A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A very Newbery week! I read Ruth Behar’s 2025 Honor book, Across So Many Seas, which is a family saga about a Sephardic Jewish family told through the eyes of four daughters of the family through the ages. After the Edict of Expulsion in 1492, Benvenida’s family flees from Toledo to Constantinople. Centuries later, in disgrace after sneaking out to a party with BOYS celebrating Turkish independence, Reina is sent to Cuba for an arranged marriage… where her daughter Alegra becomes a brigadista, traveling to rural Cuba to teach people how to read, before the family flees to Miami. And at last in 2003, Reina and Alegra and Alegra’s daughter Paloma visit Toledo, where, of course, in a museum they see the poem on a parchment that Benvenida shoved in a wall so long ago…

(“This parchment is reappearing,” I said wisely, after Benvenida mentioned once again her hope that one day! someone would find it! and read her words!)

These are all corners of history that don’t get a lot of attention in American historical fiction, so it was interesting to explore them. I particularly enjoyed the food descriptions. Not 100% convinced that the decision to have four different first-person narrators was the right one, but as their narratives are sequential rather than intermingled, it’s not like there’s much chance to get confused about who is talking.

I disliked both of Erin Entrada Kelly’s previous Newbery books, Hello Universe and We Dream of Space, so it is with great irritation that I report that The First State of Being, the 2025 Newbery Medal winner, is actually kind of fun. In 1999, young Michael worries obsessively about the looming threats of Y2K, middle school, and life in general, until he learns about living in the moment and enjoying what’s here now through the medium of a time traveler from 2199 who yearns for nothing more than to visit a mall and bury his nose in a real live physical magazine with a photograph of a not-yet-extinct tiger.

I am also trundling along in 1930s Newbery books, this week finishing Phyllis Crawford’s ”Hello, the Boat!”, which is about a family traveling by storeboat down the Ohio River in the early 19th century. What is a storeboat, you ask? It’s a boat that’s also a store, in this case a drygoods store, stopping along the river at the villages and farms that dot its shores. Loved the detail about daily life on the boat.

What I’m Reading Now

In Our Mutual Friend, Eugene Wrayburn just haughtily refused to tell Lizzie Hexam’s little brother his intentions towards Lizzie. Eugene, I realize you are constitutionally incapable of being serious, but being unable to reassure Lizzie’s brother “I promise I am not going to ruin your sister” is not a good look on you.

What I Plan to Read Next

Two more 2025 Newberies! One Big Open Sky, which I have, and Chooch Helped, which also won the Caldecott so there’s quite a waiting list.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ella Young’s The Tangle-Coated Horse and Other Tales, a 1930s Newbery Honor book that retells some stories from the sagas of Finn MacCool. Some lovely descriptive passages but not memorable overall.

I also finished Annie Fellows Johnston’s Cicely and Other Stories. Some of the stories I’ve forgotten already (what happened to the titular Cicely?), but others have stuck in my mind, like the story of three southern girls living in genteel poverty because Family Tradition says they mustn’t work… until they realize that their grandmothers worked very hard indeed when they first came to Kentucky, and conclude that surely this older Family Tradition trumps the newer one.

What I’m Reading Now

In Our Mutual Friend, the Boffins have just decided to adopt an orphan boy whom they will name John Harmon, to the astonishment of the Wilfers’ lodger Mr. Rokeworthy, whom I strongly suspect is the real John Harmon in disguise who is lodging with the Wilfers in secret to see if he wants to marry their daughter Bella, as their marriage is the condition under which he could inherit the fortune that, as everyone believes John Harmon to be dead, has currently gone to the Boffins.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have decided that once I finish Our Mutual Friend, I will at long last tackle Elizabeth Barrett Brownings’ Aurora Leigh!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Maylis de Kerangal’s The Cook: A Novel (translated from the French by Sam Taylor) is a novella that reads like an unusually in-depth magazine profile: a character study of a young Frenchman who bops around the French food establishment (while also pursuing a degree in economics), starts his own small restaurant, then throws up the restaurant because it has become his entire life, which is what he had hoped to avoid in becoming his own boss. Gorgeous food descriptions.

I also finished Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield! Dickens has been hit or miss with me in the past, but this one I really enjoyed: very pacy, lots of whump. Dickens clearly lives on the tears of his readers and wrings out your heart every fifth chapter, and you know what, I can respect that. (Mostly. It was a little excessive when ( spoilers )

On the whole however I felt that Dickens played fair with the heart-wringing in this one: the tragedies feel like real tragedies that could happen to real people (particularly the Murdstones and the way they squash all the heart and spirit out of David and his mother) and Dickens mostly lets them stand on their own. It’s not like Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop where he made me cry but I was angry about being manipulated into it as he wrung every living drop of bathos out of the situation.

What I’m Reading Now

In The Yellow Poppy, the Duc de Trelan and his ragtag band of Chouans stand alone against the forces of Napoleon! All the other Royalist forces have fallen and been treated with leniency, but Napoleon may wish to make an example of this final holdout… Were the Duc and Duchesse reunited only to be torn asunder by the winds of history? If they’re doomed, at least let them die together!

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been on the fence a while about Grady Hendrix’s My Best Friend’s Exorcism (it sounds so good but I’m such a baby about horror), but now my friend Becky has recommended it so I’m going to give it a try.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last Literary Letters has wrapped up The Lightning Conductor! I started this book with great enthusiasm, and Molly’s voice remains enchanting throughout, but unfortunately as the book goes along we get more and more letters from her suitor, a gentleman who has disguised himself as a chauffeur in order to get close to her, who is not half as charming. Plus, on this thin wisp of a mistaken-identity plot the authors hang an awful lot of sightseeing, and unfortunately it’s quite difficult to write about sight-seeing in an interesting way and they just don’t have the knack.

I quite enjoyed Mary Stolz’s The Bully of Barkham Street, which overlaps with the events in A Dog on Barkham Street, only this time telling the story from the part of view of Martin Hastings, the bully who terrorized Edward Frost in A Dog on Barkham Street.

The book does an excellent job making Martin feel like a real three-dimensional person, an inveterate daydreamer with poor temper control, without excusing his actions. One particularly nice touch is that Martin tends to feel that everyone is picking on him, which is SUCH a characteristic child attitude, and perhaps even more so a characteristic attitude for a kid who lashes out at other kids to make himself feel better.

Like the other books in the Rosemary Sutcliff’s Arthurian trilogy, The Road to Camlann is a straightforward, classic retelling, featuring slyly evil Mordred, brave and noble Lancelot, Gawain driven mad by grief. (Sutcliff, who likes Gawain more than Malory does, lays a lot of emphasis on his repeated head wounds as an excuse for his obsession with vengeance.) But it has a propulsive forward motion that I felt the other books lacked, as if Sutcliff got to the tragedy of Camelot and felt that here, in this tale of epic tragedy and OT3s, was something she could really get her teeth into.

(Although Sutcliff loves a tragedy and an OT3, I think this is perhaps her only book where these two themes are intimately connected. The Shining Company has an OT3 and an epic tragedy, but narratively these two things are unrelated, whereas here you have epic tragedy because OT3.)

What I’m Reading Now

In David Copperfield, that rat Steerforth seduced little Em’ly on the eve of her marriage, and they’ve run away together! I KNEW IT. (Admittedly Dickens foreshadowed it hard, but NONETHELESS.) That rat Steerforth, he’s probably going to abandon her in some foreign port, where her uncle (who has set off to search the world for her) will find her just in time for her to breathe her last and perhaps bequeath her newborn child onto him.

In cheerier news, David is engaged to Dora Spenlow! But his aunt has lost all her money, thus placing the engagement in jeopardy. Will Agnes figure out a way for David to make enough money to get married after all? PROBABLY.

Meanwhile, in D. K. Broster’s The Yellow Poppy, the duc and duchesse AT LONG LAST have met, at dusk, among the standing stones near the sea, and the duchesse was so overcome that she fainted.

What I Plan to Read Next

The 2023 Newbery awards have been announced! I’m excited to read Christina Soontornvat’s The Last Mapmaker, and curious about Lisa Yee’s Maizy Chen’s Last Chance. I’ve read some of Yee’s earlier books and they never struck me as awards material, but perhaps her latest has leveled up.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I have completed my trip through Mary Stewart’s oeuvre with Thunder on the Right! Probably not the book I would have chosen to end on; it’s one of her earlier books and, as the characters themselves note, rather melodramatic: ( spoilers )

However, I know that I’ll be revisiting some of Stewart’s books, so this is not really the end of the journey at all. I own A Walk in Wolf Wood, and someday I WILL find a copy of Ludo and the Star Horse.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in David Copperfield! David has run away to his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, who has taken him in, and when David’s evil stepfather Mr. Murdstone came to collect David, she soundly rated him for the way that he treated David and David’s poor dear dead mother both. YES AUNT TROTWOOD GO GO GO.

What I Plan to Read Next

Nancy Springer’s I Am Morgan La Fay and I Am Mordred. Judging by the cover of I Am Morgan La Fay these are going to be Arthuriana by way of 90s emo and I’m fascinated to see how this mash-up works.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I finished Mary Stewart’s last Arthurian novel, The Prince and the Pilgrim, which is based on the medieval Arthurian legend of Alisander, who sets out to avenge his father’s death and go to Camelot… and neither avenges his father’s death nor ever makes it to Camelot, but instead marries the Pretty Pilgrim, who takes one look at him and informs him, “I love you.”

In Stewart’s version, Alexander is the one who takes one look at Alice and instantly announces he loves her - not twelve hours after he last rose from Morgan La Fay’s bed. OH ALEXANDER. There’s a bit where his mom is like “Thank God he’s pretty because he’s not very smart,” and it’s fortunate that Alice will be in a position to do his thinking for him forthwith.

I also read J. R. R. Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas, which is a collection of the letters that he wrote for his children from Father Christmas and Father Christmas’s various helper, like the North Polar Bear and the elf secretary Ilbereth. As they were written over a period of almost two decades, there isn’t an overarching story per se, but rather the ongoing happenings of life at the North Pole, such as North Polar Bear’s various scrapes.

The copy I read includes facsimiles of the letters (each character has his own distinctive handwriting: Father Christmas’s is shaky because he’s old, North Polar Bear writes a blocky hand because he’s writing with his paw, etc.), plus Tolkien’s beautiful illustrations. A Christmas feast.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve been struggling to keep up with my email reading commitments! Whale Weekly has suddenly become Whale Almost Daily (and a chunk of chapters each day, at that! Ishmael and Queequeg are already sharing a bed like newlyweds), the letters from The Lightning Conductor are flying thick and fast, AND the first chapter of A Study in Scarlet arrived from Letters from Watson, which wasn’t supposed to start till January 1st! Oh my.

The daily Christmas Carol installments, however, continue just the right size. Scrooge has just bid farewell to the Ghost of Christmas Present, but not before being introduced to the Ghost’s terrifying hangers-on, the wretched children Ignorance and Want. One of the few scenes that didn’t make it into The Muppet Christmas Carol! Perhaps the filmmakers thought it interrupted the Ghost’s leave-taking.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been enjoying A Christmas Carol so much that I’m taking the plunge on David Copperfield.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Naomi Mitchison’s first novel, The Conquered, in which Meromic the son of a Gaulish chieftain is captured and sold into slavery during Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. When Meromic is about to be killed for insubordination, the Roman centurion Titus Barrus saves his life, and after that, well, even when they go back to Gaul to help Caesar finish his mopping up operations:

“There’s half of me aching to get off, to be fighting on my own side, the side I ought to be on; and there’s the other half - oh God, Lerrys, I’ld give my life for him, I would truly; he’s all I’ve got, he’s wife and child and home and everything. I don’t care what he does to me - not really. There’s nothing I can be sure of except friendship, but that’s true, that’s a god; how can I throw it away?”

Strongly suspect that Rosemary Sutcliff read this book at some point. There are even dog metaphors! After Meromic runs away (to revenge himself upon a man who betrayed his family) and then comes back to Titus, his fellow slave Dith tells him scornfully, “when you [came back] you went jumping about and kissing his knees like a dog - oh, Meromic, don’t!”

For Meromic has started battening on Dith, as one does when someone says something that is perhaps not literally true, but figuratively too true for comfort.

But Meromic is much more conflicted about his loyalty than your average Sutcliff character, and in any case this is only one aspect of the novel. Like the other Mitchison novels I’ve read, this one is bursting at the seams, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach where Mitchison throws in all the things that she happens to be thinking about. This often means that her novels are messy, but it’s often a glorious mess, and in this case it all comes together into a coherent whole.

Here Mitchison is writing about conquest (the title may have given this away), the difficulty of forming a critique of imperialism when your position is really “Mad about being conquered because my people ought to be the ones going a-conquering,” the difficult lot of women in the ancient world, the way that personal and political loyalty intertwine and undermine each other (the various groups of Gauls can’t come together to effectively oppose Caesar because they can’t set aside old personal animosities), the power and limitations of friendship and human kindness, and also glimmers of magic here and there because why the hell not?

What I’m Reading Now

REALLY enjoying the Christmas Carol readalong. Dickens is having so much fun as he writes (“There’s more of gravy than of grave about you!” Scrooge storms at Marley’s ghost) and it’s just a nice pick-me-up to have a couple of pages of Christmas Carol to read in the morning. Scrooge has just met the Ghost of Christmas Past! Glad that the Muppet Christmas Carol didn't go along with the thing where the Ghost of Christmas Past fluctuated, so that it was "now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head..."

My interest in The Lightning Conductor, on the other hand, is flagging. The book has devolved into LONG sight-seeing sections, and it’s the rare author who can make unalloyed sight-seeing interesting to me.

What I Plan to Read Next

A few months ago I was CRUELLY STYMIED in my quest to read John McPhee’s The Ransom of Russian Art, which the library owns… but it's in the art museum library, which is closed except by appointment. And it’s impossible to make an appointment because no one answers emails, the phone number on the website is wrong, and the phone number on the art museum library door automatically hangs up after two rings.

WELL, it turns out that The Ransom of Russian Art is collected in The Second John McPhee Reader, which I CAN get my hot little hands on. So TAKE THAT, art museum library!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My Christmas reading has continued with L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which I found quaintly delightful. This surprised me, because I didn’t enjoy The Wizard of Oz as a book: I felt it rather splintered into a series of disconnected anecdotes about halfway through. However, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus has a strong throughline: the titular life and adventures provide a central thread to tie together Baum’s lively inventiveness.

Charles Dickens’ The Cricket on the Hearth is also supposedly a Christmas story, or so at least I had been led to believe; I can only assume this is a misconception fanned by the Rankin Bass adaptation. The book in fact takes place in January, and contains no mention of Christmas at all, although there is a lot of cozy sitting by the hearth so I suppose I can see how people got confused.

I also finished a non-Christmas book: Janice P. Nishimura’s Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, research for the college girls books I’m working on (there are now two… one more and we can make it a hat trick?), but also delightful in its own right. In the 1870s, five Japanese girls (one only seven years old!) were sent to the United States to get American educations and bring back what they learned to Japan. Two were sent home early for ill health, but after an initial period of culture shock the other three thrived, and when they returned home to Japan, they eventually (again, after a period of culture shock) became instrumental in transforming Japanese women’s education. An absorbing, engagingly written history.

What I’m Reading Now

Judith Flanders’ Christmas: A Biography. This is not grabbing me like some of Flanders’ other books (Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England was more or less the book that got me hooked on the nineteenth century when I was a wee teenager, so it’s probably expecting too much for anything to live up to that), but I was intrigued to learn that people have been complaining that Christmas has lost touch with its earlier, pious roots, and now revolves around secular merry-making, essentially since Christmas was a thing.

I’m rushing to finish my final reading challenge for the year: for “a book by a local author,” I’m reading Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles, another book about Gene Stratton-Porter’s beloved Limberlost swamp, also (like A Girl of the Limberlost) featuring a lonely, neglected child whose life is transformed by a love of natural history.

What I Plan to Read Next

The library is clearly not going to bring me Betty MacDonald’s Nancy and Plum this Christmas (sulky about this; the library had plenty of copies last year, I know because I shelved them with my own two hands, so I don’t know why they have only two now), but I have one last Christmas book to succor me: a mystery, Mary Kelly’s The Christmas Egg.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, which was...well, it was okay. This was the second book I’ve read by Morpurgo that I’ve found somewhat bafflingly bland, so I think I’ll stop trying.

What I’m Reading Now

ALL THE THINGS. I should probably stop starting new books and focus on finishing things...

1. Robin McKinley’s Rose Daughter, still. Beauty has just arrived at the Beast’s castle!

2. Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, still. There is clearly some strong Victorian imperative toward defining “virtuous” and “powerfully stupid” as overlapping categories, because I have not met a hero this oblivious since Marco Loristan. Oliver falls into the hands of the obviously skeevy Fagin, who owns more gold watches than he has pockets, puts Oliver to work taking the distinguishing marks out of handkerchiefs, and teaches him how to pickpocket.

He’s like nine, so I could understand why he doesn’t understand about the watches and the handkerchiefs, but good heavens, Fagin is literally teaching him how to pickpocket! How can Oliver fail to notice that he’s being trained as a thief? Yet Oliver is stunned, stunned when he discovers that pickpocketing is in fact the gainful employment that Fagin means to offer him.

I mean really. He doesn’t even have the excuse of being a Loristan.

3. Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s The Language of Flowers. I picked this book out because of the title, which is probably an even worse idea than picking a book by it’s cover (I read Crown Duel for its cover, so clearly this method works sometimes…) - but so far it’s been working out all right.

Our heroine, Victoria, has spent most of her childhood in foster care. Standoffish, misanthropic, and isolated, she communicates mainly through the language of flowers - a safe choice, because no one else knows how to answer. Until one day, a young man does…

This capsule description makes it sound like a sappy romance, which is isn’t really (although I haven’t finished it yet, so I guess Victoria could be Healed By True Love. I’ll warn you if that happens). It’s about family love and lies and things falling apart, and maybe being able to put something together again - still broken, but together.

What I Plan to Read Next

Anton DiScafani’s The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls.

Oh, and I’m thinking about reading Madeleine L’Engle’s And Both Were Young. My knowledge of L’Engle’s work is awfully patchy, because I found A House Like a Lotus so alarming that I pretty much stopped reading her work afterward. The Wikipedia page tells me that Polly’s mentor figure does not, in fact, attempt to rape her, but that is totally what I got out of that scene.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. This is such a weird book, you guys. Entertainingly so, but still. At first I just thought I found it strange because I was expecting more espionage and less coming of age and travelogue, but no, it’s just kind of strange. Kim is accidentally a spy on the side, but mostly he just wanders around India helping a lama search for a river that will wash away his sins, and then it just kind of ends.

It’s odd how different classic novels can be from what you expect when you finally read them, even when you thought you knew a lot about them beforehand. I knew The Old Curiosity Shop was all about Little Nell dying, but I didn’t expect it to be quite that much about Little Nell dying. I mean, it’s not just a major plot point, it is literally the point of the book.

What I’m Reading Now

Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, in some English translation, though the audiobook people did not mention which.

The framing story seems to make it impossible for Christine Daae to have get POV, but then again it would also seem to make it impossible for Raoul to have POV, and he’s having POV all over the place, so I’m hoping that Leroux will give her some anyway. Because otherwise how are we going to see the Phantom’s sub-operatic lair? The lair beneath the opera is the very best part of this story, please don’t tell me they just made it up for the various adaptations. I think Christine should murder the creepy stalker serial killing Phantom and take his lair for her own.

I’m also reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned, very slowly, when I am absolutely forced by exigencies to resort to my Kindle, because it exudes an ennui that sticks to me like ichor. My working theory is that Fitzgerald was depressed and resorted to massive amounts of alcohol for self-medication.

What I’m Going to Read Next

THE LIBRARY HAS ROSE UNDER FIRE ON HOLD FOR ME. SO EXCITED! So, uh, that.

I have the newest and final of Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls series, United We Spy, on hold...but I’m fifth on the holds list so it may be some time before I get my grubby little hands on it.

I’ve enjoyed the Gallagher Girls so much, as a popcorn spy-schoolgirl story, that I’m thinking of trying out Ally Carter’s other series, Heist Society. Probably next summer, when I have time for popcorn reading. Has anyone read it? Is it just as good, or should I rest content with Gallagher Girls?