A Certain Slant of Light

My last evening in Boston! The last few days with genarti and skygiants have been jam-packed. We went canoeing on the Charles, and saw geese and ducks and two blue herons and a cormorant and a kingfisher. Then apple-picking, at a hillside apple orchard girt round with forest, where they not only allow but all but demand that you climb the apple trees: there are ladders provided, and spreading branches which all but cry out to be climbed.

We suspect that the place is under the protection of the fae - a suspicion that rose to a near certainty when we found a grassy lane of dotted with golden apples like will-o-the-wisps leading you up the hill toward the dark hopeful trees - but the fae were merciful, or sated, and took none of us, but let us go away with a golden apple plucked from the top bough of a tree.

Also we returned to the Boston Public Library to make use of their Reading Room, a beautiful vaulted space with classic green-shaded reading lamps, where I worked a bit on Sage and also a bit on titles that might be a bit more likely to bring readers to the yard. My favorite right now is Diary of a Cranky Bookworm.

And we had an afternoon tea in Lexington, a three-tiered plate bearing little sandwiches, and scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream, and tiny pastries: eclairs and macarons and the littlest fruit tarts, and tart little lemon squares. Afterward we walked two blocks to the Lexington battlefield, where we had the good luck to catch a tour that had just begun, and the tour guide showed us where the militia gathered on the green, and how close the redcoats stood, shouting for the militia to disperse, when an errant shot started the shooting war.

(I think I've mentioned before my hazy childhood vision of battles as something akin to a soccer match? This is very off-base for the Civil War, and probably for any number of Revolutionary War battles too, but this actually is about the size of the battlefield at Lexington, although the British team unsportingly brought about a hundred players to the militia's forty or so.)

We also very much enjoyed a commemorative plaque erected in 1799 and written in the full glory of 18th century prose. It begins, and I reproduce the capitalization and punctuation verbatim, “Sacred to Liberty & the Rights of mankind!!!”

This is not the only place on the plaque featuring multiple exclamation points. I love it. If you tried to punctuate a plaque like this today, everyone would think you had run mad.

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A couple of mini-reviews of things that we watched:

A Spy Among Friends, a six-episode miniseries based on Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. I believe someone read the book and said "What if we really lean into the bad break-up vibes of this story?", and the mini-series focuses tightly on Nicholas Elliot's friendship with Kim Philby, which is of course shattered by the realization that his dear friend and long-time spy colleague has in fact been a Soviet double agent ever since the day they met. (Here is an excellent in-depth review by skygiants.)

Also Night Witches in the Sky, a 1981 Soviet film directed by Yevgeniya Zhigulenko. In her youth, Zhigulenko was one of these "night witches" who flew fighter planes for the Soviet Union in World War II; I don't know if the film is based directly on her own experiences, but it surely draws on them for, say, the hijinks of the young pilots as they skylark like schoolgirls, sneaking out of hospitals, stealing goats, frolicking in the water when they're sent to a plum landing field near the beach.

None of us have watched many Soviet war movies, but if this is at all representative, they must be built on a very different set of rules than American ones, which usually signal clearly if this is a boys' own frolic or Very Serious war movie where any character foolish enough to show off a photo of a sweetheart will certainly be gunned down soon.

And possibly Night Witches did indeed have those signals, in a Soviet context. But we don't know how to read them, and were fascinated to realize that it's a little bit of both. The film doesn't have a plot exactly, it's a series of vignettes, and some of them are beach frolics and some of them are "these pilots have left behind their parachutes so they could fit in more bombs, and now their plane is going down in flames and they cannot jump."

***

Tomorrow will be a long driving day, ending on Prince Edward Island, where I will spend a week basking in the land of Anne of Green Gables. I am hoping to buy many L. M. Montgomery novels in the various Anne-themed museums, but just in case my quest proves futile, I've loaded my Kindle with a stack of Montgomery's novels.

Obviously I have to reread Anne of Green Gables, but otherwise I'll follow my whims. Will they lead to a complete Anne reread? A return visit to the Emily Trilogy or Pat duology? Might I branch out in new directions, and finally read Kilmeny of the Orchard and A Tangled Web? Heck, I might even read a non-LMM book! Ah, well, we shall see.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ben MacIntyre’s The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. I intended to get some other things done on Sunday, but instead I spent the afternoon reading this book and eating cookies and it was a good life choice. MacIntyre is one of those nonfiction writers with an irresistibly readable style, augmented in his case by an irresistibly readable choice of subject matter: spies!

In this book, MacIntyre is telling the story of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB man who became a spy for MI6 out of genuine ideological conversion (always a more interesting story than someone who becomes a spy for money, like Aldrich Ames, who becomes a subplot in this book because his story intersected with Gordievsky’s).

I was particularly fascinated by the internal KGB politics - in particular, by the way the whole agency became infected with the paranoid conviction that the US was going to launch a nuclear first strike any day now once the paranoiac-in-chief, Andropov (first leader of the KGB and then of the Soviet Union in general), became obsessed with the idea. It’s kind of hilarious - all these big tough guys quaking in their boots over literally nothing! - but also sort of sad, and perhaps Gordievsky’s greatest accomplishment was to convince Reagan and Thatcher that no, this wasn’t just bluster, the KGB truly feared a first strike, and both of them became less belligerent toward the USSR in response.

On a whim I read Sara Zarr and Tara Altebrando’s Roomies, because it was on a list of books about female friendship and I needed a new book on Overdrive. It’s a YA novel, structured around the emails that two future roommates exchange the summer before they go to college. I didn’t think it would have space to do all the plotlines justice: both girls have their best-friend-from-high-school plotlines, boyfriend plotlines, and family plotlines, and there’s the getting-to-know-your-potential-roommate plotline that ties them together - but actually I thought the book did most of them justice, although I wanted a little bit more from EB’s difficult relationship with her mom: it turns around a little too fast for me in the end.

And I finished the final Billabong book, Billabong Riders, and it feels like the end of an era: littlerhymes and I have been reading these books for over two years now. What shall we doooo now that it’s over? (Actually we’ve already discussed reading the Anne of Green Gables series next, so I think we shall be fine.)

In some ways it doesn’t feel like the last book in the series - there’s no big series-ending event (Norah’s already gotten married and had her first child, both of which books often use as convenient stopping points) and no particular push to get in at least a cameo appearance from all the best-beloved side characters. But on the other hand it is a very typical Billabong book, with all the old gang (plus Tommy) going off on a cattle-herding adventure, so in that way it’s a satisfying cap to the series.

What I’m Reading Now

Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons goes along at a fairly even domestic family memoir keel until you get to the part where Jackson writes about Bennington College - and then even the restraints of the genre can’t hold back her rage: fury positively smokes out of her as she writes about the life of the faculty wife and the adoring students who crowd around her husband.

What I Plan to Read Next

The newest Lisa See book, The Island of Sea Women! There are very few contemporary authors whose work I keep up with, but I do snap up new Lisa See books, because I like that she writes about women’s friendships and I have not yet given up hope that eventually she’ll write a book where the friends remain friends for the whole story.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Lots of things! I have two weeks worth of things to report on, after all.

I finally read Lia Silver's Prisoner, which I have foolishly, foolishly left sitting on my Kindle for *mumblecough* a while - although possibly this was not so foolish, as it means that I won't have to wait quite as long before the sequel comes out?

ANYWAY. DJ's a werewolf marine, Echo's a super-secret badass assassin with an angsty past who valiantly struggles against her feelings - all her feelings, not just her feelings for DJ, although those too. They meet after DJ ges kidnapped by a secret evil government organization with shadowy but clearly assassinate-y aims. Obviously they fall in love.

( Echo's angsty past! )

Also the evil government organization has created an unruly pack of creepily codependent miserable werewolves, I am so there for that.

I finally got the third of Sam Eastland's Inspector Pekkala mysteries set in Stalinist Russia, The Red Moth. Now that his premise is no longer new and exciting, the thinness of his characterization is beginning to gnaw on me.

Also Barbara Hambly's Crimson Angel, the latest Benjamin January book, and probably the most OT3 of the books so far. Rose has to pretend to be Hannibal's concubine for Reasons! They are forced to sleep together in an extremely narrow ship's berth - like, just sleeping, obviously - and Ben notes that it totally doesn't bother him at all because he trusts them both so much.

And then Rose gets kidnapped and both Ben and Hannibal (who are separated) chase her at top speed across the ocean to Haiti, even though Haiti is pretty much a death trap (especially for Hannibal, who is white, but really for everyone)! And when he arrives Ben is tormented, tormented by the fact that he will have to choose whether to search for Rose or Hannibal first. He chooses Rose, but because he has at least a vague idea where she might be, not because he feels good about abandoning Hannibal to his fate.

I also read Isabelle Holland's Trelawny, which is a trip. In fact it's such a trip that my discussion of it bloated out to five hundred words because there is just so much WTFery to discuss, so I'm going to post that separately after Christmas.

What I'm Reading Now

Ben MacIntyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, which is about, well, what it says on the tin. People betraying the hell out of each other for ideological reasons is kind of my jam.

What I Plan to Read Next

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.