A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Work has been so quiet this week that I spent an hour hiding in the stacks reading Gary Paulsen’s The Winter Room, a svelte novel that chronicles a year on a farm in the 1930s (the first four chapters are the seasons of the year). This book is both a loving but unsentimental evocation of life on an old-fashioned family farm, and a meditation on what it means to be a man. This is a recurring theme in Paulsen’s work, and I find him more thoughtful on this topic than a lot of other authors who obsess about What It Means to Be Manly. He doesn’t really go for the Hemingway valorization of action over reflection; his characters do act, but they act with care and reflection, and indeed realize that care and reflection are in themselves actions.

Manliness became an accidental theme this week, because it’s also a central question in Jerry Spinelli’s Wringer, which takes place in a town that has an annual pigeon shoot. At this shoot, ten-year-old boys are expected to wring the wounded pigeons’ necks. Our hero Palmer doesn’t want to become a wringer, but because the expectation is so ironclad and so tied to general expectations about masculinity, it’s hard to refuse or even to admit that he doesn’t want to. It’s his deepest secret.

But this thing did not like to be forgotten. Like air escaping a punctured tire, it would spread out from his stomach and be everywhere. Inside and outside, up and down, day and night, just beyond the foot of his bed, in his sock drawer, on the porch steps, at the edges of the lips of other boys, in the sudden flutter from a bush that he had come too close to. Everywhere.

I tried to read this book years ago, because I loved Spinelli’s Stargirl so much (spoiler: none of his other books are like Stargirl), but noped out about three pages in because of the pervasive themes of pigeon murder. This was probably the right choice at the time, not just because of the pigeon murder, but also because I suspect I wouldn’t have really sympathized with Palmer’s quandary. “Just tell them you won’t be a wringer!” I would have cried impatiently. As I’ve gotten older, I have become more sympathetic to characters who are crushed by social structures.

I also finished S. T. Gibson’s Robbergirl, which I bought on a whim because (a) f/f Snow Queen retelling (the pairing is Gerda/robber girl, not Gerda/Snow Queen, in case you are puzzled), and (b) look at that cover! Isn’t it gorgeous??

An enjoyable light read. I would have enjoyed a bit more of an edge between the two leads (I feel like this is always my complaint about genre romance. “Did not once feel like the two leads might try to kill each other :( Needs more murder vibes!!”), although it certainly had its moments. I particularly loved this line: ”Do you know what it’s like,” Helvig hissed between her teeth. “Watching some girl drag your heart behind her like a pet she’s gotten tired of?”

That but the whole book, please!

And finally, I dove into Patricia McKissack’s 1993 Newbery Honor book The Dark-Thirty with enthusiasm, as I grew up with McKissack’s picture books Mirandy and Brother Wind and Flossie and the Fox. However, I didn’t like it as much, perhaps because The Dark-Thirty has mere woodcuts rather than gorgeous full-color illustrations? But McKissack’s A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl had no illustrations whatsoever, and that was one of my favorite Dear America books…

Possibly spooky is just not McKissack’s strength as a writer. The stories in The Dark-Thirty are all ghost stories, more or less, but none of them are really spine-tingling.

What I’m Not Reading, After All

Guess what finally showed up after SIX MONTHS in transit? (Admittedly we were closed for two of those months but NONETHELESS.) Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. But in its circuitous travels, this book missed its window of opportunity: I opened it, read two pages, yelled "I JUST CAN'T READ ABOUT TRAUMA RIGHT NOW," and sent it right back.

I also gave up on John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down because, similarly, I just don’t feel like reading about a girl going into illness-related anxiety spirals right now. These spirals are of course not about coronavirus - the book was published in 2017 - but nonetheless.

What I’m Reading Now

Christopher Paul Curtis’s Elijah of Buxton, a historical fiction novel that takes place (so far) in the settlement of Buxton in Canada, an all-black town founded by escaped slaves. (Our hero, Elijah, was the first free child born in the settlement.) Eventually Elijah is going to head to America, where I expect picaresque adventures, but the book is in no hurry to get there and neither am I; I’m enjoying all the historical detail about the town (I’m getting the impression it was a real place? I suspect the epilogue will tell me, and anyway I don’t particularly want to know if it wasn’t until I’m done reading the book), like the way that the settlement rings the church bell twenty times anytime someone new escapes to Buxton: ten times to ring out their old life and ten times to ring in the new.

What I Plan to Read Next

Now that I’ve finished Robbergirl, I need to decide which book to read next on my Kindle. Stephanie Burgis’s Moontangled? Llinos Cathryn Thomas’s A Duet for Invisible Strings? Or Onoto Watanna’s Miss Nume of Japan? (Onoto Watanna was the pseudonym of Winifred Eaton, a Chinese-British author who wrote Japanese-themed romances while living in New York City in the early twentieth century. Her sister, under the pen name Sui Sin Far, wrote books about the Chinese-American experience, which evidently were less popular, as evidenced by the fact that none of them are available on Gutenburg.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

When I was about five The Borrowers was pretty much my very favorite book in the whole WORLD, so I am aghast and astonished that I didn’t realize that Mary Norton wrote non-Borrower books until the Year of Our Lord 2020, when the Disney adaptation Bedknobs and Broomsticks clued me in.

As is the way with Disney adaptations, the movie and the book don’t have much in common: Bed-knob and Broomstick is set after World War II, not during it, and therefore contains no climactic battle of suits of armor vs. Nazis (although there is a delightful sequence where an uninhabited suit of clothes commits a different act of heroism). The book also - sigh - contains a visit to a cannibal island, cannibal islands being all the rage in 1950s children fantasies; there’s a similar sequence in an Edward Eager novel.

Over the course of the book, the children only go on three adventures, which is not enough to fully explore the premise of a bed that can fly not only through space but also time. Still, that premise is amazing imagination fodder: what child wouldn’t like to lie in bed and imagine being able to fly it away somewhere for a night of adventure?

I liked Richard Peck’s A Long Way from Chicago so much that I ended up rereading the sequel, A Year Down Yonder. Both are set during the Great Depression, and they center on Grandma Dowdel, a trickster figure with a dab hand at piecrust, as told through the admiring memories of her grandchildren. She takes a dim view of cops and bankers, and when she’s not making gooseberry pies she foils evictions, catches catfish out of the country club’s stream to feed the needy, and undermines the social pretensions of the DAR.

I also read Naomi Tamura’s The Japanese Bride, a nonfiction book published in America in 1893, mostly because I was tickled pink to find a book published by a Japanese author in America so early - and completely by accident, too, it was just sitting there on a book list in William Dean Howells’ My Year in a Log Cabin. (In general, I’ve found publishers’ “Here are some other books we sell” lists in the front and end matter to be an AMAZING resource for learning about old books, because they give you such a wide view of what was out there.)

Anyway, in The Japanese Bride, Tamura explains Japanese marriage customs for an American audience, which - because American courting customs have changed so much, starting with the fact that we no longer call it “courting” - also yields interesting information about American courting customs in the 1890s for the modern reader.

Finding this book required a bit of googling, during which I discovered (1) there is a female Japanese pop star also named Naomi Tamura, but the author of this book is in fact a man, and (2) after he returned to Japan as a minister after studying at the Auburn Theological Seminary, The Japanese Bride landed him in hot water, because many people weren’t pleased that he had written so openly about private life in Japan for outsiders in a way that might invite censure.

AND FINALLY I read Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, partly because it’s on my Newbery Honor list but also on the theory that maybe it would offer some insight into why people join up with fascists today. This theory was incorrect; the answer to “Why did people join up with Hitler Youth?” is “Because all their friends joined and there was camping and singing and it was the only path to economic and educational advancement and also at a certain point it became compulsory to all quote-unquote ‘ethnic Germans’ and parents could have their children taken away if they tried to stop them from joining,” much of which is not really analogous to why young people go for alt-right groups today, although probably the “all their friends have joined” bit is sometimes a factor.

(Are we still calling it the alt-right? I feel that it has, at this point, simply become “the right.”)

What I’m Reading Now

I put off reading Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963 for years, because I figured it was going to be harrowing, and it is, but so far not for the reasons you might suspect from the title. We haven’t gotten to Birmingham yet; we’re still up in Detroit, stuck in the middle of a bully-o-rama. The new kid gets bullied, the main character gets bullied, his older brother bullies the bully (there’s sticking up for your younger brother, and then there’s chucking a smaller kid repeatedly against a wire fence just because you can, you know?), it is in short A Lot.

What I Plan to Read Next

I want to be the first to call this: thirty to forty years from now, someone’s going to win the hell out of the Newbery with a book set during 2020. Let’s hope that book is called Black Lives Matter and not The Year Democracy Died.