A Certain Slant of Light

I was thinking of not doing another reading challenge for 2018, because many of the books I chose for the 2017 challenge were so lackluster - books that I'd been meaning to read and hadn't got around to and was happy to have finished largely because that meant I could knock them off my mental list.

Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, Pam Munoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising, and - oh, how this pains me! - Isobelle Carmody's The Red Queen all fell in this category. Few series have disappointed me quite like Obernewtyn did in the end (probably because I have loved few series the way I loved Obernewtyn in the beginning) and it pains me.

But then I finished Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, and I might never have read that book at all had I not have a challenge for "a book with an unreliable narrator or ambiguous ending" - and speaking of ambiguous endings! Good Lord! I am not sure if I'm frustrated or incredibly impressed or WHAT, exactly, I feel about it (in fact I may need to reread the book again before I decide; clearly another book to add to my list of books to buy) - but. In any case. It's certainly very ambiguous.

And it also seemed like a good enough reason to do another reading challenge, because surely the point of a reading challenge is to read books that you might not ever otherwise read? Perhaps I've simply taken the wrong approach by using the reading challenge for books that I meant to get around to someday...

But then the Sayers' books I read this summer clearly fall into that category, and they were excellent in every way. So maybe there is no overarching point - at least not about how to select books.

Anyway! In the end I decided to go with the Modern Mrs. Darcy 2018 Reading Challenge, because I've done the Modern Mrs. Darcy challenge for the past two years and it's worked pretty well for me. Here's the list of challenges:

- a classic you've been meaning to read (perhaps I should finally read Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White)
- a book recommended by someone with great taste (evelyn_b, I may hit you up for this one. I am going to have to insist on something shorter than the six volume set of Proust, though.)
- a book in translation (Finally a push to read The Brothers Karamazov!)
- a book nominated for an award in 2018 (This category will, again, be filled by a Newbery nominee)
- a book of poetry, a play, or an essay collection (Charles Lamb perhaps?)
- a book you can read in a day
- a book that's more than 500 pages (unless this is the category for The Brothers Karamozov. Or The Woman in White, for that matter. Clearly these are books I've been putting off because they're so ungodly long.)
- a book by a favorite author
- a book recommended by a librarian or an indie bookseller
- a banned book (Maybe I should finally read some Kurt Vonnegut?)
- a memoir, biography, or book of creative nonfiction
- a book by an author of a different race, ethnicity, or religion than your own

Thoughts? Ideas? Book recommendations?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Pool in the Desert. The stories are a bit uneven, as stories in collections are wont to be; I thought the title story was the weakest, actually, but even then it’s still worth reading. There’s a definite theme here, about people who are trapped in an environment where they’re more emotionally or artistically sensitive than the society around them - which makes it sound unbearably up itself when I put it like that - but it’s well done and delicately explored.

I also read Ann M. Martin’s Missy Piggle-Wiggle and the Whatever Cure! It’s an update/companion novel to the original Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books; Missy Piggle-Wiggle is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s niece, who is looking after Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s house while Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle searches for her lost pirate husband. (Now that would be a delightful book: Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s magical pirate adventures in search of her lost husband.) I suppose writing Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle herself must have seemed a bit intimidating, but all the same I’m not quite pleased that they replaced comfortably plump and middle-aged Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle with young, beautiful, unattached, having-a-nascent-romance-with-the-bookstore-owner Missy Piggle-Wiggle.

Nonetheless it’s fun, and occasionally a bit sassy - “The most wonderful thing about the town of Little Spring Valley,” it begins, “was… not even the fact that the children could play outside and run all up and down the streets willy-nilly without their parents hovering over them” - but I don’t feel any particular need to read the sequel.

What I’m Reading Now

Still working on The Black Count. I’ve been putting off all my reading challenge books till the last minute this year.

I am also bushwhacking my way to the end of The Silver Brumby. I am twenty pages from the end! I WILL FINISH IT, DAMN IT.

...except the edition I have then has a further 65-page-long short story by Elyne Mitchell. I suppose it would be cheating not to read it.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still waiting for the library to get me Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock. I’m now at the head of the holds queue, at least!

That’s the last book for the 2017 Reading Challenge. The only other book I definitely want to finish in 2017 is Lauren Wolk’s Wolf Hollow, the only 2017 Newbery Honor book I haven’t yet read. Can it measure up to The Inquisitor’s Tale??? WE SHALL SEE.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel blew my tiny mind, which seems to be the inevitable result of reading any Daphne du Maurier book, although admittedly the only other book in my sample set is Rebecca.

My Cousin Rachel is in some ways quite like Rebecca: it centers on the woman in the title, who is beautiful and mysterious and threatening in a vague way that might just be a result of the narrator’s paranoid obsession with her - or might be very real.

But this time the woman is alive, and the narrator is a man - and actually gets a name! He’s Philip Ashley, a young man who was raised by his reclusive and misogynistic cousin Ambrose, and therefore knows very, very little about women. He is shocked Ambrose - far away in Italy for his health - marries their distant cousin, Rachel. He is even more appalled when Rachel arrives at the estate after Ambrose’s death - especially given that he has reason to believe that Rachel may have engineered that death...

I don’t want to spoil the book so I won’t go into more detail, but I highly, highly recommend it if you liked Rebecca - or simply gothic novels (of the non-supernatural variety: no giant helmets falling out of the sky here).

What I’m Reading Now

I have begun The Three Musketeers! Which I plan to post about on Thursdays, like I did with The Count of Monte Cristo, so it doesn’t take over the whole Wednesday Reading Meme every week.

A quick sneak preview: I shouldn’t be surprised that this book is all about loyalty kink, but THIS BOOK IS ALL ABOUT LOYALTY KINK. Also Athos is my favorite so far because he is INJURED and STOIC and then he gets injured AGAIN and at one point he faints.

In other reading news, Julie attempted to lend me Abarat. “I really loved the first two books,” she mused. “I never did read the third one…”

At which a maniacal gleam came into my eye. “LET’S READ THE TRILOGY ALOUD TOGETHER,” I said.

Success! We are a few chapters in. Our heroine, Candy Quackenbush (you gotta love these names) has just met a man who has antlers, from which hang little heads, sort of like Christmas tree ornaments, except unlike Christmas tree ornaments these heads like to argue.

What I Plan to Read Next

I really ought to start The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog if I want to finish my October reading challenge (“a book nominated for an award in 2017”) in, well, October. I have developed a sort of mental block on this book because I strongly suspect that it is going to have a Very Important Lesson about the importance of diversity & inclusiveness & not judging people based on race or religion, which is a lesson I agree with, but also one that I have read 5,000 times and I feel like that is enough.

It is entirely possible that I am wrong and the execution will not be as sledgehammer-y as I fear. I should just start reading & see.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Holly Webb’s Return to the Secret Garden, which has a charming premise - evacuee children during World War II sent to Misselthwaite Manor! - and proceeds to use it to make the our beloved Secret Garden characters heirs to all the miseries of history.

No, I did not want to read about Dickon becoming a grumpy old man because during World War I he got facial scarring so severe that children flinch away from him. Nor did I want to read about Colin Craven dying at Dunkirk in World War II. No! The fact that it was a heroic death does not make it better! COLIN CRAVEN IS NEVER SUPPOSED TO DIE, DID YOU NOT EVEN READ THE SECRET GARDEN.

I have never been fond of “major character death” fic and the fact that this is professionally published does not make me like it any better.

What I’m Reading Now

I read a lot of books by women because generally speaking I find them less likely to be misogynistic than books by men. But there’s generally, and then there’s Edna Ferber, whose writing I don’t remember being nearly this soaked in misogynistic tropes in Dawn O’Hara. Maybe she soured as she got older, soured by her life as a ~failed spinster~ - spinsters being, in Ferberville, by definition failures. As are wives if they’re too conventional. And women who sleep around if they sleep around too much.

Pansy Deleath has just gone to the Klondike with a troupe of dancing girls, and Ferber takes every opportunity to remind us how silly they are and how much better and more solid and less slutty Pansy looks by comparison. She may end up being Vaughn Melendy’s mistress for the next fifty years, but that’s because it’s TRUE LOVE, not for base mercenary gold-digging reasons like those ~other girls.

Ugh. I’m going to finish the book because it’s part of the Unread Book Club and I intend to finish them all, but UGH.

In cheerier news - well, cheerier is the wrong word. But in more pleasurable if somewhat soul-destroying reading news, I’ve started Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is beautiful and wonderfully observed (and a good example of how to write a story set in a deeply sexist culture without making the story itself sexist, so TAKE THAT, Edna Ferber) and weirdly engrossing. I meant to do other things yesterday evening and instead gulped down the first half of the book.

What I Plan to Read Next

My reading challenge for September is “a book by an #ownvoices or #diversebooks author.” I was already planning to read Ashley Bryan’s Freedom Over Me, which won a Newbery Honor this year (also, I just looked Bryan up, and he’s 94 years old. Ninety-four and still winning book awards! I find it strangely inspiring), and also Jewell Parker Rhodes Bayou Magic, which looked intriguing when I found it at the used bookstore… although upon looking it up online, it looks like it’s the third in a trilogy, so maybe I ought to start at the beginning?

Upon further inspection, it looks like a rather loosely knit trilogy, so probably I can start with Bayou Magic and go back and read the others if I like it. I was planning to find a third book to make it a hat trick anyway - if I don’t like Bayou Magic enough to want to read the rest of that series, then maybe Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Mighty Miss Malone.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Unread Book Club update: Last Wednesday I finished Gildaen, as I didn’t want to leave it hanging when I went away to Miami. If you looking for a fun magical cod-medieval adventure starring a rabbit, I quite recommend it.

While I was in Miami I read A LOT because there were a couple of days when we were more or less trapped inside by thunderstorms, but most of it was NetGalley books which I like to give their own separate post (I finished… five…) and also When Marnie Was There which I also want to give its own separate post because I liked it so much, AND ALSO I still need to review Megan Whalen Turner’s Thick as Thieves which I read before the trip and - say it with me now - wanted to give its own post because I enjoyed it so much…

Oh, but I did read E. W. Hornung’s Mr. Justice Raffles on the trip! Which is the fourth and final Raffles book, a novel rather than a set of short stories like the others, which I thought might be why it often gets shunted to the side in Raffles discussions - perhaps Hornung just wasn’t good at novels?

But actually he does perfectly fine at novels; Bunny and Raffles are in as fine a fettle as ever, and there’s also a totally badass girl who engages in plucky pre-dawn canoeing. But the villain is a Jewish moneylender, and while he does not reach Svengali levels of anti-Semitic caricature, there’s definitely enough of that about his characterization to justify the fact that the book is generally shunted aside.

What I’m Reading Now

Sherwood Smith’s Fair Winds and Homeward Sail: Sophy Croft’s Story, which is the story of a side character from Jane Austen’s Persuasion and quite charming. I really like all of Smith’s Regency romances: her pastiche is good, and you can tell that she knows the period really well because she wears her research so lightly - especially impressive in a book like this, which is stuffed chock full of characters in the navy and could easily bog down in infodumps about naval terminology.

I’ve also started reading Elizabeth Warren’s This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class (for my reading challenge: “a book of any genre that addresses current events”), which is good so far but also sort of a bummer to read because I know that as long as Trump is president and the Republicans control Congress we’re not going to make progress toward any of these goals; we will at best be fighting a holding action, if we can manage that.

What I Plan to Read Next

Angela Thirkell’s The Brandons. If only I’d taken it to Miami with me! Oh well.

For my March reading goal - "a book that's more than 600 pages" - I chose Isobelle Carmody's 1100-page doorstopper, the long-awaited finale to the Obernewtyn series, The Red Queen.

And I made it! I slogged my way all the way through to the end, finishing up the last fifty pages this afternoon.

Honestly I'm almost glad that the final book was so long in coming, because I was so devoted to these books in high school - I lent my copies to all my friends & then checked the books out of the library repeatedly because I couldn't bear to be parted from them for so long - that it would have broken my heart to read this then. At some point around book five I think Carmody lost the thread of the plot, or her previously pretty decent ability to write plots, and never really got it back.

However, her plotting was never the strongest part of the books; what's more painful is that in book seven she seems to have lost her grasp on characterization, too, so the characters will have long philosophical/expository discussions during which they are all basically interchangeable. I repeatedly had to slow down to sort out whether Dragon or Dameon was speaking, because the names are visually similar and there was no longer any clear difference in their dialogue to help me tell.

( Spoilers, in case anyone wants to know how the story ends without actually having to read the darn thing. )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A couple of NetGalley books, one of which I’ve already posted about & one of which I really liked and am therefore finding it difficult to post about. Why is it always so much easier to write about the books you hate?

I guess there is an element of vulnerability in saying that you loved something, or that something touched you or inspired you, in a way that isn’t true of saying that you hated something.

What I’m Reading Now

Ethel Turner’s The Family at Misrule, the sequel to Seven Little Australians, because my heart finally recovered from the ending of that first book. The second book seems less likely to BREAK MY HEART AND CRUSH IT INTO PULP, but then I didn’t expect it of the first book either till the very last chapter, so WHO KNOWS.

I’m also reading The Collected Raffles, which is all four books of Raffles stories collected into one; I’ve finished the first two, and they are just as much ludicrous late-Victorian you-don’t-even-need-slash-goggles-to-see-this fun as they were when I read the first few stories online.

It really is nicer to have them in book form though. I don’t mean to knock ebooks - God knows without them, my quest to read obscure old books would be utterly hamstrung - but I do feel that I retain more & often have more of an emotional response when I read books on paper.

...although being an ebook certainly did not keep me from having an emotional response to Seven Little Australians, so maybe not so much.

What I Plan to Read Next

GUESS WHO JUST FOUND DOROTHY SAYERS’ HAVE HIS CARCASE. THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S ME. I now have all four Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane books!

...I’m actually still not planning to read them for a few more months (I’m saving them for my reading challenge “Three or more books by one author”), but it’s nice to have them all.

For books that I am planning to read next in the literal sense: Isobelle Carmody’s The Red Queen. I’ll be back visiting my parents for the weekend, so I will have lots of lovely empty time to read, which is really the best way to read a Carmody book IMO.

I finished Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, which fulfills my first challenge for the 2017 Reading Challenge! *pause for cheering and kazoos* This book has been on my TBR list since 2008, so I'm glad I finally read it, but I have mixed feelings about it as a book; it spends more time musing philosophically than I think any novel that is not Sophie's World ought to do, and quite a bit of that philosophical musing is about the Nature of the Invalid, which gets tiresome. "Can the healthy and the sick ever bridge the chasm between them? PROBABLY NOT."

It's a bit like an A Passage to India of illness, now that I think about it.

The characters are finely enough observed that I think they would have stood the test of time much better if the narrative left more room for interpretation. Too finely observed to be sympathetic in some ways; I understood and even empathized with Hofmiller's bad decisions, because he makes them entirely - as the title suggests - out of pity (I think a modern Hofmiller would call his feeling sympathy; it's not as condescending as pity implies) - and yet some of them are horrible decisions, like the time that he wildly exaggerates the likelihood that a new treatment will help Edith, a young woman partially paralyzed by I think polio, although the book never specifies the disease.

Well, he wants to make her happy, which is understandable and yet so terribly, terribly, wickedly short-sighted. And having set himself on this path, he's too weak to pull himself out of it; he begs Edith's doctor not to tell her that Hofmiller exaggerated (even though the doctor intends to do this in the gentlest way possible: Hofmiller is a layman, didn't understand the technicalities, certainly no suggestion that he was exaggerating on purpose because it was just so pleasant to be the bearer of good news, etc. etc.). Hofmiller promises that he'll tell her himself when the time comes, and I guess the doctor must be taken in by Hofmiller's cavalry uniform and the honor and backbone it seems to promise he possesses, because he agrees to this dubious plan.

In the event, Hofmiller is never put into a position where he has to confess, but I don't believe he ever would have managed it. The keystone of his character seems to be that he does whatever he thinks will be most approved by the people he's with at the time; and at no point would Edith or her father ever want to hear that this new treatment is in fact totally unsuitable for Edith's condition.

What I liked about this book - and also what made it painful to read - is that the Hofmiller's flaws are so small and common and in ordinary circumstances would probably cause only small problems, but he finds himself in a situation where they end up leading to tragedy. It's a sort of small-scale Greek tragedy - a small and sordid tragic flaw, leading despite Hofmiller's good intentions to a bitter ending.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

May Gibbs’ The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, which I didn’t like nearly as much as The Magic Pudding, unfortunately. I think perhaps you need to be introduced to Snugglepot and Cuddlepie at a tender age to appreciate them properly?

What I’m Reading Now

G. A. Bradshaw’s Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Animals Really Are, which starts with an impassioned plea for humans to treat animals better. If you ever want to confirm your suspicions that humanity is actually kind of awful, read a book about animal intelligence.

What I Plan to Read Next

My first reading challenge for 2017 is “a book in translation,” and I spent some time whiffling between possibilities (more Zola? Dosteovsky? Perhaps I should try Balzac?) before realizing in a blaze of light that I have the perfect book already on my shelf: Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity, which I have intended to read for nearly a decade now without ever buckling down to it. The time has come!