A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Karl Schlögel’s The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World. I wish I’d taken notes on this as I was going along, because it’s a huge book, full of chapters that function as mini-essays on all sorts of interesting things: the early Soviet obsession with America, The Book of Healthy and Tasty Food (the Soviet Joy of Cooking), graffiti, tattoos, those classic early Soviet names meant to celebrate the revolution (Traktorina! Oktyabrina! Even contemporaries like Ilf and Petrov satirized this naming trend), wrapping paper, the catalog of forbidden books… I read it all, because I am like that, but this is definitely a book that you could dip in and out of depending on your interests

One item of particular interest: Schlögel includes a diagram of a communal apartment, which I’ve struggled to envision for years. As it turns out, the pre-revolutionary bourgeois apartments that became communal apartments consisted of a long corridor with rooms opening on either side and the kitchen acting as a sort of cap at the end of the corridor.

He also includes a picture of the communal kitchen, where each family had its own table pushed against the wall and all its cookware either on the table or hanging above it.

I also read Anne Lindbergh’s The People in Pineapple Place, which is one of those books that feels like it was written just for me. August is struggling to adjust to his move to DC, until he discovers Pineapple Place - a mysterious street that no one else can see. Forty-three years ago, concerned about the impending World War II, one of the residents wrenched Pineapple Place from its moorings, and it’s been moving from city to city ever since, the unaging residents invisible to most of the population. But August can see them! Friendship, mysterious invisible streets, a spot of time travel (August gets to ride a streetcar!)… this book has it all.

This week’s Newbery: Alice Dalgliesh’s The Silver Pencil, a semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Author as a Young Girl, noteworthy because it does not end with the heroine getting married. Instead, Janet has just bought a house in Nova Scotia with her first book advance (houses were cheaper then) and received a proposal from a gentleman she’s just met. The book ends with the proposal still up in the air, allowing the romantic reader to imagine wedding bells, although as Dalgliesh never married, one imagines Janet won’t either.

What I’m Reading Now

More fun with The Wordhord! I am truly sad that modern English has replaced the excellent word “flittermouse” with the more prosaic “bat.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Before I leave Indianapolis on August 26, I’d like to finish up the Newbery Honor books of the 1940s, my Betsy-Tacy reread, and also some books that the Indianapolis library has that are not readily available in other libraries, including Monica Dickens’ Mariana and Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks.

Is this perhaps more books than one person should attempt to read in one month? Maybe! I’ll do my best.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I polished off two more Newbery Honor books, YES I KNOW I said I was going to slow down on Newbery books, but in my defense these were both short audiobooks on the audiobook platform that my library is going to get rid of sometime this year… Of course I had to get on that!

Alice Dalgliesh’s The Bears on Hemlock Mountain is a very short book about a boy who crosses Hemlock Mountain (a hill, really) to fetch an enormous cooking pot for his mother… and runs into a couple of bears on his way home! I firmly expected a Wolf in the Snow type story where the boy made friends with the bears, but nope, these are scary bears, and our hero hides under his enormous cooking pot till his father shows up with his shotgun.

There seems to have been a switchover in predator presentation in children’s books around 1970: before then wolves and bears etc. tend to be just varmints, fit only to be shot.

William O. Steele’s The Perilous Road is set in Civil War Tennessee, where young Chris Brabson purely hates the Yankees, because they stole the buckskin shirt that he shot the deer for himself before he even got the chance to wear it and also all the food off his father’s farm, as well. But when he visits a Union wagon train to try to find his brother (who joined that Union army! What a perfidious rattlesnake!), he realizes that Union soldiers are just regular guys… and when the Confederate cavalry attacks, he learns that war is hell.

To be honest I have read a lot of books in which a Historical Character realizes that the Hated Outgroup is Not That Bad, Actually, so I feel a little cranky that Steele made me feel genuine emotion when the Yankee soldier gave Chris gingersnaps. (Of course Gingersnap Soldier dies in the ensuing raid, thus teaching us all an important lesson about showing kindness to children when invading a foreign land: don’t do it! You will be narratively marked for death!)

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun D. K. Broster’s The Yellow Poppy, which is like if Broster said “what if I took all my favorites tropes… and applied them to a middle-aged het couple, who have been married for twenty years, only the Duc thinks the Duchesse was brutally murdered on the same day as Madame Lamballe (and when he heard the news he spent an hour kneeling with his knife at his throat while his foster brother the Abbe struggled to talk him out of it!), when actually the Duchesse has been in hiding for most of the last decade and now has ended up as concierge of their former palace Mirabel!!”

She’s currently walking through Mirabel, overcome by Memories. It’s all so extra and I love it.

What I Plan to Read Next

The library has one more Newbery Honor book on audio: Marguerite Henry’s Justin Morgan Had a Horse.