A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Josephine Daskam Bacon’s Smith College Stories. These never quite came together for me, I’m afraid; Bacon doesn’t have the skill, so important in a school story, of swiftly differentiating loads of characters. Even in the last story I was still getting characters confused with each other.

Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages, a lighthearted domestic memoir about life with her young children (sort of like Cheaper by the Dozen, only from the mother’s point of view), which is a rather odd reading experience when you’re coming to it from her novels. The two share some common themes - houses that have a mind of their own, for instance - but the treatment is totally different. It’s like an illustration of the idea that if you give two writers the same starting point, they’ll come up with totally different stories, except in this case the two writers are actually… the same writer.

I also finished the 2018 Reading Challenge just under the wire with Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Unfortunately I don’t have much to say about this book otherwise: I enjoyed it but it didn’t leave a huge impression. But I guess you never know beforehand whether something will or not.

What I’m Reading Now

Now that I’ve wrapped up the 2018 Reading Challenge, it’s time… to start the 2019 Reading Challenge! And I’ve come out of the gate running with Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, for “a book you’ve been reading to read.” It’s been on my list, uh, since I read Angelou’s poem of the same name in my high school English textbook. I just started yesterday, but so far the writing is beautiful, as you might expect from a poet.

Oh! And I’ve begun to listen to Dan Stevens reading The Odyssey, which so far I’m enjoying much more than the Iliad. Telemachus is trying to convince his mother Penelope’s suitors to leave her alone and stop eating all the cattle, and the suitors are like “HA, or we could continue eating you out of house and home, that sounds like fun.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got a hold on Jeff Speck’s Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Lia Silver’s Mated to the Meerkat, which asakiyume suggested when I complained that paranormal romances never draw as much on the interesting animal behavior stuff as I want. It’s lots of fun! And there is indeed some great meerkat stuff in here. (I also really liked the lawyers who are literally snakes.)

But I’ve concluded that paranormal romance will probably never be my genre, because what I really want is paranormal shifter family drama, and for obvious reasons a romance needs to focus on the romance and not the “But what do you mean you’re leaving the elephant seal colony to go pairbond with an whooping crane? You’re supposed to spend your days fighting to protect your harem of fifty, not wandering around with a single solitary bird!”

And I’ve finished Skirting the Issue: Stories of Indiana’s Historical Women Artists, which I feel could have more enthralling prose, but it’s interesting nonetheless - who knew there were so many historical women artists in Indiana? (Actually Indiana was kind of a cultural center in the early twentieth century. You heard it here first.) And it has occurred to me that we do ourselves a disservice when we talk about women artists and reference only the most famous ones: there were so many women who made the living in the arts, even if they didn’t become household names, that it gives a false feeling of scarcity to trot out Mary Cassatt and Georgia O’Keefe over and over again.

Oh! And I finished the nun book. It was all right, but I feel there must be better nun books out there.

What I’m Reading Now

Hurrying to finish my books for my 2018 Reading Challenge. I’m about halfway through I’ll Give You the Sun, for “a book recommended by a librarian or indie book seller,” which always seems to be the challenge I struggle with, presumably because I didn’t choose the book myself. The book is told in two interlocking strand one of which is a few years earlier than the other, and in the later strand the characters keeping making Ominously Vague References to the terrible events that took place earlier, but they never actually spell out what happened and keep you in a false state of suspense.

I hate this structure. It makes the characters feel irritatingly coy. Also, one of the characters seems to be hallucinating, although I’m pretty sure it’s just the author’s way of trying to show that he’s creative and artistic, but it really sounds like he’s losing touch with reality and maybe somebody should be trying to get him help.

On a cheerier note, I’m reading Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits for “a book by an author of a different race, ethnicity, or religion than your own.” I’ve only just started but I’m really liking it so far.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been pining for Alicia Malone’s The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made By Women, but I don’t think the library’s going to get it for a good long while yet.

There are a number of reasons why Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Eyes in the Fishbowl is not one of her better known works, but for my money, the foremost reason is that title. I can’t be the only one who envisions a fishbowl full of eyeballs, and I suspect that the overlap between habitual Zilpha Keatley Snyder readers and people who want to read about bowls full of eyes is not very high.

But the title is misleading: it refers not to literal eyeballs, but an advertisement that the hero Dion sees, a picture of a fishbowl that seems to have a faint pair of eyes swimming in it - because there’s a photograph on the other side of the page of a girl with big dark eyes.

The advertisement comes to Dion’s attention because it’s for Alcott-Simpson’s, his favorite department store: an enormous, exquisite building that he has haunted since he first tried his luck as a shoeshine boy. Dion’s family is not quite destitute, but there’s no extra money for anything, and to him Alcott-Simpson’s has always represented a sort of fairyland of beauty and wealth. Never mind the head store clerk often tries to shoo him out on the assumption that this ragamuffin must be stealing.

A fancy department store is a very different kind of place than Bent Oaks Grove, or Libby’s Treehouse, or even the A-Z Antiques and Curio Shop, but it has something of the same kind of enchantment about it. One of Snyder’s great strengths is that she can bring places to life just as much as characters: they’re described so carefully - not exhaustively; but with such a good eye for the perfect telling detail that you feel like you’ve been there.

A department store may seem less inherently enchanting than an oak grove or a treehouse (although doubtless this is a matter of opinion), but Alcott-Simpson’s has a leg up on the aforementioned locations in that it is literally as well as figuratively enchanted: or perhaps haunted would be the better word, and not just by a hopeful shoeshine boy. Strange things have been happening there, and it’s beginning to scare the clientele away.

This has some extra poignancy because Eyes in the Fishbowl was written at the end of the great department store era. Most of them were driven out of business by shopping malls rather than paranormal activity, but there’s nonetheless an element of elegy about this book.

The secondary characters are not quite as well realized as the department store. Indeed, even Dion is somewhat fuzzy sometimes: he’s supposed to be rebelling against his father’s hippie values by embracing materialism (a novel take on teenage rebellion - a hot topic in 1968), but to me his love of Alcott-Simpson’s always felt aesthetic more than materialistic. It’s not like he’s walking through going “If I had a million dollars I would get that and that and THAT.” He loves the store because it’s beautiful; he doesn’t actually want to own the things in it.

This is actually an appealing character trait, and more fun to read about than “Dion: The Boy Obsessed with Mink-Lined Fishbowls,” but it does mean that his character arc doesn’t quite arc. But the sense of atmosphere and the mystery and the magic are strong enough that this doesn’t really matter - except in the sense that this also, probably, has done its part to make Eyes in the Fishbowl one of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s lesser-known books.

What I’ve Finished Reading

Linda Sue Park’s Project Mulberry, in which two kids raise silkworms for a not-4H-but-pretty-much-4H project. It does a good job mixing fun with more serious exploration of race issues. For instance, in the beginning our heroine Julia Song doesn’t want to do the silkworm project - it will just remind everyone that she’s Korean! - but she doesn’t know how to explain that to her friend Patrick, so she pretends she likes the idea while secretly attempting to undermine it. Like a secret agent! Agent J. Song, reporting for duty.

It’s fun, but it has one odd feature: between each chapter there’s a two-page section which is a chat log between the author and the main character. They’re not bad, but I’m also not sure they add anything. Was Park low on word count?

What I’m Reading Now

Sherman Alexie’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, a memoir about his life and his childhood and his mother. I made the mistake of beginning to read it right before bed - a mistake because 1) it’s hard to put down, and 2) even once you’ve put it down, it’s hard to put it aside mentally and go to sleep. It’s emotionally intense.

I’ve also started Jacqueline Woodson’s Feathers, which is all right but not setting me on fire like Brown Girl Dreaming.

What I Plan to Read Next

My next reading challenge is “a book by a favorite author,” which got me thinking about the difference between “an author I like” and “a favorite author” - which is sort of like the difference between “a person I like” and “a friend,” in that I’ll put a lot more effort into seeking out a favorite author’s books, and will also stand by them through bad books/hard times in a way I wouldn’t for an author I merely like.

(It took me a long time to realize that many people don’t seem to make this distinction. This is where having a word in between “acquaintance” and “friend” would be useful. I also wish that the word friendish had caught on from Emily of New Moon - for someone you’re thrown together with and don’t dislike but also don’t connect with on any deeper level.)

Anyway, this is why Isobelle Carmody is still a favorite author even though I found the last three Obernewtyn books intensely aggravating. But I don’t think she’s got anything new out - at least, available in the United States - so it will have to be someone else. Maybe Zilpha Keatley Snyder? I know she’s got some books I haven’t read. But will interlibrary loan get them to me in time? THE QUESTION.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Susan Coolidge’s Eyebright, which among its other endearing qualities contains a scene where the delighted heroine discovers a stack of books that have been chosen especially for her. (Naturally I took note of all the titles, and moved right on to A. D. Whitney’s We Girls, about which more anon.) I quite enjoyed many parts of this book - Eyebright’s visit to the Shakers, and her island home off the coast of Maine, and her visit to the tide pools in a cave that are like little fairy gardens - but sadly I don’t think it ever quite comes together as a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

I also finished Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, which I liked more than Some Tame Gazelle, although I’m still not sure I’ll read more Pym because her books are just so sad. Pym is writing about single women in mid-20th century Britain leading lives of quiet desperation, which are all the sadder for their very uneventful quietness, endless lives stretching forward in an unbroken string of gray days. At the end of the day I’d prefer to read about Miss Read’s spinsters and their lives of quiet contentment.

And I read Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, which is deliciously atmospheric. Twenty three-year-old Mary Yellan, recently orphaned, has just moved to Cornwall to live with her aunt and uncle in their crumbling on on the barren coast, where the sea booms and the wind rushes across the empty moor.

But I didn’t like it as much as Rebecca or My Cousin Rachel; Jamaica Inn has a sense of looming sexual menace which those books mostly lack, which is not so much bad as not to my taste. And I quite disliked the endgame pairing, and it really detracts from the reading experience shouting “NO DON’T DO IT!” at the heroine as she goes ahead and does it. You’ll be better off alone, Mary! And I’m not sure why she thinks this dude and SPINSTERHOOD FOREVER are her only options anyway; she’s young and pretty and clearly well able to attract men.

Oh! And I completed my June challenge, “a book you can read in a day,” with Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Which was moderately amusing.

What I’m Reading Now

I suspect I’ll be reading A. D. Whitney’s We Girls for the rest of June, not because of any flaw in the book, but because summer reading has began and therefore I have less time to read at work. That’s probably a good thing but a bit frustrating from a reading perspective.

What I Plan to Read Next

No firm plans as yet. I’m turning over possibilities for my July challenge, “a book that’s more than 500 pages.” Leaning toward Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but I’ve still got a month in which to decide.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished William Heyliger’s Captain of the Nine, in which that PERFIDIOUS TRAITOR Mellen becomes so filled with loathing of the team captain, Bartley, that Mellen tries to throw the final game of the season by sending a fake telegram telling one of the players that his father’s sick and he has to go home. THAT DIRTY RAT. I thought nothing could be lower than Kennedy’s blackmail trick in Bartley, Freshman Pitcher BUT I WAS WRONG.

Fortunately Mellen’s trick is caught in time, the other player is retrieved, and Mellen is kicked off the team - although they decide to allow him to graduate so as not to hurt his mother. ONLY HIS MOTHER FINDS OUT ABOUT HIS DISGRACEFUL BEHAVIOR and drags Mellen away, presumably by his ear, and she is going to be disappointed with him for the rest of his misbegotten life and I would be delighted by this poetic justice except that his poor mother was so looking forward to watching him graduate and instead all she gets to witness is his bitter shame.

I also finished listening to Roald Dahl’s memoir Going Solo, about his time working for Shell in east Africa just before World War II and his time in the RAF in North Africa and Greece during the war, which is fascinating and sometimes quite funny even as it is horrifying (as you would expect from Dahl). Possibly something that would interest my fellow Code Name Verity fans, although of course it is a very different thing.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m listening to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I’m not in love with the audiobook narrator, but the book has drawn me in so effectively that it doesn’t really matter. Leopold has been sawing down a lightning-blighted oak and drifting back in time tree ring by tree ring, noting ecological milestones as he goes. This is the year Wisconsin decided to drain all its wetlands, or the last major passenger pigeon hunt in the area, or so forth.

Possibly this sounds grim (Leopold is writing against the majority opinion of his society vis-a-vis conservation and he knows it), but even with a subpar audiobook reader it’s actually quite soothing to listen to. Yes, Leopold! You follow those skunk tracks through the melting snow and muse upon the life cycle of the meadow mouse!

This is much more enlivening than Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. The book is basically a series of philosophical memoranda that Marcus wrote to himself, and therefore pretty repetitive. There are countless meditations that follow the same basic outline as this one: “On death: If the universe is composed only of diverse atoms, death is dispersion; if the universe is really one unified whole, death is extinction or transfiguration.”

The fact that Marcus repeats it so many times make me doubt its efficacy at making him dread death less.

Having said this, this isn’t really a book that you’re meant to read right through, and it probably works better if you just open to a random page and dip into it. Although it’s hard to imagine a day where the wisdom you really need is “Just as circus games and other popular entertainments offer the same tedious scenes over and over, so it is with life - an appalling sameness, a tiresome round of cause and effect. When will it ever end?” Thanks, I guess!

I’m also - good God am I reading a lot this week - reading Caroline Dale Snedeker’s Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community, which I took some time to get into, but now the book has introduced a bright-eyed young woman from Europe with Ideals about women’s rights and the abolition of slavery and the glory of democratic government, and everyone who meets her either loves her or despises her and the book has become ten times more interesting to me.

I think historical fiction often fails in depicting forward thinking outspoken people by failing to grapple with how disruptive that can be - what’s forward-thinking in the past is often just common sense in the present and therefore no longer feels disruptive - but Seth Way is really going for it and it gives me a good feeling about how the book may eventually deal with the collapse of New Harmony.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m finally going to read Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler! This has been on my to-read list since I was in college and finally I’m going to read it.

I’ve also decided that now is the time to read the rest of Edward Eager’s books, so I’m starting in on The Time Garden as soon as the library brings it to me.

What I've Just Finished Reading

I have completed the first challenge in my 2018 Reading Challenge with The Black Arrow! I'm posting this so late because I decided I wanted to steamroll through the last few chapters to get it done for this week's Wednesday Reading. Stevenson is a real hit-or-miss author for me and this one was mostly a miss, although I did enjoy John Matcham, the girl in boy's clothes (apparently this plotline never gets old for me), and her saucy best friend Alicia.

What I'm Reading Now

A Skinful of Shadows got set aside in favor of The Black Arrow, so I remain exactly where I was last week, lackaday.

What I Plan to Read Next

I went to a library for a job interview today (which went well! I think! It will be at least two weeks before I know) and it seemed like it would be good luck to check out a book while I was there... So I got Nancy Atherton's Aunt Dimity and the Buried Treasure, on the grounds that I have long meant vaguely to check out these books, which are about... um, I think Aunt Dimity is a ghost, and she helps her niece solve mysteries?

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?