A Certain Slant of Light

Wednesday Reading Meme

2026-04-22T17:00:59Z

Books I've Given Up On This Week

I regret to admit (or rather admit without regret) that I got deeply bored about a quarter of the way through Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, and have therefore taken it back to the library. Sorry, Jean-Paul! This is simply not a season of my life where I am interested in you.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

While looking for more Penelope Farmer books, as one does, I discovered that the author of Charlotte Sometimes also occasionally moonlighted as a translator from Hebrew. Specifically, she and Amos Oz teamed up to translate Oz’s book Soumchi, a wistful childhood journey through British-occupied Jerusalem between the world wars.

This is an adult book about children rather than a children’s book - the tip-off lies in the prologue, a melancholy reflection about how everything is changing all the time which is very “adult looking back at childhood.” A gentle period piece about a boy with a massive crush on his classmate Esthie and also absolutely zero common sense, as evidenced by the fact that he keeps making trades where he is fairly obviously getting the worse end of the deal.

Also continuing my Vivien Alcock explorations with A Kind of Thief, a contemporary novel about a girl whose father is arrested for theft. But before he’s marched off by the police, he manages to sneak her the information to pick up a bag at the railroad station. Does receiving these presumably stolen goods make her… a kind of thief?

I think Alcock’s work is stronger (or at least more tailored to my interests) when she’s exploring a fantastical premise. This is fun but not something I would suggest seeking out unless you’re an Alcock completist. (If you are an Alcock completist, I do own a copy and I would be happy to send it to a new home.)

Also zipped through Dorothy Gilman’s Kaleidoscope, the sequel to The Clairvoyant Countess, which I probably should have read first as Kaleidoscope is chock full of spoilers for the earlier book. On the other hand, I’ll probably have forgotten all the spoilers by the time I mosey around to The Clairvoyant Countess, so it’s fine.

Always love Gilman’s older heroines. This book is aptly named, a kaleidoscope of different fractured glimpses of other people’s lives, some of which appear once and some of which are threaded throughout the book. No strong through-line but lots of fun little interweaving stories.

What I’m Reading Now

Grace Lin’s Chinese Menu, a lavishly illustrated compilation of the legendary origin stories of many classic Chinese dishes. Just about the embark on the story of spring rolls.

What I Plan to Read Next

I know I keep saying I’m going to read E. F. Benson’s Queen Lucia, but I’m going to read Queen Lucia for real this time.

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Book Review: The Empire Must Die

2026-04-21T18:45:20Z

I know I’ve read Mikhail Zygar’s The Empire Must Die: Russia’s Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917 before, because my ebook is spattered with my own highlights all the way to the very end. However, I have no memory of the book, and also apparently never posted about it, both of which are baffling because it’s an enjoyable and fascinating read.

The Empire Must Die is telling the intertwined stories of many different prominent figures in late tsarist Russia: not just the prominent political figures (both in the government and in the varyingly legal levels of opposition), but also figures in the arts, Chekov, Diaghilev, Tolstoy, Nijinsky. It is both painting a picture of Russian high society and exploring the events that led to the downfall of that society.

Zygar is telling a story more than he is advancing a thesis, so he doesn’t advance the idea that this or that thing is the root cause of the ultimate Bolshevik takeover. And obviously any complex historical phenomenon has many causes: autocracy, the Russian orthodox church, a highly class-stratified society with huge income inequality, etc. etc.

However, it ultimately seemed to me that any of these problems might have been overcome were it not for Nicholas II, Russia’s weak-willed, vacillating, but also stunningly pigheaded final tsar. He’s like the guy in the parable who is sitting on top of a house roof in a flood, turning away a neighbor in a boat and a helicopter and what have you because he’s convinced that God will save him, except in Nicholas’s case he’s ignoring warning signs like “we just lost a war with Japan because of our antiquated military, so perhaps we should modernize before we get embroiled in a larger war?”

Or, rather, he repeatedly sees the warning signs, he agrees to direly needed reforms, and then he backtracks the next day after he’s had a chance to talk to his wife. Absolutely a case where both halves of an adoring couple made each other exponentially worse. Nicholas believed that any attempt to amend the autocracy was a violation of the oath he made to God at his coronation, and his wife Alix not only agreed wholeheartedly but remained steadfast in this belief when the weak-willed Nicholas wavered.

So much for the collapse of autocracy. After Nicholas abdicates, why do the Bolsheviks end up in power? Well, you’ve got three main parties vying for it.

The Kadets: the liberal democratic party. In favor of a republic or a constitutional monarchy. Popular among Russia’s middle class, which is not very large. Just can’t pull the numbers they need. Ideologically opposed to shooting people for political reasons.

The Socialist Revolutionaries (also known as SRs): in favor of peasants and the political assassinations of tsarist officials. Despite this history of violence, excited to work non-violently within the new state system that everyone is trying to patch together after the revolution of February 1917. Unfortunately, their two most charismatic leaders recently died, and also they discovered that Azef, the guy who organized most of their high profile political assassinations, was actually a police agent. Awkward. The SRs fail to kill him.

The Social Democrats (also known as the SDs; split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks): Marxists, in favor of the industrial proletariat; hate peasants, but canny enough to promise to distribute land to the peasants anyway. The Bolsheviks are ideologically in favor of shooting people for political reasons, which gives them a decisive edge while their opponents are fretting about whether it will fatally undermine their attempt to build democracy if they shoot political opponents who threaten to violently overthrow democracy. As it turns out, the answer is “probably yes, but do you know what will undermine democracy even more decisively? Being violently overthrown.”

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2026-04-17T12:28:38Z

I watched the Alec Guinness Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with skygiants and genarti when I visited Massachusetts (a month ago now; where does the time go?), and I’ve been procrastinating writing about it, because how does one review perfection?

It’s so good. Quite possibly the perfect adaptation. Alec Guinness makes an amazing Smiley. Possibly not as plain and tubby as Smiley ought to be, but he’s projecting that as hard as he can nonetheless. And he’s just so good at Smiley’s style of sympathetic understatement where he might not actually be sympathetic to whatever line of bull his horrible loser interlocutor is trying to feed him, but it would take an awfully attentive listener to realize that, and most of the people around him never seem to listen at all.

Much is made in the books of Smiley’s amazing spy skills, and I have accepted this without ever exactly being able to put my finger on what those skills are, except maybe the patience to deep-dive in the files. But the miniseries suggests that Smiley’s other secret weapon is the ability to listen, and not only listen but radiate the aura of attentive, thoughtful, sympathetic listening that makes people want to keep talking.

His not-at-all secret weakness is his adored wife Anne, who is sleeping with a Who’s Who of all the important men in London. Just about everyone Smiley meets taunts him with this in not-very-veiled terms. (“Give my love to Anne,” says an obnoxious acquaintance in the first episode. “Give everybody’s love to Anne!”) Amazing example of a character who is hugely present despite not actually showing up till the final episode, during one of the rare sunny moments of a show that takes place mostly in clouds and rain and darkness. Anne actually is one of the bright spots of Smiley’s life despite also being the bane of his existence.

But it would be a mistake to focus too closely on Smiley, because the whole ensemble cast is excellent, and the production really gives the characterization room to breathe. The first scene simply consists of four men assembling one by one around a table, smoking cigarettes, sipping coffee, flipping through folders of papers, clearing their throats… until at last the final man arrives and the meeting gets started and you see, “Ah, that’s the one in charge.”

That’s Bill Haydon. You don’t learn his name yet, and you also don’t learn for a while that he’s not technically the boss, but also you already know most of what you need to know about him.

The adaptation hews quite close to the book, but not slavishly so; clearly the product of people who love and admire Le Carre’s work but also recognize that the challenges of adapting a written work to a visual medium can require some tweaks.

They did make one change I absolutely loved, which was ( spoilers )

Just gorgeous. Absolutely amazing. I want to watch the sequel Smiley’s People, which has a reprise cast, but I’m also not sure that I’m strong enough to watch two Smiley adaptations in one year, especially since this is the one adapting the book with the most Karla (played by Patrick Stewart) (did not write about the scene in this series where Smiley and Karla face off and Karla just sits there, absolutely silent, and dominating the room in that silence) and I feel they may add a Karla bit that will bring me to my knees like the part under the spoiler cut above.

Clearly I’ll simply have to wait until I visit Boston again to watch Smiley’s People.

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Book Review: Hooked

2026-04-16T12:15:11Z

“Self,” I told myself, as I circled the bookstore display of Asako Yuzuki’s Hooked, “self, you must de-hype yourself. Yes, this is the new book by the author of your beloved Butter, and yes, Yuzuki has teamed up once again with all time favorite translator Polly Barton, but you must not expect to love it as much as Butter! That is too much weight to place on a book!”

And indeed I did not love Hooked as much as Butter, but it’s still a fascinating book and just as propulsively readable, even as it went off the rails a bit at the end.

Hooked begins with our heroine Eriko arriving at work early. She is a successful employee but otherwise struggling in life. She’s thirty years old, still single, keeps getting dumped by her boyfriends, and doesn’t have a single female friend.

This last fact is the one that torments her. She believes (despite the solid counter-evidence of all those dumpings) that she’s good with men, but she’s terrible at female relationships and she knows it. In fact, sometimes she laments that she’s never had a female friend, although once again - solid counter evidence - she keeps running into her old friend Keiko in the apartment halls. But Eriko destroyed that friendship when she was 15, and hasn’t had a friend since.

However, Eriko has achieved a pleasurable parasocial relationship with her favorite blogger, Hallie B, who bills herself as The World’s Worst Wife. She has neither a job nor children, just stays home all day neither cleaning the house nor cooking, just loafing about and occasionally updating her blog.

Oh, and Hallie B seems to have no female friends either. This makes Eriko feel extremely seen.

Then one day, Eriko catches sight of Hallie B having lunch at a local neighborhood spot. She introduces herself as a big fan of the blog, Hallie B introduces herself by her real name Shoko, and they make plans to have dinner at a nearby Denny’s.

Dinner is a blast! They super hit it off! Eriko rides home on the back of Shoko’s bike, like they’re in a high school anime, amazing. Eriko concludes that her friendship problems are OVER because she has now found a BEST FRIEND FOREVER and they are now going to hang out, like, ALL THE TIME.

Shoko thinks they had a nice evening and hopes they can continue to hang out occasionally.

You can see where this is going. Soon Eriko is sending Shoko lengthy strings of texts promising that she is NOT a stalker, and also stalking the Denny’s where they hung out that one time in case Shoko comes back so Eriko can tell Shoko to her face that she is not! not! NOT! stalking her!

Eriko has some of the same energy as Izzy in The Appeal, except somehow simultaneously more deranged and more self-aware. It seems like these two qualities should be contradictory, and indeed there are times when Yuzuki doesn’t get the balance quite right, and instead of seeming fascinatingly, complexly batshit, Eriko just seems incoherent.

( spoilers )

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Wednesday Reading Meme

2026-04-15T13:31:19Z

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

C. S. Forester’s Hornblower and the Atropos, tragically low on gay pining (no Lt. Bush in this book) but chock full of adventure and Hornblower being extremely hard on himself at all times. We also spend a couple of chapters with Hornblower and Maria together, travelling across England on one of the newfangled canals (I believe that Forester found a detailed description of canal travel in his researches and just had to share, and I am HERE for it), and I think it’s probably for the best that their marriage involves long, long stretches of Hornblower being away at sea, as they clearly find each other very annoying when together.

Forester also appears to have found a detailed description of “how to blow things up underwater in the early 1800s,” and again I am HERE for it. Thank you for building a large proportion of your plot around this knowledge, sir.

I also finished Isaac Bashevis Singer’s A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw, stories of his boyhood before and during World War I, written in Yiddish and translated by a variety of people. I bought this at the Yiddish Book Center and found it interesting, but probably would have done better to purchase one of his short story collections instead. There were too many! I simply couldn’t choose!

What I’m Reading Now

Just started Sartre’s Nausea. So far, so much navel-gazing.

What I Plan to Read Next

HOUSTON my hold on Elisa Malisova and Kateryna Sylvanova's Pioneer Summer has ARRIVED at the library! Yesss please let this tale of gay Young Pioneers in the late Soviet Union live up to all my hopes and dreams.

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Hornblower, movies seven and eight

2026-04-14T15:20:37Z

Alas, alas, the sad day has arrived: I have finished the last of the Hornblower movies. What joy is there in the world when there are no more Hornblowers to watch? Simply the joy of rewatching them, perhaps, and convincing my friends to watch them too. (Have already suborned one friend to The Cause.)

Since seven and eight are the last of the series, this review obviously contains many ( spoilers )

Perfectly fine, but did not reach the glorious heights of Hornblower bridal carrying a starving Kennedy through the rain to demand medical attention from the Spanish authorities holding them captive.

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Holiday

2026-04-10T12:42:21Z

Still working on my reviews for the movies I saw over spring break! In my defense, we saw many movies - and it still wasn’t as many as I would have liked, as we only managed to hit up one of the films in the Kate the Great film festival at the Brattle.

However, that film was Holiday, starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, one of the all-time great Golden Age of Hollywood screen pairings. Genuinely shocked that I never saw or even heard of this movie before, given how much I love both of the stars.

However, this is perhaps just as well, since it was wonderful to see it for the first time on the big screen. Cary Grant is Johnny Case, a cheerful businessman who just got engaged to Julia, a girl he met a couple weeks ago at a ski resort. Katherine Hepburn is Julia’s disaffected little sister Linda, who Johnny meets for the first time when he visits Julia’s home… which happens to be the family mansion in the heart of Manhattan.

Yes, Johnny Case has been Crazy Rich Asianed. Going home to meet his fiancee’s family, he discovers they’re richer than God. After some initial doubts, however, the patriarch takes to Johnny, an up-and-coming one man with an extremely lucrative business deal in the pipeline. But then Johnny lets slip his true plan. Once he makes his packet, he plans to quit business and spend a few years traveling the world and finding himself.

Julia and father are appalled. What’s the point of making a huge amount of money except to use it to make yet huger amounts of money? But Linda, who is utterly miserable in her gilded cage, is fascinated. Here’s someone who really wants to live!

You can more or less guess the plot from there, but it’s still a delightful ride, with many excellent side characters. Linda and Julia’s drunk gay brother, like Linda miserable and unable to see a route to escape. Johnny’s friends the eccentric professor and his equally eccentric wife, a double act who easily morph into a triple act when Johnny’s on the scene. There’s a delightful moment when they’re singing “Camptown Races” with Linda, having a real good time in the attic while people pretend to have a good time at the huge stuffy engagement/New Year’s Eve party downstairs.

For a movie called Holiday, this is probably one of the least holiday-aesthetic Christmas/New Year’s movies I’ve ever seen. The characters keep commenting on the unusually warm weather they’re having, presumably to try to cover the fact that they are very obviously filming in southern California, and there’s very little in the way of Christmas trees or other decorations either.

However, as long as you don’t go into the movie expecting to get your Christmas on, it’s a fantastic time. Great chemistry between the leads, fantastic family dynamics, some more serious discussions about money and the meaning of life which give a bit of ballast to the levity. Just a jolly good all around time.

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Hornblower movies 5 & 6

2026-04-09T14:44:50Z

Onward I sail in my Hornblower movie adventures! Five and six are a pair, based on Lieutenant Hornblower, which features a mad captain who is convinced that his lieutenants are plotting to take over his ship. His lieutenants, in increasing fear for their lives, conclude that they’d better take over the ship.

It’s interesting to watch these so soon after reading the books, because you read the books and it seems like there’s plenty of dramatic incident, and then you watch the movies and you go “Ah, the producers decided they needed to juice this up a bit.” Example: in the movies, the entire action is framed by the lieutenants’ trial for mutiny. If they are found guilty they will be HANGED.

Example two: in the book, Captain Sawyer falls down the hatchway, hits his head, and basically is incapacitated ever after. In the movie, he still falls from the hatchway (obviously we’re not going to let go of the question “did Hornblower push him?”), but he recovers! retakes the ship! and then promptly sails it directly under the guns of a Spanish fort, which forces the lieutenants to take action to remove him from power!

While I was reading Lieutenant Hornblower, I entertained myself greatly with the speculation that Hornblower DID push Captain Sawyer. However, upon reflection I’ve decided that if he had pushed Captain Sawyer, literally every promotion would be accompanied by the reflection “This is only happening because I MURDERED my CAPTAIN, truly I am the WORST.” On the other hand, this might explain the great increase in neuroticism between Mr. Midshipman Hornblower and our return to Hornblower POV in Hornblower and the Hotspur? Feels so guilty he can’t even name his guilt…

Okay no, I really think that if Hornblower were guilty he would be naming his guilt to himself incessantly. Maybe he’s just more neurotic because of the stress of serving under mad Captain Sawyer who was convinced that all his lieutenants and especially Hornblower were plotting against him.

ANYWAY. Getting back to the movie adaptations. I can see why these films must have made Bush/Hornblower fans Big Mad. Bush is at long last introduced - and then he’s upstaged at every turn by established movie fan favorite Lt. Kennedy.

Kennedy, not Bush, is the one who is nice to young Wellard after Captain Sawyer whips him for no reason.

When Bush is wounded, Hornblower briefly cradles his head, then the doctor is like “Go away, there’s nothing you can do here,” and Hornblower’s like “okay” and drops Bush like a hot potato. He hotfoots it off to have a chat with Kennedy, who tells him unsteadily that the prisoners have been dealt with… “Is that your blood?” Hornblower asks.

Kennedy mumbles something about how he’s fine.

“IS THAT YOUR BLOOD?”

Kennedy lets his jacket fall open and we see that his white shirt is SOAKED in blood. END OF SCENE.

And then of course Kennedy dies for Hornblower! Shambles into a court, barely able to stand upright on account of his wounds, and insists that he’s the one who pushed Captain Sawyer down the hatch! (As we have seen in endless flashbacks, he wasn’t even in the vicinity.)

Hornblower is not in court that morning, having been decoyed away, which upon reflection doesn’t quite make sense: surely he has to be in attendance at his own capital trial? But obviously we can’t have Hornblower spoiling Kennedy’s dramatic gesture by popping up to yell “That’s a lie! I pushed Captain Sawyer!” (Possibly no one pushed Captain Sawyer! Maybe he just fell! Those hatches have no safety rails. Absolute death traps.)

Anyway, Kennedy is duly sentenced to death. But before they can hang him, he dies of his wounds. Hornblower, of course, is at Kennedy’s bedside, holding his hand as he dies.

One presumes that sometime in the final two movies, Bush will at last have a chance to repair to his sickbed, where Hornblower will tenderly brush his hair from his forehead. But even then, how can he compete with the guy who sacrificed his life for Hornblower? The filmmakers clearly decided to ride the good ship Hornblower/Kennedy into the sunset.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

2026-04-08T17:35:54Z

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Mademoiselle Misfortune, a charming book from the 1930s. Young Alice is the oldest of six look-alike sisters in Paris, and one day overhears the landlady sighing that the girls are six misfortunes for their family: imagine having to pay six dowries! But soon after, a crotchety American lady (the sister of a friend of the family’s) asks Alice to accompany her on a trip through France as her interpreter, in which position Alice comes into her own as a person. Delightful illustrations by Kate Seredy.

I realize there’s no guarantee that an author will ever meet her illustrator, but I hope Brink and Seredy did come to know each other, as based purely on their books I think they could have been besties.

What I’m Reading Now

Frolicking through E. M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in America. No deep thoughts, just enjoying this whirlwind tour of the American literary world in the 1930s. Apparently everyone who was anyone was reading Anthony Adverse, except for our narrator who keeps having to duck conversations about the book.

What I Plan to Read Next

lucymonster and troisoiseaux have convinced me to read some existentialists, so I’m starting with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea because I figure that if I start with Camus, then Camus is where I will also end.

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Easter Books

2026-04-06T17:57:04Z

There are so few Easter books that I don’t usually bother with any special Easter reading, but I stumbled upon a couple while I was hunting down all those Christmas books for Picture Book Advent. So this Easter morning, I made a cup of the very fancy hot chocolate from Burdick’s (really should have bought more) and read my Easter books.

The first was Tasha Tudor’s A Tale for Easter, which is about a little girl’s Easter. It’s hard to remember when Easter is (so true), but when Mama makes hot cross buns for tea on Good Friday, you know it’s just around the corner… and that’s when you have your Easter dream of riding a fawn to meet baby bunnies and ducklings!

The second was Jan Brett’s The Easter Egg. Every Easter, all the bunnies make beautiful eggs, because the maker of the most gorgeous egg gets to ride with the Easter Bunny as he makes his rounds. There are dyed eggs that have been turned into flower pots, carved wooden eggs, luscious chocolate eggs, classic psyanki eggs, even a mechanical egg… An explosion of delicious detail that really plays to Brett’s strengths as an illustrator.

I was also completely charmed by the borders on this one. Each page is bordered with branches of pussy willow, which over the course of the book swell from tiny buds to full pussy willows - and then on the last page, each pussy willow bud is a tiny bunny! It’s subtle enough that most people won’t notice, but it’s just delightful when you see it.

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Robber Cats

2026-04-03T12:14:03Z

I was very excited to read R. M. Ballantyne’s The Robber Kitten at the archive, because how could you go wrong with a title like that? And the cover seems promising: it features a kitten all dressed up like a highwayman, plumed hat and pistols and all.

Alas, the story is a morality tale, in which a kitten Goes to the Bad (led astray by bad company, we are told, although we never meet a single companion, evil or otherwise), realizes that wickedness has made it wretched, and returns to its grieving mother, who has been crying her heart out over her robber son. Now do any of us really believe that a mother cat would be sorry one of her kittens took to a life a crime?

However, Ballantyne frequently seems to forget that his characters are cats. Item: the robber kitten has to remind himself not to feel afraid as the sun sinks low. SIR you are a CAT you can SEE IN THE DARK. Item: the robber kitten falls out of a try onto his head. SIR you are a CAT you famously LAND ON YOUR FEET. Such a disappointment.

However, by fortunate coincidence I’m reading another book about a larcenous cat, Katherine Applegate’s Pocket Bear, which is narrated by the cat Zephyrina. Until recently a stray, Zephyrina has graciously consented to accept a home with Dasha and her mother Elizaveta, recent refugees from the war in Ukraine. To show her appreciation, she likes to bring back interesting finds that she has scavenged, especially toys for Dasha’s Second Chances Home for the Tossed and Treasured.

This has resulted in a wagon in front of the Second Chances Home for the Tossed and Treasures, full of Zephyrina’s recent finds, with an apologetic sign saying “Our Cat Is a Burglar,” to which Zephyrina objects. One: our cat? She is her own cat, thank you very much. Two: a burglar? What a way to refer to the Robin Hood of felines.

Zephyina is a deliciously recognizable type of cat, the previous stray who proudly believes that she is BAD! BAD TO THE BONE! but actually is a not-so-secret softie. In Zephyrina’s case, that softness manifests first with her friendship with Pocket Bear, a tiny teddy first sewn during World War I to accompany a soldier to war in his pocket.

Now over a hundred years old, Pocket Bear still remembers that formative military service. He calls the other toys in the Second Chance Home his troops, and worries over them like a kindly general. He calls Zephyrina “Corporal Z.” She cheekily sketches a salute and brings home more liberated-not-stolen toys.

The story kicks off when she brings home an old bear from a trash can. A very old bear; a possible antique, which might bring in a lot of money, which Dasha and Elizaveta desperately need to establish a new life in the United States. But can they get Dasha and Elizaveta the money they need and also find the old bear a loving home…?

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Meet John Doe and His Girl Friday

2026-04-02T12:08:50Z

I happened to be in Boston while the Harvard Film Archive was putting on a series of movies on the theme “The Woman and the Typewriter,” and you’d better bet we were on that like white on rice. We managed to hit up two of the three films, and the third was The Hudsucker Proxy which I’m sure is just fine but not old enough to interest me.

The first was Meet John Doe, Frank Capra’s dark mirror of his earlier film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Barbara Stanwyck is about to lose her job at the newspaper, so she fires off one last inflammatory article: a fabricated letter that claims to come from a man calling himself John Doe, who says he’s going to jump off City Hall in protest against the prevailing conditions of society.

The article causes a huge furor, so Barbara Stanwyck is called back to the newspaper. To keep the uproar going, the newspaper casts a man as the “writer” of the letter: Gary Cooper, an out-of-work ballplayer who finds himself thrust in the limelight as he travels the country giving speeches to the John Doe Clubs that keep popping up, filled with everyday ordinary people who are sick and tired of the way things are and have decided to move forward on a small, local scale, helping their neighbors. Their only rule? No politicians!

But of course the politicians want to get their grubby fingers on this rapidly growing movement. Edward Arnold (who played the sleazy politician in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) is back as an even sleazier politician, who hopes to use the John Doe Clubs to facilitate the fascist takeover of the United States!

I must confess I felt that this plan was half-baked, which indeed is how I felt about the John Doe Clubs in the first place. Then the movie steps back from the tragic ending that it seems to have been building toward, which undermines the story still more. ( spoilers )

The second movie was His Girl Friday, an all-time fave which I’ve seen at least twice before. Star reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), dressed in an iconic diagonally striped hat and suit, comes back to the paper to tell her former boss (and ex-husband) Walter Burns (Cary Grant) that she’s getting married again. Walter Burns at once sets out to stop the marriage, getting Hildy’s new fiance arrested at least four times in one night, while also enticing Hildy back into the newspaper business with a humdinger of a story: a man on death row whose execution in the morning has become a political hot potato.

Do Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns have a healthy relationship? Absolutely not. Will their inevitable remarriage at the end of the movie end up lasting more than six months? Absolutely not. Does any of this matter to me as Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell exchange barbs at top top TOP speed? Also absolutely not. Shine on, you crazy diamonds! You are terrible for each other and I love that for me.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

2026-04-01T16:36:51Z

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I went to the library to get one of the 2026 Newbery books, but instead got ambushed by Kate DiCamillo’s Lost Evangeline, which features a TINY GIRL standing on a SPOOL OF THREAD. How was I to resist?

Sadly the book did not focus on tiny Evangeline repurposing objects for her tiny world: spool of thread as stool, etc. But it DID feature a scene where Evangeline rides a cat, which seems like atonement for Kate DiCamillo’s The Tiger Rising where there’s a girl riding a tiger on the cover and then no one rides a tiger in the book at all, except in a dream which I think we can all agree does NOT count.

littlerhymes and I have also finished H.M.S. Surprise! (How many “surprise” puns did we make while reading this book? Many.) Jack does indeed start the book by losing the massive fortune from the Spanish treasure ships, although the Admiralty gives him nearly ten thousand pounds to make up, which would be a pretty tidy fortune in itself if (a) one were not comparing itself to hundreds of thousands of pounds of prize money, and (b) it didn’t all go to pay off Jack’s eleven thousand pounds of debt.

So he and Sophia STILL can’t marry, and indeed even though Jack has made another fortune by the end of this book, it ends with them still unwed… The next book had better open with a wedding, my god.

In news of Stephen’s matrimonial endeavors, Diana Villiers almost promises to marry him, then elopes with a rich American. Stephen is heartbroken but tbh I think Jack has a point when he says that this is the best thing that could have happened to Stephen, given that the man fights a duel for her in this book and would inevitably have to fight many more should they ever wed.

I see this is the book where the movie got the scene of Stephen operating on himself, which in the book occurs even though there are other surgeons available. Stephen doesn’t trust them! (Probably fair.) He will operate on himself in the mirror, moving his own ribs aside to get out the bullet lodged in his chest! Agonizing. This man is so metal. I could never.

What I’m Reading Now

Mikhail Zygar’s The Empire Must Die: Russia’s Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917, which I found on my Kindle marked as unread but clearly did read at some point, because I marked the passage where a young Nicholas II (not yet Nicholas II as his father is still alive) attempts to say something about politics at the dinner table, only for said father to start throwing bread rolls at him. Ah, the perfect way to train the heir to an empire: discourage any and all attempts to take an interest in politics.

Anyway, since I’m enjoying the book and have clearly forgotten it completely, I’m traipsing through it again. The defunct Narodniks, now regrouped as the SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries), have begun assassinating ministers again.

What I Plan to Read Next

Yesterday at the library I was simply unable to resist Katherine Applegate’s Pocket Bear.

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March Writing and April Goals

2026-03-31T12:09:04Z

It’s been a long time since I posted about writing, because it’s been a long time since I’ve written very much, but visiting skygiants and genarti and asakiyume inspired me to get back in harness. I am working very slowly on a secondary world fantasy novelette involving a princess in a tower and a magical paper bird and a sorceress’s apprentice.

If this sounds familiar, this story has been in the works for about 15 years. This time I’m going to finish it, though! I finally know what happens!

I also published Diary of a Cranky Bookworm this month, and since it’s basically not selling, I’ve decided that in the future I’ll continue to self pub m/m and m/m/f but will look for trad pub options for anything else. Or might just not write anything but m/m, at least at novel length. The m/m has made 15 times more money than all my other books combined.

I have however accrued a small stable of short stories, mostly fantasy, mostly not romantic, many possibly not publishable. (I know there are readers for a story about a tiny person who lives in a library, but are there venues?) (The one story about the grizzled warrior who falls in love with the magical coffee shop she manages is a shoe-in for publication somewhere, though.). My goal is to submit at least one story each month. May they come back with their pockets full of gold!

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Revisiting My 2019 Reading List

2026-03-30T12:34:35Z

I haven’t quite finished the 2017 books yet, but I had some extra time at work Friday and what better use of that time than to go through my 2019 reading list and decide which authors to revisit? So here we are.

Katherine Applegate - Pocket Bear

Grace Lin - Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Foods

Shaun Tan - The Arrival. I read Tales of the City in 2019 and found it pretty downbeat, but littlerhymes clued me in that Tan also wrote picture books so of course I have to give those a try.

C. S. Lewis - considering The World’s Last Night and Other Essays, although I’m also interested in Studies in Words

Toni Morrison - Beloved

Ben MacIntyre - Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy

Lisa See - Daughters of the Sun and Moon. Her newest book! Not yet out, in fact.

Jacqueline Woodson

Penelope Farmer - Soumchi. Apparently Farmer moonlighted as a translator from Hebrew. (the university library has Eve: Her Story, but also a book called Soumchi which appears to be written by an Israeli writer named Amos Oz, but nonetheless has Farmer’s name attached in the catalog. Did she translate? Or write the preface? May check it out just to solve the mystery.)

Dorothy Gilman

George Gissing - Demos. After New Grub Street, I felt I had to explore Gissing further, and according to Wikipedia, George Orwell thought Demos was one of Gissing’s best novels.

E. M. Delafield - The Provincial Lady in Wartime

George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier

Vivien Alcock - A Kind of Thief. I found this book at a used bookstore so it has become my next Alcock

William Dean Howells - Their Wedding Journey

Booth Tarkington - Penrod. I’ve meant to explore more Booth Tarkington since I read Seventeen. At last I’m getting around to it!

Barbara Cooney - Letting Swift River Go. When I visited asakiyume we went to the Quabbin on a foggy day, and asakiyume mentioned that Cooney illustrated a book about the building of the Quabbin, so of course that's next on my list.

Susan Cooper - torn between Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children and Green Boy

William Bowen - Merrimeg. Bowen was a children’s fantasy author in the 1920s. I’d really like to read his book The Enchanted Forest, but it doesn’t appear to be on Gutenberg or FadedPage, so I’ll content myself with Merrimeg for now.

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Wolfwalkers and My Father’s Dragon

2026-03-27T13:42:08Z

I showed up at asakiyume’s place just a couple of days before St. Patrick’s Day, so we decided it would be the perfect time to catch up on the latest movies released by the Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon, still perhaps most famous for its first movie The Secret of Kells.

We perhaps should have saved Wolfwalkers for St. Patrick’s Day itself, as it’s actually set in Ireland. Young Robyn Goodfellowe has just arrived in Ireland with her father, a professional hunter who has been hired by Oliver Cromwell to eliminate the wolves in the nearby woods. Once the wolves have been driven out, the wild woods can be cut down and converted to farmland, thus by proxy also taming the wild Irish people.

Young Robyn is supposed to stay home and do chores, but in classic heroine mode, she would much rather dash about the woods hunting with her father. Unable to accompany him on his hunt, she instead goes into the woods on her own, and accidentally falls into one of her own father’s snares!

Robyn is released by mischievous young wolfwalker Mebh, and they spend a happy day frolicking through the forest together. But in the process of releasing Robyn from the trap, Mebh nipped her. And that night when she falls asleep, Robyn’s spirit rises from her body in the form of a wolf…

Absolutely gorgeous animation. I particularly loved all the sequences featuring the wolfwalkers in wolf form, particularly the eerily beautiful image of Robyn’s wolf-spirit frantically trying to return to her body when the whole town is attempting to hunt down this wolf that inexplicably got into the town walls.

I was also impressed ( spoilers )

The animation in My Father’s Dragon wasn’t quite as lovely, or rather didn’t have quite as many opportunities for numinous loveliness. But I also enjoyed it, which surprised me because I didn’t particularly like the book it’s based on and likely wouldn’t have tried it if it weren’t Cartoon Saloon.

The book (also called My Father’s Dragon) is a straightforward tale about a boy going to an island where he defeats and/or escapes various ferocious animals (crocodiles, tigers etc) in order to rescue a baby dragon. The end. A brisk recitation of a series of events without much character development or worldbuilding of the island or anything else.

The moviemakers clearly realized that in order to stretch the story to feature-length, character development and worldbuilding and so forth was just exactly what they’d need. The result is a much richer story, where the various ferocious animals are no longer basically an obstacle course but characters with their own motivations. Also, the human protagonist meets the baby dragon much earlier, which changes his journey from a solo quest into a sort of heartwrenching buddy comedy.

The filmmakers were trying very hard, and unfortunately sometimes you could see the gears grinding as they strained to get the emotional effect they wanted, which of course serves to undermine that effect. But still, an ambitious “shot for the moon and landed among the stars,” which is still a pretty decent place to land.

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Book Review: New Grub Street

2026-03-26T12:03:04Z

When I posted about George Gissing’s The Odd Women, I commented that it was indeed an odd book, but I think I undersold or perhaps did not yet understand the sheer oddness of Gissing’s work, not only in a 19th century English context but just in terms of English literature in general.

This is even more obvious in New Grub Street, which takes as its cast a motley crew of struggling writers in 1880s London, and as its themes money and love. More specifically, its themes are:

1. Poverty is horrible and degrading and undermines every other facet of life; and

2. Money is a necessary but not sufficient condition for love. That is to say, you can have money but not love, but love without money cannot last.

Of course these themes are implied in other books (think of Jane Austen’s characters breathlessly discussing the marriage prospects of so-and-so who has thus-and-such pounds a year), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them expounded with Gissing’s brutal clarity. It’s bracing, stimulating not always to total agreement but certainly to deeper thought, for instance about the fact that people marry not only because they fall in love with an individual but because they love the image of the lifestyle and status they think they’ll have with that person.

Gissing has the Zola-like gift of creating an ensemble cast of characters who illustrate different facets of his theme while also being interesting and individual people in their own right. Gissing is trying to give them all a fair shake, to portray them all so clearly that we can see why they act the way they do. Readers may or may not find it in our hearts to sympathize, but that will be our own decision, not a result of Gissing putting his finger on the scale.

--Sensitive Edwin Reardon, who married upper-middle-class Amy on the strength of one well-received novel and now suffering immense writer’s block. Amy fell in love with both Edwin and the idea of being a successful novelist’s wife, and is appalled to see this dream crumbling under what appears to her to be his refusal to work.

As I’ve struggled with writer’s block for the past couple of years, I feel a great sympathy for Edwin: he quite literally cannot write anything good right now! It’s not his fault! But I can also see why it doesn’t look that way to Amy and her family, especially because the social rules of 1880s London mean there is no graceful road of retreat. Not only is it impossible for Amy to get a job (this is literally unthinkable: not one character ever even imagines it), but now that Edwin has set up as a full-time writer, the whole family would lose caste if he took a job for wages.

--Jasper Milvain, debonair man about town who approaches writing as a business and forthrightly says his goal is to earn a thousand pounds a year. A character type who in many books would be a villain, and I won’t say that he’s not just a bit villainous at times, but he’s also a complex character who definitely has a point. In the tradition of an Austen baddie, he ends up perfectly happy with himself and his choices.

--Alfred Yule, a cranky aging writer of moderate abilities who was never very financially successful, and married a working class woman because he never made enough to support a wife of his own class. There’s a section where Gissing lists a whole bunch of similarly positioned writers who made a similar decision and makes it clear that he thinks this is pretty much always a mistake that will lead to marital disharmony.

--Marian Yule, Alfred Yule’s daughter and assistant, who is to an ever-greater extent perhaps simply writing his articles for him. (We also get a glimpse of two other women writers in Jasper’s sisters, who at Jasper’s suggestion take to writing Sunday school stories to support themselves.)

--Whelpdale, an unsuccessful writer who makes a success of it telling other writers how to write to market. A jolly young man despite all his setbacks.

--Harold Biffen, an extremely poor though talented writer of the realist school who sticks fast to his principles and loves discussing Greek and Latin literature with Edwin Reardon. Would be the tragically romantic starving artist in a garret in another book. Unfortunately wound up in a Gissing book instead.

Having set these and various other figures going, Gissing simply observes them, like a naturalist watching a particularly interesting species of cockatoos. The result is absorbing, as skygiants and genarti can attest, having been subjected to various rants and wails as I tore through the back half of the book. Highly recommended on account of quality, recommended cautiously on account of emotional intensity.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

2026-03-25T12:03:52Z

This Wednesday Reading Meme covers the last two weeks, so it is perhaps a bit longer than usual, although not so long as it could be as I intend to write a whole post devoted to George Gissing’s New Grub Street. Will I manage this? Unclear. Not sure I ever truly did justice to The Odd Women either.

What I Read Over the Past Two Weeks

Patricia C. Wrede’s Caught in Crystal. I was excited about this book because I loved Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, but I found Caught in Crystal a disappointment. The characters spend a lot of time moving from location to location without ever giving much sense what makes any particular location interesting and unique, and it takes about 75% of the book before we finally get started on the quest that we could all see coming from about chapter two.

Eleanor Hoffman’s A Cat of Paris, illustrated by Zhenya Gay. Another lavishly illustrated cat POV children’s book from the 1940s, which seems to have been a highwater mark for this sort of thing. Delightful as books in this genre almost invariably are, with the extra delight of taking place on the Left Bank of Paris! I was only sorry that our cat never got to pose for the patissiere who yearned to sculpt him in marzipan.

Scott Eyman’s Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart. During a long wait at the airport I sorted through my Kindle and found some books I’d forgotten about, including this one! I love Golden Age Hollywood and Jimmy Stewart especially, so I found this a lot of fun, even though Henry Fonda is the kind of guy who says things like “I’ve never liked myself very much” and you go mmm yeah I don’t think I like you very much either. Apparently if someone got too emotional in front of Fonda, or asked for help, his characteristic move was to silently walk away.

However, I did find Fonda’s needlepoint hobby endearing.

Ngaio Marsh’s Enter a Murderer, the second Inspector Alleyn novel, which I approached with trepidation because I’ve found the early Alleyn books hit or miss. (IMO Marsh hits her stride in Artists in Crime, when Alleyn falls head over heels for murder suspect Agatha Troy.) However, this one was a surprise pleasure. The story is set in a theater, and Marsh’s theater mysteries are almost always good, and although Alleyn doesn’t seem to have quite settled into his characterization yet, it is extremely funny to watch him flippantly flirting with starstruck reporter Nigel Bathgate.

”Here’s the warrant,” murmured Alleyn. He struggled into his overcoat and pulled on his felt hat at a jaunty angle.

“Am I tidy?” he asked. “It looks so bad not to be tidy for an arrest.”

Nigel thought dispassionately, that he looked remarkably handsome, and wondered if the chief inspector had “It.” “I must ask Angela,” thought Nigel.

Must you, Nigel? I think you can tell damn well that Chief Inspector Alleyn simply oozes sex appeal.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Takuya Asakura’s The Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop, which I bought because it was a mere $5 with a drink at the Barnes and Noble cafe (deal lasts till the end of March!) and I was weak to the beautiful cherry blossom explosion of a cover. I feel that a bookshop that only appears when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom ought to feel a bit more numinously magical than the one in this book, but nonetheless I’m enjoying it enough to keep reading.

What I Plan to Read Next

Continuing my Provincial Lady journey with The Provincial Lady in America.

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Book Review: Pax

2026-03-24T12:07:49Z

(I actually wrote this review before my trip, then ran out of time to post it.)

Sometimes you just know, just from looking at a book’s cover, that this book is in some way For You. Such is the case with Sara Pennypacker’s Pax, with its Jon Klassen cover of a fox standing on a wooded hill gazing across a plain at a sunset. I’ve looked at this book for years and always meant to read it and somehow never quite picked it up.

But at last I’ve read it, and I was correct that it IS for me, full of solid fox action (which you would expect from the cover) and also surprisingly serious musings about war (which you would not guess from the cover, but it works).

War is coming to the country. Which country? The country, which is similar to America but perhaps not America. With whom? The enemy. What for? The water. Why? Because the humans are war-sick. This vagueness might not work for me in a different book, but here it works well to highlight the destructiveness of war, not only for people but for the land and the animals.

Peter’s father has joined the army. Since Peter’s mother is dead, he’s going to live with his grandfather, which means he needs to get rid of his pet fox Pax. So Peter’s father drives him to an isolated road, and Peter throws Pax’s favorite toy into the woods, and Pax chases after it.

But as soon as Peter arrives at his grandfather’s house, he realizes he’s made a horrible mistake. There’s nothing for it: he’s got to run away and trek cross-country to find Pax.

Meanwhile, Pax intends to sit by the side of the road and wait for his boy. But hunger and thirst force him to begin exploring the forest, where he meets other foxes… and they discover that the human armies are drawing closer.

Really enjoyed this. Great fox POV. There’s a sequel, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Pax lives. Don’t want to give too many spoilers, but I found Peter’s journey unexpected and satisfying, and Pax’s journey pretty much what you might expect from that summary but also satisfying. Sometimes stories hit certain beats for a reason, you know?

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Back from Massachusetts!

2026-03-23T20:14:46Z

I have returned from my travels! In fact I returned a few days ago, but have been busy with post-trip errands/releasing Diary of a Cranky Bookworm/convincing the cats that I still love them despite CRUELLY ABANDONING them; and therefore have not had time to post.

Lovely trip! Started in Boston, where I stayed with skygiants and genarti and watched the Alec Guinness Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (emotionally destroyed me, will post about it later) and also various movies from TWO perfectly timed film festivals, one featuring films by Katherine Hepburn and the other featuring Spunky Girl Reporters, about which films I will ALSO post later. Crushed that I didn't get to see Katherine Hepburn as a Girl Athlete in Mike and Pat but I simply could not spend ALL my time watching movies. Other Boston highlights:

1. At long last, I visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner! Loved the mix of artworks from different places and periods and media - an entire corner devoted to lacework! some excellent tapestries! beautiful musical instruments, and I so hope that sometimes the museum has concerts where these lovely instruments get played. Loved the lack of labels so you can just drift about absorbing without getting bogged down with facts. Delicious Italian Renaissance courtyard. A bit disappointed that you couldn't wander through the garden the way you can in the Cloisters. Happy to report that for once the museum store had postcards of almost all my favorite paintings!

2. Much good food! We picked up cakes and chocolates at Burdick's, croissants at Lakon Paris, and a Pi Day special of FOUR pies, three savory and one sweet. Also an amazing afternoon tea at the Courtyard Tea Room at the Boston Public Library, followed by a repeat visit to all the murals (I think the Galahad cycle is my favorite although Sargent is also spectacular) plus a side trip to a room with some delightful dioramas of Famous Artists at Work.

3. The USS Constitution! A very suitable excursion for Year of Sail, especially on point because the ship just got a little cameo near the end of Hornblower and the Hotspur. Loved being actually inside the ship and seeing the hammocks crowded in, the galley in the middle of the deck, the lieutenants' little cubicles and the captain's larger quarters with an actual bed, albeit quite a narrow one, note that down for fic purposes.

And then away we went to meet up with asakiyume at the Yiddish Book Center, where skygiants and genarti handed me over for the second part of my journey. We toured the Yiddish Book Center, made a cranberry-pecan tart, visited Bright Water Bog--

This link takes you to asakiyume's entry with pictures of the ice forming on the bog. It also mentions eating the cranberries cold from the bog water and the absolute delight of a swing hung between two pines by the waterside. Absolute thrill. Nothing in the world like a swing.

We also hit up the Smith College Spring Bulb Show, a welcome infusion of color and light after a long cold winter. And we made some of the decadently rich hot chocolate from Burdick's, hot chocolate so thick it's practically chocolate sauce (in fact I ate/drank most of it by dipping croissants in), and watched Cartoon Saloon's Wolfwalkers and My Father's Dragon, about which more anon...

Simply a delightful trip!

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Diary of a Cranky Bookworm release

2026-03-20T23:46:41Z

My new book is out! Diary of a Cranky Bookworm has been in the works since 2011, undergoing a long and meandering composition process, and it's a bit of a shock to realize that it's actually out there in the world. Go little book go!

May 12, 2012

Dear Diary,

DISASTER. I thought college application essays were bad enough, but now I have to write a summary of my diary??? Horrifying. I’m just a high school senior in a small town in Minnesota, getting up to shenanigans with my friends, retreating to my Treehouse to daydream about slipping into a portal fantasy, and discovering to my horror that my long-time nemesis is maybe, possibly, actually a delight.

And I might be a little bit in love with her.

Which is an unwelcome Realization, as it is sure to cut disgracefully into my reading time. And that’s already in short supply, in between college applications and AP calc and my friend Arielle who always thinks she’s in crisis maybe actually being in crisis for real.

Is that enough of a summary? I sure hope so, because it’s time to meet Georgie for our weekly trip to the library!

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Wednesday Reading Meme on Tuesday

2026-03-10T12:13:14Z

I’m posting Wednesday Reading Meme a day early this week, as tomorrow I am heading out on my Massachusetts trip! Not planning to take my computer with me so probably will not post until I return, bearing news of a Katherine Hepburn film festival, fancy tea at the Boston Public Library, and (if all goes well) a visit to a maple sugaring operation.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Eliza Orne White’s I, the Autobiography of a Cat, a charming book from 1941, with adorable illustrations by Clarke Hutton (one features a cat batting at an ink pen; cats never change). A cat tells us about his life with a lovely old lady in her beautiful home, where our cat accompanies her on her daily walks around the veranda. (She is blind so uses the veranda rail as a guide, and he walks ahead so she can stroke him from time to time.) Delightful. Always happy to read another book in cat POV. My main contemporary source is Japanese works in translation, but there was clearly a boom in this sort of thing in mid-century American children’s publishing.

I also finished E. Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods, which perhaps suffered very slightly because I didn’t read The Treasure Seekers first (mostly because I spent the entire book wondering “Who is Albert and why are the Bastables staying with his uncle?”) but overall a pleasant read about children getting up to shenanigans in Edwardian England. Loved the bit where the children decide to walk to Canterbury like the pilgrims of old.

What I’m Reading Now

Zipping through Sarah Tolmie’s The Fourth Island, which is a delight! There is a fourth (magical) island of Aran, where lost people wash up from time to time, and the locals help them build houses and fit into the local community. A little bit Dinotopia although without the dinosaurs.

What I Plan to Read Next

Plotting my trip reading! I have four books on my Kindle: Patricia C. Wrede’s Caught in Crystal, Andrea K. Host’s Stray, George Gissing’s New Grub Street, and Kaje Harper’s Nor Iron Bars a Cage.

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Book Review: Hornblower and the Hotspur

2026-03-09T14:35:59Z

We begin Hornblower and the Hotspur with Horatio Hornblower standing at the altar with his blushing bride Maria, desperately informing himself that they’re not married just yet! There’s still time to run for it! Only he can’t bring himself to commit the cruel act of leaving her at the altar, so instead he stands there like a lump and gets married.

This is one of the most inexplicable marriages I’ve ever encountered in fiction. It appears that Maria confessed her love for Hornblower and Hornblower was unable to think of any response except “Will you marry me?”, despite the fact that he doesn’t love her, in fact doesn’t think he should ever marry, and lives in dread of passing his temperament on to his children. (I should note that he is in no way honor bound to her before the wedding: she’s not pregnant with his child and he didn't seduce her. He didn't even flirt with her! He just existed in her general vicinity and she fell for him.)

He then spends the rest of the book asking himself “What would a good husband do?” and then enacting the part of a good husband, in much the way that he sometimes enacts the part of a good captain.

littlerhymes and I discussed many possible explanations for Hornblower’s behavior, none of which were entirely satisfactory, but to be fair, what WOULD be a satisfactory explanation?

1. Hornblower is a deeply closeted gay man who is marrying Maria for reasons of social pressure. However, there seem to be plenty of bachelors in the Navy, so it’s unclear how much social pressure he would actually be experiencing, especially since he seems to have no family clamoring for grandchildren/an heir.

(Whether or not he’s gay, there is alas little evidence here that he sees Bush as more than an excellent lieutenant, although Bush is clearly still nuts about Hornblower. The bit where Hornblower fails to mention his own act of heroism in a letter to the Gazette and Bush is like “It isn’t RIGHT, sir.” And also the bit where Bush is tells Hornblower he’s worried about Hornblower’s health and Hornblower is like who cares about this SACK of MEAT that is my BODY.)

2. Hornblower is SO deeply repressed that he can’t cope with the fact that he is experiencing the weakness of having a human emotion (“love”), but actually does love Maria on some level. He keeps feeling surprising upswellings of tenderness for her. Also, he castigates himself severely every time he DOES experience an emotion (or also human weaknesses like “sleepiness” or “hunger”), which I feel has probably damaged his ability to recognize emotions at all.

But even if he loves her, he clearly doesn’t have a lot of respect for her. Might love her purely in the sense of feeling an animal attraction, and also gratitude for the fact that someone cares about him? He muses at one point that it’s strange to be going to sea with someone on land who gives a damn about him.

3. Hornblower doesn’t think that he deserves nice things, so he marries Maria to make sure that he will have a wife who is ill-suited to him, as he deserves.

Oh, also there are some sea battles and stuff. Hornblower is sent with the fleet to capture some Spanish ships carrying a fortune and then has to hare off chasing another ship at the opportune moment so he doesn’t get a share of the massive amount of prize money. But then the Crown takes the money anyway so he actually would have gotten nothing even if he had been there.

I’m pretty sure these Spanish treasure ships formed the basis for a similar incident near the end of Post Captain, only you better believe Jack Aubrey was on hand to win his part of the prize money. I finished Post Captain confident than Jack could pay off his debts and marry Sophie, but now it looks like maybe he won’t be getting the money after all…?

We will find out in HMS Surprise, but not for about a week, as I am setting off on a trip to Massachusetts on Wednesday! littlerhymes and I will resume our sailing voyages once I return.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

2026-03-04T13:14:10Z

A wild episode of Books I’ve Abandoned appears! I kept on slogging through Maeve Binchy’s A Few of the Girls on the grounds that it’s a short story collection and therefore might eventually cough up a story I like, but finally decided it was just too many downer stories about people in bad friendships and bad marriages and bad adulterous relationships.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Getting my St. Patrick’s Day on with Eve Bunting’s St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning, which I actually picked up on account of the illustrator, Jan Brett. This was one of Brett’s earliest books and the publishers clearly gave her a very limited palette to work with, just black and white and yellow and green (and a yellow saturated to the point of orange for the Irish flag). She does the best with what she has, but how fortunate for us all she has more colors to work with in her later books!

But her characteristic attention to detail is still visible here: the stone walls in the green fields, the multitude of toothsome sweets in the Mrs. Simms’ Half-Way-Up Sweetshop, the sleepy boy and his sleepy dog curled up in the rocking chair once they’ve walked all the way up Acorn Mountain and all the way back in their very own St. Patrick’s Day parade.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun E. Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods, and am happy to report I find the Bastables much less stressful than the children in The Phoenix and the Carpet, possibly because the Bastables don’t have a magic carpet that might just strand them in Outer Mongolia. Capable of getting up to plenty of mischief without magical aid however! They are about to fill a lock to float a barge, under the impression that this will be a good deed, but I strongly suspect that the barge is simply going to float away downstream.

What I Plan to Read Next

My coworker lent me John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis.

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Book Review: Jacob Have I Loved

2026-02-27T21:53:40Z

I first read Katherine Paterson’s Jacob Have I Loved at eleven or twelve, and I hated the protagonist Louise with such an incandescent rage that it blotted out just about everything else about the book. But nonetheless a few scenes stuck with me for years, along with a gnawing sense that there was more to the book than I could see around my rage, so I’ve always meant to reread it.

And I finally have reread it, and I’m glad I did because there is indeed more to the book than I noticed the first time. Both place and time are beautifully evoked: a fishing village on a small island that is crumbling away as successive hurricanes wash it into Chesapeake Bay, during the years of World War II. The sea, the weather, the process of making a living catching crabs and oysters - these things are all described in lovely and compelling detail.

The character work is also well done, and the decision to make our heroine Louise a sulky, self-centered girl who is cripplingly jealous of her sister Caroline who genuinely is better than her in every way is certainly a bold one. However, the reason that certain artistic decisions are described as “bold” is because they may alienate the audience, and let’s face it, I still feel pretty darn alienated from Louise.

This time around, I did feel somewhat sorry for her. It really has to be hard to have a twin sister who is a beautiful musical genius with good people skills, when you yourself are a girl of average looks, average musical talent, and the people skills of a particularly sullen barracuda. However, my ability to feel sorry for Louise frayed in the face of Louise’s boundless capacity to feel sorry for herself without, at any point, even trying to make her own life less miserable.

Perhaps the peak moment comes when Louise’s twin Caroline is offered a scholarship to go to mainland for boarding school to further her musical gifts. Louise (understandably) is jealous, and her loving mother suggests that perhaps, with scrimping and saving, she and Louise’s equally loving father might save enough money to send Louise to boarding school in the nearby town, which incidentally has been Louise’s secret goal for years…

(Side note: despite Louise’s determined years-long pity party, even she has to admit to herself that her parents have always loved her, just as much and perhaps in some ways more than they love Caroline.)

Where were we? Louise’s mother has just offered to undergo great sacrifice to give Louise the chance to fulfill her dream of going to boarding school in Crisfield. In return, Louise bitterly accuses her mother of trying to get rid of her. She orders her mother to leave her alone, then feels extremely sorry for herself when her mother, in fact, goes away.

For God’s sake, Louise, go to boarding school at Crisfield and be happy. But no. Instead Louise quits school to work on her father’s boat, which she describes as the happiest time in her life, not because she was actually what anyone else might describe as “happy” but because she was too worn out to feel anything.

This part in particular made me scream because the conceit of the book is that Louise is writing the book retrospectively, as a young mother who has found a loving husband and also has a thriving career as a nurse. You might imagine that the life she built for herself might be the happiest time in her life! Might in fact have helped heal some of the acid jealousy she feels toward Caroline!

But no. She’s left home (with the loving encouragement of her parents, I might add), she’s gotten a nursing degree, she’s married and made a career, but she hasn’t gained an iota of perspective on anything. She has her own husband now, but she’s apparently still outraged that Caroline married the boy who Louise never particularly liked in the first place. She always looked down on him, and never laughed with him because they had completely different senses of humor, and just generally considered him a second-rate sort of person. But she hung out with him before Caroline did and apparently felt she had dibs.

To be honest, I think the book might work better for me if it weren’t told retrospectively. If Louise were telling her story in real time, as it were, if she were a teenager reacting to her life in this laceratingly self-defeating way, I might find her less frustrating. I can understand a seventeen-year-old telling herself that she’d consider accepting this second-rate boy she doesn’t particularly like (after all, the island offers a pretty limited dating pool), and then exploding with rage when the second-rate boy doesn’t even ask her. And instead asks her sister! Who took her chance to go to boarding school and is now studying at Julliard and has presumably met MANY boys, but nonetheless ACCEPTS THIS ONE, which suggests maybe he was never second-rate in the first place?? Enraging. I get it. That is, I see why it’s painful, although if I were Call I’d definitely want to marry Caroline rather than Louise, because Louise treats him like dirt.

But the fact that Louise hasn’t gotten over it even after she has her own husband? Louise. Please. You didn’t even want Call. PLEASE. Please please please TRY to see things from anyone else’s point of view, ever, just for a couple of minutes. If you happened to meet yourself and Caroline as a stranger, I bet you'd like Caroline best too.

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