A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I wasn’t particularly invested in the characters or the plot in Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair, which would usually be a death knell for a story, but in this case I grew so absorbed by the worldbuilding that it pulled me through the book. What IS this world where the way to propose is to offer a marriage toy, where wizards often give banquets by transforming simple foods like potatoes into costly delicacies, where people use kinship terms as courtesy titles? “Tell me more!” I begged. “PLEASE give me some infodumps!”

Karr did not hear my plea for infodumps, but apparently the ebook has an afterword which gives a bit more detail about the worldbuilding. (Genuinely considering buying the ebook just to read the afterword.) Apparently, the afterword also mentions that the book is stealth Ruddigore fanfic, although in that way where you start with a canon and then put your story in a completely different setting, and change some of the characterization, and add a self-insert for your favorite character to fall in love with, and somehow by the end no one but yourself can see the Ruddigore at all.

I also read Courtney Milan’s The Suffragette Scandal. I read the rest of the Brothers Sinister series seven years ago, and unfortunately the delay before reading the last book was a mistake. I’ve forgotten most of the characters from the earlier books and also am just not in the same headspace where I originally found the series so delightful. It’s fine! It just didn’t grab my heart like the others.

What I’m Reading Now

Whale Weekly has begun! I didn’t realize that we were beginning our Moby-Dick journey so early! …and I have the sinking feeling that I’m going to find Melville just as insufferable now as I did in high school, but I will give it a few weeks before I make any decisions about whether I truly WANT to spent the next three years of my life revisiting Moby-Dick.

In other news, littlerhymes and I have been reading The Wicked Day, and I’ve been having Mordred feelings YET AGAIN, just like when I read The Winter Prince and The Idylls of the Queen… Oh, God, have I become a Mordred stan? I don’t want to be a Mordred stan. And yet HERE I AM, unable to break free, just like poor Mordred who doesn’t want to be the doom of Camelot and yet that is his FATE.

What I Plan to Read Next

As you may have noticed I am really on a roll with these Newbery Honor books, and I intend to keep going as long as the inspiration is upon me.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Courtney Milan's The Heiress Effect. Jane Fairfield, desperate to drive away suitors because she needs to stay at home to protect her sister Emily from the well-meant but disastrous series of medical quacks their uncle sends to try to cure Emily's seizures, has made herself into a social monstrosity. Her gowns are too bright, her voice is too loud, and the things she says! - she sounds so kindly, so sympathetic, as she commiserates with so-and-so about how difficult it must be knowing that people only listen to him because he's a baronet.

This is the sort of premise that could easily become deeply embarrassing for the reader, who cringes as Jane lumbers from one disaster to another. But she walks into her disasters so clear-eyed and unembarrassed that it's impossible to be embarrassed for her, and it becomes rather a pleasure, instead, to watch her say the things that no one else dares to say.

The one problem I had with this book is that I felt Oliver figures out her game rather too quickly. No one else has noticed that she's being dreadful on purpose, so why should he do it in just a few meetings? It doesn't feel organic to his character (and part of the problem, I think, is that his character seems rather ill-sketched next to Jane's); it feels like it happens because it needs to happen for the narrative to move forward.

I might have liked it better if he began to fall in love with her, dreadfulness and all, and only then realized that the dreadfulness was a mask.

I also read Kelsey Osgood's How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, which is half memoir about Osgood's struggle with anorexia and half indictment of the way that modern culture commodifies narratives of struggle with anorexia, a tension that Osgood is aware of and somewhat uncomfortable with and does not deal with entirely successfully. I'm not sure what a successful engagement with that conundrum would look like, but I sort of suspect it would look like not writing the book, which perhaps contributes to the fact that the book never quite comes together.

The book also suffers because Osgood is obsessed with Marya Hornbacher's Wasted, to the extent that How to Disappear Completely sometimes seems patterned on Hornbacher's memoir. At one point Osgood does a side-by-side comparison between a passage of her writing and a passage from Hornbacher's, a comparison which really drives home Osgood's comparative lack of both power and precision. (She's using it to show how she patterned her own experiences on the anorexia memoirs she devoured, so there's a good reason for it, but it still seems quite misguided.)

This is not to say that Osgood's criticisms of Wasted are wrong, of course. Osgood notes that many girls she met on eating disorders units read and reread Wasted for inspiration - not inspiration to get healthier, mind, but inspiration to redouble their commitment to being anorexic. But being right is not enough to make Osgood's book coalesce from a bunch of evocative parts into a coherent and compelling whole.

What I'm Reading Now

Rosemary Sutcliff's Lady In Waiting, about Bess Throckmorton's marriage to Walter Raleigh. The title is a pun: Bess was one on Queen Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting, but she also (at least in Sutcliff's telling) spent much of her life waiting for Walter Raleigh to come back from his various schemes and remember her. He is, to an almost hilarious degree, the pinnacle of the Sutcliff hero who is incapable of remembering his lady-love when she's out of his sight. The queen punishes them for marrying by imprisoning them in the Tower (in separate parts of the Tower, of course), and when they're released, he doesn't even pause to say goodbye before he goes haring off to the coast.

All this is to say that it's an intensely Sutcliffian book, and if you like that sort of thing (which of course I do) you will probably enjoy it very much.

I've also started Michael Ende's Momo, but I haven't gotten very far so I'm reserving judgment currently.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still waiting for the library to come through for me with this year's Newbery books.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Courtney Milan’s A Kiss for Midwinter, which I didn’t like quite as much as the other Brothers Sinister books that I’ve read. Lydia continues to be a doll, but her paramour - I’ve forgotten his name - seems just a little bit too full of himself. He has a few affecting scenes where he struggles to care for his aging and increasingly demented father, but otherwise I mostly wanted Lydia to smack him.

To be fair, Lydia also spent a large percentage of the book yearning to smack him. It’s just that the narrative necessitated that she had a change of heart, and my heart did not change with hers.

Sam Eastland’s The Beast in the Red Forest, the most recent Inspector Pekkala book, which ends - I kid you not - Pekkala, his junior partner Kirov, and Kirov’s fiancee Elisaveta having Friday night dinner together, while Stalin enviously listens in using the bugs he’s put in Pekkala office. He waits until they’re juuuuust sitting down to dinner, and then he has his secretary put through a call to Pekkala, so he can sort of interject himself into this cozy scene.

Book six is probably not going to involve Stalin dispersing them to separate gulags and then wondering why he has no friends (maybe because you send them all to gulags, Stalin?), but I feel like that would be the logical aftermath.

I also - at last! - finished Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, wherein Richard Mayhew defeats not one, but two forces of darkness that have destroyed countless greater foes by sheer force of his own protagonist-hood. Like, seriously, that’s it. In one instant he spears a beast that has dozens of spears sticking out of its hide from other hunters, but Richard’s spear kills it because - I don’t know, it would be way inconvenient for him to die at that point in the story.

I think what bothers me about Gaiman’s writing is that he wants to have the fun parts of darkness without any of the price: the dead don’t actually die, the betrayals don’t really hurt, the danger never feels quite real, and evil is a cartoonish force rather than something that real people can actually become. It’s like he’s mistaken a noir aesthetic for actual darkness.

What I’m Reading Now

Jerome K. Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, which I think is meant to be funny but isn’t, not even in the mild and ponderous way that I found Three Men on a Boat funny. So far it mostly seems to be regurgitated high-flown high Victorian moral rhetoric, with a mild spin that might, I suppose, make it amusing if you lived with the real thing all the time.

Also Nancy Jo Sales’ The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World, which I’ve only just started. So far it seems to be steering clear of What’s Wrong with Kids These Days territory; let’s hope this trend continues.

What I Plan to Read Next

My dad and I tromped over to the university library, and I came back with a small haul: George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Velvet Room, and The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600. Because who doesn’t want to read about ancient Greek novels, am I right?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I began with The Red Cross Girls in Belgium, which opens with a capsule summary of Eugenia’s courtship with Captain Castaigne, and you guys, its all missed opportunities all the time. Eugenia aids French soldiers in escaping from the Germans and ends up in jail and nearly dies of some kind of disease...and all the time Captain Castaigne is a million miles away and not involved at all! He doesn’t show up at all till it’s all over! WHAT. What a waste of possible hurt/comfort! But for books about nursing these books are notably low on that.

I was also disappointed by Angela Brazil’s Bosom Friends: A Seaside Story, because the title seemed to promise an epic Anne of Green Gablesian friendship, but in fact it’s about a chance friendship that eventually breaks because one of the friends is actually shallow and silly and abandons her supposed bosom buddy as soon as a more fashionable friend shows up at their seaside resort. For what it is, it’s actually rather charming - the description of the beach hut that the group of children build is delightful - but the title is totally false advertising!

On the other hand, I also read Courtney Milan’s The Governess Affair, on egelantier’s suggestion, and it is exactly as charming and well done as she said. Unfortunately the library doesn’t seem to have the rest of them (so frustrating!), so I probably won’t continue the series.

Finally, I read Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men and a Boat, which I also enjoyed in the end, although it took me a bit to get into the swing of things. Victorian comic writing works quite differently than modern comic writing. It’s not so much a matter of one-liners, but rather the cumulative effect of everything building up together. Like this:

Harris proposed that we should have scrambled eggs for breakfast. He said he would cook them. It seemed, from his account, that he was very good at doing scrambled eggs. He often did them at picnics and when out on yachts. He was quite famous for them. People who had once tasted his scrambled eggs, so we gathered from his conversation, never cared for any other food afterwards, but pined away and died when they could not get them.

What I’m Reading Now

E. L. Voynich’s The Gadfly, again on egelantier’s recommendation, because how can you go wrong with a book about a young man whose one true love is REVOLUTION? He’s just been arrested. On Good Friday. This book, it is not so much with the subtlety, I love it.

Also, if I ever become an evil dictator, I am going to outlaw arrests on Good Friday and possibly the entirety of Passion Week. Why hand the revolutionaries symbols like that? I mean really. This is Evil Dictatorship 101 here.

What I Plan to Read Next

So many books! So many books to choose from! I have one last Angela Brazil, The Princess of the School; I am growing rather tired of her fondness for saddling her school stories with unnecessary mysteries about mysterious foundlings, lost inheritances, etc. I just want school hijinks, damn it!

Alternatively, perhaps Leave It to Psmith. There are entire walls of Wodehouse in bookstores all across England (seriously. WALLS), so I figured I should give him another go.

And I got a whole stack of books at Persephone Books, which specializes in reprinting beautiful editions of unjustly forgotten British women writers of the twentieth (and occasionally nineteenth) centuries. So basically it’s my dream bookstore and I feel rather wistful that I didn’t think of this brilliant idea first. Then again, no one seems to have done this for American writers yet...