A Certain Slant of Light

The year is drawing to a close! Well, not imminently, obviously, but close enough that I have been drawing up some final reading plans to ensure that I read everything that I meant to read this year, despite the incursion of NetGalley into my life.

I want to read the Newbery Honor books that I haven’t read yet for this year, Pam Munoz Ryan’s Echo and Kimberley Brubaker Bradley’s The War That Saved My Life, which involves World War II, so I will probably enjoy it. (Echo appears to be a billion pages long. I hope it’s worth it.)

I also want to read the new American Girl series, Melody Ellison in 1964 (the books take place in Detroit during the Civil Rights Movement), and the library finally has them! So I have put the first one on hold.

I have two challenges left on my reading list. November’s is a book you’ve been meaning to read, which quite frankly describes a lot of books, but one of my friends mentioned she meant to read The Things They Carried which I have also been meaning (and dreading) to read, so I’m going to do that one.

(I also signed up for a November challenge to read books that you’ve got lying around on your shelves, because I figured that otherwise The Secret Country Trilogy might lie around for years before I got around to reading it. Books that I own always seem to go to the bottom of my reading list.)

December’s is a book published this year, which likewise offers an awful lot of choice, but when I saw Grace Lin’s new book When the Sea Turned to Silver I knew at once it had to be that one.

And...I think that’s all I’ve got planned, actually! Which is not actually all that many books; it seemed like a much longer list in my head.

PETYA. PETYA NOOOOOOO.

Approximately 75% of Book 4, Part 3 involves Tolstoy expounding his theory of history, which he has already shared AT LENGTH in other parts of the book. And unlike Hugo, who often thoughtfully sets his digressions aside in their very own sections of the book, Tolstoy mixes his in with everything else, so you can’t skip anything without the concern that you might in fact be missing important parts of the story.

I mean, sure, if you skip the whole Waterloo section in Hugo, you would miss the two sentences at the end where Thenardier saves Marius’s father, thus setting off a chain of obligation that binds Marius to his worthless carcass forever after. But Hugo goes on to explain all of this at length later on, so it still wouldn’t matter really if you missed it the first time around.

Whereas if you skipped Book 4, Part 3 in War and Peace, you would get away from a lot of tiresome historical theorizing… But you would also miss the five Petya chapters sandwiched in the middle. And that would be a great loss.

The book has been so intent on explaining why history happens as the result of the concerted action of masses of men driven along by great historical laws, as opposed to as a result of world-historical genius, that we haven’t visited many of the characters in quite some time. No news on how Natasha is holding up in the aftermath of Prince Andrei’s death; nor is there any news of Princess Marya and Nikolai Rostov’s possible impending nuptials.

I’m also not sure Princess Marya knows her brother is dead, which I suppose is yet another thing that might get in the way of her wedding to Nikolai Rostov. I have become disturbingly invested in this marriage and therefore increasingly convinced that it will never be.

Oh! But we do know something about Pierre! After being imprisoned by the French army and then marched halfway to Smolensk, he’s been rescued by Russian forces. One can but hope he will get to go back home to St. Petersburg and nurse his battered feet back to health.

I've passed the thousand page mark in War and Peace! There are only...four hundred more pages to go...

As I suspected, reports of Prince Andrei's death were greatly exaggerated. I strongly suspect that he is Emma's favorite character, after whose second death she quit reading the book - no other characters have fulfilled the requisite criteria of dying (well, having their deaths reported) twice - and I am wondering if there is some way I can gently hint at his continued liveliness.

He's lying in a wagon in the Rostov's baggage train. Natasha doesn't know about it yet, and I strongly suspect that she's going to come upon him by accident and nurse him back to health and thus undo the damage done to their romance by that snake Prince Anatol. Or maybe not? What a missed opportunity if not.

I thought the whole sequence where Natasha convinces her family to leave most of their baggage behind and take wounded soldiers instead was rather splendid.

But now we're back in Moscow with Pierre, who hasn't left the city because he seems to be suffering some sort of nervous breakdown - oddly enough, unconnected with the war; it's everything else in his life that sent him over the edge. A French detachment has just found the house where he's staying, and notwithstanding that the commander has just pronounced Pierre a Frenchman (one can be, it seems, an honorary Frenchman), I feel this will not end well for Pierre.

PRINCESS MARYA HAS A SUITOR! PRINCESS MARYA HAS A SUITOR!

Oh, and also Napoleon is invading Russia, and he is coming EVER CLOSER to Moscow (the Muscovites have not yet quite assimilated the fact that their city is about to be invaded, and they're partying), and also Tolstoy is having a jolly good time expostulating on the fact that history happens because... I suppose history forces itself to happen somehow, even against the will of its participants?

I find his theory a bit puzzling. He emphasizes that Napoleon was very foolish to invade Russia at all, or to give battle at Borodino; I'm not sure why he concludes from this fact that the forces of History swept Napoleon along, rather than that Napoleon behaved foolishly and history is often decided by the foolishness of supposedly Great Men.

Speaking of foolishness, Pierre has decided that now is the time to join the army. Oh no, Pierre! Stay safe! I worry about him: he's clever about books and ideas, but otherwise he doesn't seem to have the sense God gave a goose.

But all of this pales in comparison to Princess Marya's happy fortune. After her father's death - the book does not expect us to feel deeply sad about his death, but I think I felt even less sad than I was supposed to; he was so awful - Marya was trapped on her estate by a recalcitrant peasantry, unable to flee as the French army loomed ever closer - and who should arrive but a gallant Russian officer, who saves her from her peril and, in this incomparably romantic situations, falls in love with her! And she, of course, swoons over her knight in shining armor.

The only fly in my ointment is that this gallant Russian officer is Nikolai Rostov, the beloved of Sonya, who is clearly either going to marry him or pine away and die. I am so torn! I want everyone to be happy! But I think I want Princess Marya to be happy just a little bit more, so poor Sonya is just going to have to pine.

Not that my desires are likely to have the slightest effect on the outcome, mind. Nikolai Rostov might get killed in battle at any moment, and then the whole question is moot.

OH NATASHA NO. I have been screaming this at Natasha Rostova for the last fifteen chapters or so, but did she listen? Noooooo, she went ahead and got infatuated with that cad Anatol, and planned an elopement with him - he didn't bother to tell her he was already married - and probably would have managed it if it were not for the interference of her loving cousin Sonya, not that Natasha's likely to ever forgive Sonya for it.

Poor Sonya. I have heard vague rumbling that happiness is not in store for Sonya (that, indeed, all Sonyas in Russian literature tend to get shafted), so I am worried for her.

Prince Andrei is trying to drown his pain in bitterness, which means that a reconciliation is probably impossible, and his relations are beside themselves with joy at the engagement's dissolution.

I had hoped for better from Princess Marya. But I think that the disappointment of all her own hopes has curdled her religious faith into something cramped and narrow, so I can't blame her too harshly.

In happier (possibly?) news, Pierre has found a new object in life! He had lost his earlier enthusiasm for Freemasonry and was adrift on a listless sea of despondency, but now he's fallen in love with Natasha (everyone is in love with Natasha). I predict that having a new obsession to distract him from brooding will pep him right up.

And now - onward to the invasion of Moscow!

I finished a draft of the Sage novel! Oh my God, I actually have a draft! It only took... four years to complete, oh wow, but I wasn't actively working on it for most of those four years so that's not as bad as it sounds.

I walked over to the ice cream store to celebrate, and got one of the chocolate-dipped cones and the chocolate got a bit melty in the hot sun and it was delicious, and I am contemplating buying myself this Breaking Cat News mug to celebrate a bit more.

Then I got out A. S. Byatt's Possession, which I intended to read for the 2016 Reading Challenge "a book published before you were born"... only to discover that the book was published in 1990, at which point I was already tottering around and learning important lessons about not chewing on books.

I was 100% sure that Possession was published in 1980. It's very disturbing to realize that I was so certain and so wrong at the same time.

I'm still going to read it, because I've been planning to read it this month for aaaages and also I talked evelyn_b into reading it along with me. (Join us if you like! We could be a peculiarly dispersed little reading group!) But clearly I'll need a new book for the challenge.

We are at the ball! We are at the ball with Natasha Rostova - her first ball, and she's practically floating with excitement - and Dramatic Happenings are in the air, although I'm not yet sure what they will be.

Natasha's older sister Vera has gotten engaged to the most boring man in the whole Russian army, but it's beginning to look like the family finances may keep the engagement from coming off. Poor Vera. No one seems to like Vera that much - even her prospective fiance is willing to throw her over if the money doesn't come through - which makes me sad for her, even though at the same time I don't really blame them for not feeling close to her. She's always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and never notices or cares if it hurts people.

Poor Pierre continues to be a failboat at everything. He tries to modernize his estates and liberate his serfs, but he's so befuddled by business affairs that he doesn't make any headway; and then he takes his wife back, and I am pretttttty sure that she's cheating on him again and he's never going to notice because he's so taken up with Freemasonry.

Although he seems to be growing ever so slowly disenchanted with the Masons, so perhaps he is due for another conversion? Although unless it's a conversion to the mysteries of double-entry bookkeeping and the joys of intense management of one's own estates, I'm not sure that it's going to help him in his heartfelt but wholly inept desire to help his serfs.

He did manage to convert Prince Andrei, not to Freemasonry, but to the idea of trying to do some good for his serfs, and Prince Andrei (a much more practical fellow than poor Pierre) has already emancipated the serfs of one estate. I have become fond of him despite everything; of course it doesn't hurt that he feels simply terrible about the way he treated his poor wife.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is such a different book than I expected. Not that I walked into it with very firm expectations, but I had the vague idea that it was like 80% sex scenes with perhaps some linking descriptions of English wildflowers.

In fact, it's more like one part sex scenes and one part wildflowers to three parts EXISTENTIAL DESPAIR. Industrialization has ruined the world and almost all of the people in it and probably within a hundred years humanity will have lost the last vestiges of its goodness and slaughter each other to extinction in an orgy of industrialized violence.

(Lawrence wrote this in 1929. We have twelve years left to go to before we can say he was wrong.)

Really I just want Connie to be happy, but that's looking less and less likely as the book goes on. Connie and Clifford have grown ever farther apart, and the more we know about Mellors the less he seems like an antidote. The main thing he and Connie seem to have in common is their despair, and I have become increasingly convinced that if Mellors and Connie run away together, they'll sink into an abyss of utter misery as soon as the first flush of honeymoon sex wears off.

I mentioned to evelyn_b last week that what these characters really need is a visit from Flora Poste, of Cold Comfort Farm, who would set them all right with firm good sense and cheerfulness. She could give Sir Clifford a pamphlet about ways to sexually satisfy his wife despite his impotence, whisk Connie off for a refreshing vacation in Venice, and... Well, I'm not sure how she could help Mellors. He doesn't like his dog! What kind of human being dislikes his own dog?

Flora could bring up Mellors' hang-ups about mutual orgasms, perhaps. Until Connie, Mellors has never managed to have a mutual orgasm with any of his partners, and he thinks that this is a sign that womanliness has been utterly undermined by the industrialization that is crushing the human spirit and slowly killing us all.

Like, dude. Maybe you're just not that good at sex, Mellors, did you ever think of that? Maybe women are a diverse population with different desires and physical sensitivities and you could try to make your peace with that instead of obsessing about how your lack of mutual orgasms is a sign that the world is in a ghastly state of degradation and decay.

I think if Flora tried to suggest any of this to Mellors, he'd probably just dismiss her as a meddling female, though. He might prove too tough a nut for even Flora Poster to crack.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Quite a lot of things! I have allergies or possibly a cold, and therefore have spent as much of the week as possible reclining on the sofa and reading.

First, though, a book I dropped: Victoria Thompson’s Murder on Astor Place, a murder mystery in turn-of-the-century New York. How could that go wrong, I thought? But I thought it was too info-dumpy and simultaneously too modern-sounding. I could buy a turn-of-the-century midwife recognizing postpartum depression, but I very much doubt she’d use that term for it.

But I probably could have worked with all that, except… then our heroine, midwife Sarah Brandt, meets police sergeant Frank Malloy. They hate each other on sight in that “s/he’s soooo annoying, but what an amazing body” way that suggests they will be dancing around their attraction for the next ten books, and ugh, this is my least favorite romantic dynamic of all time.

And now for books I completed: Marie Brennan’s In the Labyrinth of Drakes, which I enjoyed very much! Brennan has gotten much better at skipping directly to the action as the series goes on. In the first book, it takes nearly half the novel for Isabella to even leave Scirland - I for one could have done with a much more cursory sketch of Isabella’s unhappy girlhood trying to quash her interest in dragons and be a proper young lady; I’ve read that story before, I can fill in the blanks - but by this fourth book, we’ve left that far behind, and there’s scarcely a chapter of set-up before Isabella’s heading out on her dragon-studying expedition.

I also read Maud Hart Lovelace’s Carney’s House Party, which is a companion novel to her Betsy-Tacy series, about how one of the characters in that series broke up with her high school boyfriend (who moved to California when they were halfway through high school) and ended up with the man she eventually married. It’s... not bad, but it’s probably my least favorite of Lovelace’s books that I’ve read, probably because in between breaking Carney up with one boy and engaging her to another, there’s not much time for anything but the romance.

And lastly, I read Kent Kiehl’s The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without a Conscience, which is very interesting, although marred by Kiehl’s forays into autobiography. Some authors can make their search for the information just as interesting as the information itself, but alas, Kiehl is not among their number.

Aside from that, though, it’s a fascinating book. Kiehl argues (backed by piles of brain scans) that psychopathy is caused by a malformation of the paralimbic system, which means that psychopaths don’t process emotions the way that the rest of us do and are physically incapable of learning from punishment.

This leads to a chapter about a program in Wisconsin which treats psychopaths entirely through positive reinforcement: patients are rewarded for prosocial behaviors with candy bars and video games. It’s clearly not a perfect treatment (but then, what is?), but it did lead to a 50% reduction in convictions for violent crime as compared to inmates who weren’t part of the program, so clearly it’s an avenue worth more investigation.

Although given that many people think our prison system is too cushy already - you have to wonder what sort of prison these people would approve; would the prisoners lie on piles of rotting straw as the cold rain dripped on their faces through the stainless steel bars on the windows? - it doesn’t seem too likely to me that this approach will take off in the near future. But then, stranger things have happened.

What I’m Reading Now

Still more of Constance Fenimore Cooper’s Anne. Anne has signed up to become a Civil War nurse. I’m hoping that this will lead to a dramatic scene where the unworthy man that she loves dies in her arms, or possibly just before she arrives at the hospital - yes, I think this has more dramatic potential - just before she arrives at the hospital, so she is there just in time to see his waxen face and his dead, staring eyes, and know she is too late.

I’ve also begun reading Christ Jennings’ Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopia, which I all but pranced over to the library to get as soon as I heard of its existence. Unfortunately, I can only really recommend it if you share my fascination with nineteenth-century American utopian communities, because so far the writing has been pedestrian at best.

What I Plan to Read Next

The challenge for next month on the 2016 Reading Challenge is “a book that has been banned,” so I’ve been contemplating various lists of books that have been banned over the years. Should I finally bite the bullet and read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or The Things They Carried? On the one hand, I’ve meant to read both of those books for years; on the other hand, I have avoided actually reading them for years because I know they’re both super hardcore.

Maybe I should finally take this opportunity to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover. One of my friends is a big D. H. Lawrence fan (although I’m not sure if that extends from his poetry to his novels). Or maybe Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Betsy In Spite of Herself, which is just as good as all the other Betsy-Tacy books. I feel like I’m becoming a Betsy-Tacy evangelist. One of my high school friends is a Betsy-Tacy friend and I struggle not to bombard her with texts like “OMG BETSY BAGGED PHIL BRANDISH, THIS WILL END BADLY.”

Phil Brandish is a handsome classmate with a red auto. Betsy is more in love with the auto than Phil, but as she’s only fifteen I think she’s not quite aware of that until they’ve actually been dating for a while, at which point she realizes that Phil is a pill.

One thing I love about these books is that when Betsy decides that she wants a boy, she goes after him - to the point that she actually asks Phil Brandish out (after setting up a Leap Year Dance to make this socially acceptable, of course, February 29th traditionally being the one day when women can propose to men). Even in modern YA books, it doesn’t seem to be all that common for the heroine to pursue her desires so straightforwardly (or sometimes even to know what her desires are), so it’s a nice contrast to read a book that’s practically a step-by-step manual on “This is one way to get what you want, and get rid of it when you find you don’t want it anymore.”

I also finished David McCullough’s 1776, which was interesting, although McCullough is not answering the ranks of my must-read nonfiction writers; of course this is partly because he writes military history, which is not high on my list. Mostly it made me aware just how little I know about the American Revolution.

What I’m Reading Now

Betsy Was a Junior, in which Betsy sets her sights on Joe Willard… only to discover that he’s been snapped up by another girl! Oh well, I’m sure she’ll have a delightful junior year despite this setback. Betsy generally seems to have a talent for finding the fun in whatever’s going, even if it isn’t going quite how she wished.

I’ve also been reading Henry Beetle Hough’s The Country Editor (a memoir about being a newspaper editor on Martha’s Vineyard), because it was mentioned in When Books Went to War as a book that World War II soldiers particularly enjoyed, and I liked one of their other favorites, Chicken Every Sunday.

The Country Editor isn’t quite doing it for me, though. It’s very episodic - not that I mind episodic, but it’s so very episodic that it feels like it doesn’t quite come together at all. But I’ll keep on a bit longer and see if perhaps I start feeling better about it.

What I Plan to Read Next

Eva Ibbotson’s Madensky Square, for the 2016 Reading Challenge “a book that you own but have never read.” I should note that I am totally failing at the challenge “a book that intimidates you.” This may have been the wrong year to try and tackle War and Peace.