A Certain Slant of Light

Picture Book Monday: 2026 Caldecott

2026-05-18T12:07:43Z

I have ambled through this year’s Caldecott winners, and generally quite enjoyed them! Every Monday Mabel got the Actual Toddler(™) stamp of approval from my three-year-old niece.

Fireworks, Matthew Burgess, illustrated Cátia Chien. An explosion of joy! A hot summer day in New York City, with water spurting from a fire hydrant and a man playing a sax in the park and a juicy red watermelon, all leading up to watching the fireworks from the roof. KABOOM KABOOM.

Every Monday Mabel, written and illustrated by Jashar Awan. Also an explosion of joy! Every Monday, Mabel drags a chair outside to sit on the driveway and watch… THE GARBAGE TRUCK. When the garbage truck arrives the text goes ALL CAPS and there are words for the SOUNDS (gah-dump as the trash goes into the belly of the truck) and you can really feel the thrill right alongside Mabel.

Stalactite and Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave, written and illustrated by Drew Beckmeyer. A stalactite and a stalagmite slowly grow closer and closer together over eons of geologic time. Love the concept, found the spacing of the stalactite and stalagmite’s dialogue weirdly hard to follow. Snorted at the glossary when it defined humans as “the only native species to develop language and culture” (that really depends how you define both language and culture) who have left “a beautiful and sometimes terrible mark on this planet.” I am not convinced that any other species on this planet would put “beautiful” in that sentence first or indeed at all.

Our Lake, written and illustrated by Angie Kang. Gorgeous illustrations, blue for the lake and blue shading into green for the forest and yellow for the hot summer sky, with an explosion into warm gold and orange and red for the brief flashback to the days when Dad used to take the boys to the lake before he died. Yes, death has come for the Caldecotts too.

Sundust, written and illustrated by Zeke Peña. This is not an illustration style to which I am spontaneously drawn, but I tried to look at it through the eyes of the Caldecott committee and decided that it is a style that allows a great deal of movement. And of course I loved the part where the two kids ride the hummingbird.

***

You will I’m sure be SHOCKED to hear that I’m contemplating a Caldecott Honor project. I intend to wrap up one of my current reading projects before I add another, though!

comments

Book Review: Studies in Words

2026-05-15T14:05:23Z

It is probably foolish to read a book called Studies in Words and then complain “Gosh, C. S. Lewis is really getting into the weeds here on the fine points of meanings of specific words.” However, I must admit that there were times when I simply couldn’t follow the book’s argument about, say, the fine shades of distinction between different meanings of nature at different times, possibly because I just haven’t spent enough time reading things like Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales to have seen these meanings in action.

However, despite sometimes getting completely turned around in the weeds, I did manage to extract a few interesting general principles.

1. Words always and inevitably have multiple meanings, particularly if the word is culturally important. If a writer from a time period sits down to explain “this is what X word really means,” that’s actually a pretty good sign that X was rarely or never used to mean that. (In fact, in other contexts, said writer will probably use X in a manner that contradicts the explicit definition he wrote elsewhere, because he’s fallen into the general usage.)

2. In general, usage has a tendency to move from descriptive to evaluative. For instance, “villain” originally described a social class (peasant), began to be used as an insult, and at last lost its original meaning entirely and came to mean simply “bad guy.”

3. If a word becomes REALLY culturally important, this can paradoxically drain it of most of its specific meaning. Lewis uses the example of the word “wit” in the 18th century - the concept of wit became the center of such a highly charged discourse that often when a critic says a work or a person is “witty,” they mean little more than that they approve it. (When a word has reached the stage of casting this glow of approval all around it, Lewis says it has acquired a “halo.”) Once we agree that a word defines our cultural ideal, we will therefore never be able to agree on the specific details of its definition until that ideal is dead.

comments

Wednesday Reading Meme on Thursday

2026-05-14T13:33:19Z

Work has been a madhouse this week, so Wednesday Reading Meme is alas a day late.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Emi Yagi’s When the Museum Is Closed (translated by Yuki Tejima), a short novel about a woman who is hired to chat in Latin with a bored Venus statue, and inevitably ends up falling in love with her. High hopes for this one, but did not end up liking it as much as I hoped. ( ”Spoilers” )

However, I approached E. F. Benson’s Queen Lucia leerily, and I ended up really enjoying it! The omnibus at the library includes the cover blurb that Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels are “the most enchantingly malicious works written by the hand of man,” which put me off, but I can only assume that either the books change radically in character over the course of the series, or Mr. Gilbert Seldes and I have very different standards for what malice looks like.

Queen Lucia is a social comedy about English village life, like a slightly more biting Miss Marjoribanks or Miss Read. The characters can be petty, at times even spiteful, and Benson is certainly poking a bit of fun at Lucia’s cultural pretensions (she likes to pretend she can speak Italian, for instance) - but despite their foibles they’re basically decent people, who can imagine no higher level of cruelty than snubbing someone’s garden party. The human species would be greatly improved if that was the worst thing we ever did.

Finally, I read Clay Risen’s The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century, a chronicle of the bungling incompetence with which the US Army approached the Spanish-American War in 1898. Fortunately for them, the Spanish bungled even harder. A striking number of military conflicts seem to be decided on this scale of “which side displays slightly less shambling incompetence?”

What I’m Reading Now

Stephen Brusette’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World. Like many small children, I loved dinosaurs, so I thought it would be fun to catch up on the latest developments in the field. So far we’re in the earlier Triassic, which is marked mostly by non-dinosaurs species, like the salamanders the size of cars.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m just about to wrap up the last 2026 Caldecott book, and then I’d like to turn my attention to the 2026 Newberies.

comments

Revisiting My 2014 Reading List

2026-05-07T12:41:52Z

The last of my already-finished reading lists. A bit less exciting to post these when I’m not asking for advice about what to read for some of the authors, but I'm still glad to have the complete record on here.

Susan Fletcher - Journey of the Pale Bear

Adam Gopnik - A Thousand Small Sanities. Didn’t review this one. No longer remember it very well. I keep reading Gopnik because I love Paris to the Moon SO much but none of his other books are the same.

Rosemary Sutcliff - Rudyard Kipling. Not a biography of Kipling so much as an overview of his children’s books. A useful source if you’re interested in Kipling’s influence on Sutcliff.

Francesca Forrest - “Semper Vivens.” A short intense story about a terraforming accident that has created a patch of land where all life is constantly transforming into other life, which recently became the focus for a cult which decided to land there even though it meant death-by-transforming-life; a story of an awe-ful place in the old sense of the word. Hard to get a hold of, which is why I didn’t review it, but so memorable.

Rumer Godden - Premlata and the Festival of Lights

William Dean Howells - Literary Friends and Acquaintances

Barbara Cooney - The American Speller: An Adaptation of Noah Webster's Blue-Backed Speller. A picture book loosely based on Noah Webster’s iconic speller. Like many picture books, I didn’t have enough for a whole post about it, and so it fell through the cracks.

Sarah Orne Jewett - A White Heron

Dorothy Sayers - Lord Peter

Hilary McKay - The Time of Green Magic

Jane Langton - Paper Chains

Rachel Bertsche - The Kids Are in Bed: Finding Time for Yourself in the Chaos of Parenting

Angela Brazil - A Popular Schoolgirl

Annie Fellows Johnston - Cicely, and Other Stories

Zilpha Keatley Snyder - The Treasures of Weatherby

C. S. Lewis - The Great Divorce. Apparently I never reviewed this one? This shocks me. Surely I meant to review it and it just fell by the wayside. Clearly I’ll have to reread and review properly at some point.

Ben Macintyre - Operation Mincemeat

Elizabeth von Arnim - Elizabeth and Her German Garden

comments

Wednesday Reading Meme

2026-05-06T12:26:41Z

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Mark Helprin’s A Kingdom Far and Clear, a single book containing all three books of Helprin’s Swan Lake trilogy, the first of which is a retelling of Swan Lake (tragic mode), and the second and third of which are a continuation of the story based on the question, “But what if Rothbart wasn’t defeated at the end of Swan Lake? And also Rothbart wasn’t just a garden variety sorcerer, but a totalitarian dictator, but in a weirdly whimsical way where (for instance) our ten-year-old heroine spends an entire Joan Aiken-esque sequence working as a yam curler, wearing a special orange and black yam kitchen uniform to roll yams off the yam conveyor belts, and the yam kitchen is so gigantic it has 6000 employees?”

Bizarre. Bleak. Beautifully written! Beautiful but sometimes strangely static illustrations by Chris Van Allsburg. As a retelling I felt this was this not so much engaging with the original as using it as a springboard to deal with its own thematic preoccupations. ( spoilers )

Conclusion: books two and three could have done with a LOT more swans.

I also read Michiko Aoyama’s The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park, translated by Takami Nieda. Like Aoyama’s Hot Chocolate on Thursdays, this is a warm, gentle book about a series of loosely linked characters, linked in this case by the fact that they recently moved into a new condominium development near a park with a concrete ride-on hippo named Kanahiko, the eponymous Healing Hippo. He probably doesn’t actually have healing powers (this book has less of a fantasy undercurrent than Hot Chocolate on Thursday), but even just hearing about these healing powers helps people reexamine the problems in their own lives.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m reading Clay Risen’s The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century. I got to the part where the whole army starts converging on Tampa for the invasion of Cuba (Tampa had only one railway line and no port, but an entrepreneur had suggested using it at a staging ground and Washington said “Yes” without actually checking into the details), and the officers are hanging out at the hotel with thirteen silver minarets… “I’ve been there!” I shrieked. This hotel is now the flagship building of the University of Tampa.

What I Plan to Read Next

Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, which looks similar to Aoyama’s other books in that it is about a bunch of loosely linked characters (connected in this case by a library) who figure out a way forward through their problems. Then I’ll be out of Aoyama books until Matcha on Monday comes out in July.

comments

100 Books That Influenced Me, 54: Refuse to Be Done

2026-05-05T12:50:41Z

After a lengthy hiatus, 100 Books That Influenced Me has returned! I reread Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, and it fit too perfectly into this series to be reviewed anywhere else.

When the urge to reread struck, I actually had a bit of trouble finding this book, because I had misremembered the title as Dare to Be Done. This was, after all, what the book allowed me to do: I was in despair over ever finishing The Sleeping Soldier, which had sprawled into ten massive, messy drafts. Bell’s methods helped me sort this enormous mass of material, organize the pieces, and at long, long last put them together in an order that actually functioned as a story.

These methods are the two strategies that Bell describes in part two of the book, the section about transforming your rough exploratory draft (discussed in part one) into a solidly plotted novel (which you will then polish, polishing techniques described in part three). The first is to make an outline of everything that you’ve already written.

It turns out that it’s much easier to deal with ten drafts worth of material when you’ve reduced all those thousands and thousands of words to outline form. You can see at a glance what scenes you already have, and which scenes must logically come before which other scenes, and which scenes you need to have but haven’t written yet. Then suddenly you’ve got a working outline, which has given you a ton of new interest and enthusiasm, because the project seems so much more possible that you’ve accidentally written a bunch of those new scenes into the outline and simply need to type them up!

The other strategy Bell describes is not to copy and paste from one draft to another, but to retype everything. I scoffed as I read this strategy, but since I was desperate, I decided to give it a try, and goldarnit if it didn’t work.

First of all, although you can copy-paste a scene that doesn’t quite work across ten drafts, if you retype it, you find that you have to fix it.

Second, since the outlining ended up moving a lot of scenes around, almost all the scenes needed some revision anyway, so they weren’t accidentally referencing scenes that now happened later on. Retyping the scenes in order following the outline made this work happen naturally, since I knew what I’d already retyped.

Third, this made it very obvious if there were scenes I still needed to write that I’d missed in the outlining stage.

Absolute convert. Never copy-pasting anything again. The method worked so well that I used it on Sage, similarly a wilderness of many messy sprawling drafts, and transformed it into Diary of a Cranky Bookworm.

I’ve used the second-draft tools in this book most extensively, but since those tools work so well… I mean, I have been having a bit of trouble with the first draft of The Paper Bird. Maybe I should poke through Bell’s first-draft suggestions and give a few of them a try.

comments

Book Review: An American Girl in London

2026-05-04T12:14:17Z

Like The Empire Must Die, Sara Jeannette Duncan’s An American Girl in London is another book that I almost certainly read but didn’t actually mark as read on my Kindle, which is perhaps fortunate as this gave me the very great pleasure of rereading it.

The book was published in 1891, catching the zeitgeist of stories about the culture clash occasioned by Americans descending on England, sometimes as tourists and sometimes on the hunt for aristocratic husbands. (Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers is a late entry to this genre, but probably the most famous.)

In An American Girl in London, our heroine Mamie is the heiress to a baking powder fortune out of Chicago, who decides to travel to London on her own after her parents are unavoidably detained by political business in America. (Poppa is a senator, you see.) Indomitable and archly funny, she visits Madame Tussaud’s, goes to Ascot, and is presented at Court:

I liked going to Court better than any other thing I did in England, not excepting Madame Tussaud’s, or the Beefeaters in the Tower, or even “Our Flat” at the Strand. It did a great deal to reconcile me, practically, with monarchical institutions, although, chiefly on poppa’s account, I should like it to be understood that my democratic theories are still quite unshaken in every respect.

(The concern that contact with monarchical European institutions would corrupt American democratic principles is a recurrent one in 19th century American books, possibly because at that point American democracy was politically speaking a weird outlier in a monarchical world. At another point, Duncan assures us that “My democratic principles are just the same as ever, though – a person needn’t always approve what she likes.” You can enjoy the pomp of someone else’s monarchy without wanting to bring it home!)

Aside from being deliciously funny, the book is full of fascinating tidbits about the differences between American and British English in the 1890s, like Mamie’s shipboard exchange with a woman who inquires, “Have you been bad?” Mamie, after some hesitation, replies that she doesn’t think so, but after all the prayer book says that we’re all miserable sinners… The lady, startled, informs her that she was asking if Mamie had been seasick.

Or the bit where a man accuses Mamie of “pulling his leg,” an expression that was clearly not current in America at the time.

Or the entire subplot where Mr. Mafferton decides that he should like to marry Mamie, but neglects to inform her of this fact by so much as a single bouquet or box of chocolates, so that Mamie remains completely in the dark until she’s actually having dinner with his family and discovers that they think she will be joining the family on a permanent basis very shortly. Awkwardly, Mamie is already engaged to a fellow back in America.

Honestly just the perfect combination of business and pleasure. Some of the most delicious research material I’ve ever had the joy of experiencing. I’m now overcome by the desire to reread the sequel, A Voyage of Consolation, in which Mamie takes Europe.

comments

Revisiting My 2013 Reading List

2026-05-01T12:29:37Z

Continuing these reading list posts! This one is the 2013 lists.

Sarah Rees Brennan - Tell the Wind and Fire

Rosemary Sutcliff - “Shifting Sands”

Frances Hodgson Burnett - Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s

Ethel Cook Eliot - Ariel Dances

Kate Seredy - The Singing Tree

Katherine Applegate - Odder

D. E. Stevenson - Mrs Tim Carries On

Elizabeth Goudge - The Lost Angel

Adam Gopnik - All that Happiness Is. Didn’t review this one. An essay about happiness published as a book. Can’t remember what Gopnik concludes happiness is, but probably some variation on “work and love,” a la Freud.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender Is the Night

comments

April Writing and May Plans

2026-04-30T15:30:27Z

In April, I wrote a piece of flash fiction called “Skysail Jack,” about a young vagabond who likes to hitch rides on zeppelins, with occasionally disastrous results. This was not accepted to Flash Fiction Online but may nonetheless spark a flash fiction series with classic adventure story titles like “Skysail Jack and the Flying Dutchmen.”

I’m also continuing very slow work on my fantasy novelette The Paper Bird. I believe I will complete a draft this month! It’s going to be about 15,000 words, which is an awkward length, but I’m just so pleased that I’m going to have a draft, since I started this story 16 years ago at a time when I was starting (and occasionally finishing) many secondary world fantasy stories. They were all terrible, and I couldn’t understand why. I was so faithfully going through those websites of worldbuilding questions! Reading books about crafting imaginary languages! Carefully creating maps and sprawling family trees!

But I believe that at long last, I may be writing a secondary world fantasy story that is actually good. This is partly because I have grown as a person and a writer, and partly because I’ve finally grasped that I need to leave out like 95% of that beautiful worldbuilding.

I am therefore cautiously considering the possibility that I might be able to write about some of the other secondary world characters who have obstinately refused to die despite ~15 years of neglect. In fact, I tried to describe some of these story ideas in this post, but ran up against the fact that they tend to have characters and a setting but not what you might actually call a “story,” which makes it difficult to describe them in a way that might interest other people.

But good news! The Paper Bird also languished for years with characters and a setting but no story, so I just need to replicate the process whereby I gave it a plot. Unfortunately I don’t know quite how I did it, but no worries! I’m sure I can work it out.

Also, I don’t think that most of these potential stories are very marketable in self-pub, with the possible exception of Innis and Jess (prisoner of war and guy who really didn’t want a pet prisoner of war; obviously they fall in love, obviously their cultures have wildly different views on sex/love/romance/etc), but that is a problem for future me. At the moment it’s just nice to be writing again.

comments

Wednesday Reading Meme

2026-04-29T12:19:50Z

What I Just Finished Reading

Michiko Aoyama’s Hot Chocolate on Thursday, which begins with a woman who goes to the cafe every Thursday to have a hot chocolate and write letters. “OMG TWINSIES!” I shrieked. “I also go to the cafe once a week (my day is Saturday) to have a hot chocolate and write letters!”

The book continues its gentle meander from character to character: from the cafe manager to the mother of a kindergartner who often gets a hot chocolate at the cafe, to the kindergartner’s teacher, to the teacher’s supervisor, and so forth and so on, all the way to Sydney where a young artist gets a kiss from what appears to be the spirit of the Royal Botanic Garden. (The book is not exactly fantasy but also not not fantasy.)

Continuing the fantasy theme, I read William Bowen’s Merrimeg, a 1920s children’s fantasy, largely in the nonsense fantasy mode that was so popular at that point. I largely thought it was fluff, but then the final chapter (each chapter is pretty much a short story) featured the nymph who lives behind the waterfall taking Merrimeg on a journey in a glass carriage, asking the driver to stop at “15, 30, and 80,” which turns out to be those years in Merrimeg’s life - and Merrimeg is not merely looking at her life in those years, but actually being that age briefly… I found it unexpectedly moving. So well played, William Bowen.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs, having decided that it would behoove me to learn more Russian history pre-1890. So far I’ve pretty much just read the introduction, but already learned that Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov were both pre-Romanov tsars. (I must confess to my shame that I previously had the vague impression that Boris Godunov might be fictional, probably because I knew Pushkin wrote a play about him, but this play was clearly in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Henriad rather than his King Lear.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Michiko Aoyama’s The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park.

comments

Revisiting My 2012 Reading List

2026-04-28T15:14:38Z

Since I started posting my book log challenge lists, it’s been bothering me that I never posted the lists for years 2012, 2013, and 2014. I’ve decided to correct this, starting today with 2012.

You may notice that this list includes multiple entries for Frances Hodgson Burnett and Rosemary Sutcliff. In subsequent lists I decided that I could include each author only once per year, having realized that otherwise repeat author names might clog up the lists for ages.

Frances Hodgson Burnett - Editha’s Burglar

Franny Billingsley - The Robber Girl

Rosemary Sutcliff - The Chronicles of Robin Hood

Lisa See - Lady Tan’s Circle of Women

John Scalzi - Starter Villain

Rosemary Sutcliff - The Iliad. I never reviewed this book (or its companion The Odyssey. They had gorgeous illustrations by Alan Lee but otherwise were very standard retellings.

Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Cozy Lion. Didn’t review this one either. A bit of fluff.

Rosemary Sutcliff - The Odyssey

Elizabeth Wein - Cobalt Squadron

comments

Picture Book Monday: Mid-Twentieth-Century Edition

2026-04-27T16:53:09Z

Another budget of picture books! I rarely have a full post worth of stuff to say about a picture book, but also often have a thought or two I want to share, so have decided to continue in the template of the picture book compilation posts I wrote during during Picture Book Advent.

Lentil, written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey. Young Lentil can neither sing nor whistle, but when the brass band can’t play to welcome the town’s leading citizen back home, Lentil saves the day with his harmonica. The instant this leading citizen was mentioned, I pegged him for a bad ’un, but McCloskey was writing in a different era and the guy who keeps giving the town schools and libraries and hospitals is a public-spirited good ’un even if he does name it all after himself.

Mike’s House, by Julia Sauer, illustrated by Don Freeman. Young Robert loves Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel so much that he calls the library “Mike’s house.” Hilarity ensues when Robert gets lost on a snowy day and asks a police man to help him find Mike’s house. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel was published in 1939, this book was published in 1954, my brother and I loved Mike Mulligan in the late 80s and early 90s, and now my soon-to-be-three-year-old niece loves Mike Mulligan too. Just lovely to see this chain of connection stretching for close to 90 years now.

The Sunday Outing, by Gloria Jean Pinkney, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. Published later than the other books in this book but set in the same 1930s-1950sish time period. Young Ernestine loves to go to the North Philadelphia train station every Sunday to watch the trains with her Aunt Odessa Powell. (Truly a satisfying name to say.) But she’s never gotten to ride the trains and is afraid she never will, till Aunt Odessa Powell suggests that Ernestine come up with a way to save money so her family can buy her a ticket to go visit her mother’s folks in North Carolina.

Gorgeous evocative detail, as always in Pinkney’s illustrations. Love his skill at capturing the peculiar ways that children sometimes move. Also love the 1930s/40s style of it all. Did worry slightly about Ernestine crossing into Jim Crow territory all on her lonesome in the train, but decided that in Picture Book Land perhaps this would not be a problem.

Playing Possum, written by Edward Eager, illustrated by Paul Galdone. The last of the little-known Edward Eager books that I discovered through Wikipedia. A possum falls into a garbage can; the adults are appalled at the sight of this ugly dying rat, and only the little boy recognizes that it is in fact a possum, and is in fact playing possum. Underwhelming. If you’re going to read one of the lesser-known Eagers, definitely make it Mouse Manor.

comments

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.

comments

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.”

comments

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.

comments

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 )

comments

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.

comments

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.

comments

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.

comments

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.

comments

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.

comments

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.

comments

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…?

comments

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.

comments

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.

comments