong to complain about this ending at the very same time that I’m complaining that the Newbery books of the 1970s are such downers, but this seems like a falsely positive place to stop. The book ends with the heroine and her son petting a lamb in the Canyon de Chelly, when we all know the cavalry’s going to drag them back to Bosque Redondo at some point. If you’re going for tragedy then commit to your tragedy, Scott O’Dell! Go full Rosemary Sutcliff or go home.

After the general misery of Laurence Yep’s Dragon’s Gate I approached Dragonwings with caution… but actually this one bucks the miserable trend of the 1970s Newberys! Yes, there’s some misery, but overall the book is enjoyable. In the early years of the twentieth century, young Moon Shadow moves to San Francisco to be with his father (yes, there IS an earthquake sequence), who grows obsessed with building an airplane.

( Spoilers )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I have read MANY books this week, because my housemate tested positive for Covid, which means I also am stuck at home (currently I’m all right… just waiting to see what happens…) without much to do but read.

The Traveling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa, translated by Philip Gabriel, with an adorable cat illustration at the beginning of each chapter by Yoco Nagamiya. I picked this up on a whim because the cover enchanted me, and I’ve enjoyed a number of Japanese novels in translation (maybe I should have a tag for that?), and it did not disappoint. Our narrator, Nana, is a cat with a crooked tail shaped like a seven (whence comes his name), and the story tells of his travels with his owner Satoru. Satoru is looking for a new home for Nana, and on the way we not only take a tour through Japan, but through Satoru’s past as he visits old friends.

( Spoilers )

William Dean Howells’ The Flight of Pony Baker is a book for boys in the style of Tom Sawyer, and it draws so heavily on Howells’ memoir A Boy’s Town that one really only needs to read one of the two books. Personally I found The Flight of Pony Baker much weaker: the plotting is clunky, and Howells has pruned back a lot of the detail that made A Boy’s Town so fascinating.

Jessamyn West’s The Friendly Persuasion is a series of interlinked short stories about Jess and Eliza Birdwell and their brood, a Quaker family in southern Indiana during and after the Civil War. Earlier this year I happened to visit their neck of the woods (Clifty Falls and the town of Vernon) and it was thrilling to see these locales in fiction, although I expect that they’re much changed.

Mostly these are tales of incidents from ordinary life: the time that Jess brought home an organ (when Quakers aren’t supposed to have musical instruments), a daughter of the family getting her first crush, a son breaking with Quaker pacifism to join the Vernon militia to defend the town against Morgan’s Raiders (only for the Raiders to pass Vernon by)... Of course in some ways a raid, even one that never comes off, is a big break from ordinary life, but West writes it as an extension thereof. Ordinary life stretched out to its edges.

AND FINALLY, Katharine Hull & Pamela Whitlock’s Escape to Persia, sequel to The Far-Distant Oxus. As often happens with sequels, this is not quite as good as the first, although in this case the fall-off is very slight: none of the children’s adventures are as epic as their week-long trek to the sea in the first book, but they still have lots of fun. It’s easier perhaps to write a good sequel when the first book was episodic: all you have to do is come up with more fun episodes, not a whole new plot just as good as the first.

What I’m Reading Now

In Dracula Daily, Dracula has spent the last couple of weeks eating the crew of a ship one by one, as chronicled in the captain’s log. It builds up such dread to read this as it happens, and makes it so sad when the ship crashed at Whitby, with the heroic captain lashed to the helm, dead… the journalist writing up the incident hints darkly that perhaps the captain killed his crew, but fortunately the townsfolk know better and are planning a hero’s funeral.

What I Plan to Read Next

Through carefully laid plans to abuse my parents’ library privileges, I have cut the number of Newbery Honor books I will need to interlibrary loan down from seventy-two to a mere forty!

From her trip in England,

littlerhymes sent me a Biggles omnibus containing Biggles Flies East and Biggles Flies West, which the publishers must have bunged together based on the pleasing symmetry of their names, because they are wildly different books!

Biggles Flies East is a World War I spy adventure. After a German recruiter mistakes Biggles for a disgraced pilot and tries to recruit him as a spy, the British intelligence service decides to run Biggles as a double agent - which ends with Biggles stationed at a German airbase in Palestine, where the slightest slip might lead to his death, surrounded by enemies on all sides!

Biggles spends many of his adventures in situations where the slightest slip might lead to his death, and generally seems pretty chill with it, but being surrounded by enemies takes a real toll. The atmosphere of distrust frays his nerves: he’s clearly much more comfortable on adventures when he has his friends at his back.

This is also the book that first introduces Biggles’ sexy nemesis von Stalhein! I actually found this less slashy than Biggles and Co, perhaps because von Stalhein and Biggles are supposedly on the same side and therefore can’t truly lean into the antago-flirtation? And, as aforementioned, Biggles is simply not at his best as a spy. As Algy comments, “Those soulless hounds at the Air Board need boiling in oil for sending a fellow like Biggles on a job like this.”

Biggles Flies West, on the other hand, is a much more classic Biggles & his buddies face danger together adventure… and also a riff on Treasure Island! (The characters in fact give themselves Treasure Island nicknames: Biggles is of course Captain Smollett.) After Biggles and friends rescue teenage Dick Denver from a ruffian intent on stealing the treasure map (and the cursed doubloon) that Dick just received in a letter from his father, they join forces to hunt for treasure on a small island in the Caribbean.

This culminates in an amazing sequence where Biggles and company defend an Elizabethan-era fort (carved, as Johns tells us, into the living rock of the island), using the weapons abandoned there centuries ago when pirates drove the garrison from the fort, while wearing Elizabethan clothing that was also left behind. “Would all this be usable after centuries of neglect?” the adult reader may be tempted to ask. Hush! Rule of cool! Enjoy the visual of Biggles and friends, dressed in Elizabethan finery, armed only with Elizabethan muskets and cannon (and a cutlass!), taking on a ship full of ruffians intent on stealing their pirate treasure!

Genuinely astonished that no one has made a Sharpe-style series of movies based on the Biggles books. They’re so cinematic. But apparently the only Biggles movie is the one with the time-traveling TV dinner salesman. Such a waste.

It is a strong temptation to the weary historian to close the present tale with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it.

By the time she wrote the third March family novel, Jo’s Boys Louisa May Alcott was absolutely, incredibly, 100% done with Plumfield and indeed the entire March family, as evidenced by the above quote. I strongly suspect this a redaction from a first draft in which an earthquake did swallow Plumfield, changed only when her editor begged her on bended knees not to slaughter her whole cast in the final chapter. “Think of the money,” he sobbed, tears in his eyes.

I can only assume Alcott wrote this whole book with her eyes on the money, because she has even less fucks to give than she did in Little Men, and she was already running short of fucks then. There is a certain perfunctory quality to most of it: she has to settle all these boys in professions AND hitch them up with brides and by god she’ll do it, but for the most part she’s bored. She throws in a shipwreck and a murder to try to cheer herself along but even that can’t save it for her.

Actually the best chapter is the one about Jo’s life as a celebrated authoress. At long last she has fulfilled her childhood dream of being a rich and famous writer - and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be! She’s inundated with fan letters and requests for autographs; the doorbell rings incessantly with visitors wanting to meet the literary lioness. Sometimes she climbs out the back window to escape; other times, she pretends to be her own maid, hoping that if they think she’s out they’ll move along. (Unfortunately, that party sees through the imposture, but they leave swiftly anyway, for the young girl fan is desperately disappointed in Jo’s appearance: “'I thought she'd be about sixteen and have her hair braided in two tails down her back,” she mourns.)

In general, Jo can’t stand her young girl fans: “The last time I let in a party of girls one fell into my arms and said, “Darling, love me!”,” she complains. (Apparently fans have just always been Like This.) There’s such an irony that Alcott, who wanted so much to write for boys, has come to be seen so wholly (much more so than in her own lifetime) as a writer for young girls.

In some ways Jo’s Boys is the book that certain critics want Little Women to be: Jo finally achieves incredible literary success, the book forthrightly moralizes in favor of women’s rights and votes for women (there’s a whole chapter where Nan catechizes the young men of her acquaintance on the subject), and Nan herself becomes the spinster career woman many critics yearn for Jo to be - albeit a doctor rather than a writer.

(

littlerhymes and I were quite sad that the book offers no convenient girl to ship with Nan. It also does its level best to sink the good ship Nat/Dan: they get exactly one walk together, Nat cuts out early to spend the rest of the evening with his lady love, and then they don’t see each other nor, apparently, think about each other again for the entire book. I could get around the physical separation if they at least pined.)

But at the end of the day, one doesn’t just want a book to move through a checklist of desideratum; one also wants it to be compelling, which Little Women does apparently effortlessly and Jo’s Boys manages mostly when Alcott is writing about how annoying Little Women fans are. For all that she wanted to write about boys, she never seems as interested in most of them as she was in the March sisters.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

When Mrs. Spring Fragrance first arrived in Seattle, she was unacquainted with even one word of the American language. Five years later her husband, speaking of her, said: ‘There are no more American words for her learning.” And everyone who knew Mrs. Spring Fragrance agreed with Mr. Spring Fragrance.

For a long time I’ve been meaning to read one of Sui Sin Far’s short stories, and this week I finally read Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Sui Sin Far was the penname of Edith Maude Eaton, daughter of an Englishman and a Chinese woman who had been adopted as a child by English missionaries; she wrote short stories about the Chinese immigrant experience in America, and if this story is any example they were charming stories (stylistically very characteristic of the time) with the occasional well-planted barb about American immigration policies toward China and attitudes towards Chinese immigrants.

I also read W. E. Johns’ Biggles in the Baltic, a World War II adventure in which Biggles and company operate out of a SECRET ISLAND BASE in the Baltic, which they manage to keep secret for less than a week, which their CO cheerily tells them was longer than anyone expected, actually! We really thought you’d all die out there! Ready for your next mission? THANKS COLONEL RAYMOND. GLAD TO HEAR IT.

And I finished D. E. Stevenson’s Winter and Rough Weather, in which James and Rhoda settled into their farmhouse at the end of a borderline-impassible road. This road came up so many times I was convinced was going to become a plot point, probably involving Rhoda giving birth in the middle of a thunderstorm which would make it impossible for the doctor to get through.

In fact, Chekhov’s Road never washes out at a plot-important point. This is a quiet yet absorbing book about ordinary people living mostly pleasant lives. I always enjoy Stevenson’s character dynamics: they seem so real and well-observed.

What I’m Reading Now

A Coalition of Lions, the sequel to The Winter Prince. ( Spoilers )

What I Plan to Read Next

littlerhymes has sent me an omnibus of Biggles Flies East AND Biggles Flies West!

When I realized how few of the Newbery Honor books of the 1930s the library still had, I figured that I had better get on the ones that are left before they, too, disappeared. Here is the first batch!

James Cloyd Bowman’s Pecos Bill: The Greatest Cowboy of All Time is a collection of tall tales about Pecos Bill, who is, as you can see, the greatest cowboy of all time. Does what it says on the tin! Pecos Bill created the Grand Canyon by lassoing a cyclone and so on and so forth.

Wanda Gag’s The ABC Bunny, written and illustrated by Wanda and hand-lettered by her brother Howard, is a charming ABC book. Rather than simply having a different picture for each word, it tells a continuous story about a bunny going on an adventure, finding some lettuce to nibble and meeting many other animals, including “P for prickly porcupine, Pins and needles on his spine.”

Phil Stong’s Honk the Moose is about a moose who moseys into a livery stable during a cold winter, where he is found by two Finnish-American boys (the 1930s appear to have been the high-water mark for American children’s books showcasing various European nationalities), and soon becomes the pet of the whole town. It’s based on a true story: my edition (a 2001 reprint) includes a forward by the mayor of Biwabik, Minnesota, who notes that the town now features a life-size statue of Honk.

Elizabeth Janet Gray’s Penn is a biography of William Penn, which I found absolutely charming if perhaps biased: Gray obviously adores Penn, although she has to allow that he never could seem to see the flaws in his friends, no matter how obvious they were to others: “sincere and open as the day, he could not imagine that his friend might say things which he did not mean,” and therefore didn’t realize that his BFF James II was interested in religious toleration as a back door to reintroduce Catholicism to England, not for its own sake.

But “too generous to our friends” is far from the worst flaw to have. In Gray’s telling, Penn sounds like a real sweetheart: open-hearted, earnest (but not without a sense of humor), always moving forward and looking for the best, and also (as Gray informs us many times) very handsome!

And finally, Ludwig Bemelmans’ The Golden Basket. Yes, this is that Ludwig Bemelmans, and although this is not a Madeleine book, it does mark the first literary appearance of Madeline! She appears in one of the chapters, already the smallest girl among twelve little girls who live in two straight lines. (I just discovered that Bemelmans named Madeline after his wife, which is so sweet.)

Mostly, however, The Golden Basket is a delightful account of the adventures of sisters Celeste and Melisande as they accompany their father to Bruges, where they stay in the inn of the Golden Basket. Lots of lovely detail about the town, and the hotel, and the people they meet, and the food they eat (omelets with jam!), and the games they play, including one where they take turns pretending they are captive of a submarine by hiding under a coat with a home-made periscope sticking up through the sleeve… and then complete the submarine experience by having the sister who is currently not captain pour a pitcher of water down the sleeve! Peak rainy day fun. Just really charming.

Of course Bemelmans is still well-known, and I knew Gag from Millions of Cats (the oldest American picture book still in print), but it was sobering to realize not only how few of these older Newbery books the library still had, but how few of the authors I had ever even heard of. So many award-winning books, indeed entire successful careers, washed away by the sands of time…

But it’s also sort of freeing. Posterity will forget about almost all of us, so why worry? Enjoy your projects today and let tomorrow take care of itself.

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June 2025

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with books: 2022

Book Review: Sense & Sensibility

Newbery Honor Books of the 1970s, Redux

Book Review: The Planet of Junior Brown

Wednesday Reading Meme

Book Review: The Lady Doc

More Newbery Books of the 1930s

Book Review: Oxus in Summer

Wednesday Reading Meme

Book Review: The Squire's Tales

Book Review: The Lion Hunter and the Empty Kingdom

Book Review: Northanger Abbey

Book Review: A Coalition of Lions and The Sunbird

Wednesday Reading Meme

Book Review: The Idylls of the Queen

Newbery Books of the 1970s

Wednesday Reading Meme

Book Review: Biggles Flies East & Biggles Flies West

Book Review: Jo’s Boys

Wednesday Reading Meme

Newbery Books of the 1930s

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June 2025

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