A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Carries On, in which World War II begins, and Mrs. Tim tries to keep on keeping on even while worrying about air raids, the beginning of rationing, and most of all her husband who didn’t make it back to England during the evacuation of Dunkirk… A bit heavier than some of Stevenson’s other works but still full of her gentle charm.

I’m surprised this book wasn’t reprinted during the rash of D. E. Stevenson reprints a few years ago – there’s a big market for World War II fiction and I think modern readers would enjoy it.

I also finished John Le Carre’s Smiley’s People, in which ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve stolen genarti’s New Year’s Resolution to read at least one unread book that I already own each month, so this month I’m reading a book about the history of servants in England in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (Actually it seems to be mostly Edwardian with a few forays earlier.) Very interesting!

What I Plan to Read Next

After years of procrastination, I’m going to read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Gaelic Ghosts, a collection of Scottish ghost stories. The preface is as charming as the stories themselves, for Nic Leodhas reminisces about where she learned the stories: this tale of a ghost dog from an uncle, the tale of the Lady’s Loaf-Field from a great aunt… a peek into an oral tradition.

Also D. E. Stevenson’s Amberwell, a family saga that starts in the 1920s and stretches till just after World War II. Amberwell is the name of the family estate, and Stevenson is so good at writing about places in a way that makes you see them; and so good, too, at writing characters who feel like real people, some of them nice and some of them dreadful (the parents in this book! Their motto is “never explain,” which tells you just about everything you need to know about their parenting style), but vivid and lively and a pleasure to spend time with. Reading her books is like going on a visit.

And also Hilary McKay’s Lulu and the Dog from the Sea. One of the delightful things about deciding to read through an author’s entire catalog is that it leads you to wonderful finds, like this series of easy readers about Lulu and her cousin (and best friend) Mellie, who are always getting into scrapes on account of Lulu’s love of animals. I don’t usually read easy readers, but McKay combines a simple writing style with a cracking good story about befriending a stray dog on a seaside holiday. Highly recommended as a present for a child learning to read, especially if the child loves animals.

What I’m Reading Now

This week in Sir Isumbras at the Ford, I’ve reached the end of book two. ( Spoilers )

Also continuing on in E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat. We’re in May 1939 now (these essays were originally written as columns for Harper’s) and the threat of war hangs in the air like a fog, its tendrils winding through the cracks even into White’s chicken coop.

What I Plan to Read Next

The sequel to Amberwell, Summerhills. I shall have to put an interlibrary loan on it, so it will be a bit... but on the other hand the Purdue interlibrary loan office was EXTREMELY on the ball with Mary Stolz's Go and Catch a Flying Fish (about which more anon!), so perhaps it will be here soon!

I was a bit afraid I’d let too much time elapse after reading D. E. Stevenson’s Vittoria Cottage before getting my grubby hands on the sequel, Music in the Hills, but as Stevenson says in the forward, the sequel is absolutely meant to stand alone, and also the relevant details flooded back as I was reading. So glad that Caroline and Mr. Shepperton are happy together!

This book focuses on Caroline’s son James, back from the war in Malaya, who is starting off his civilian life by staying with his aunt and uncle at their farm, Mureth. He goes there partly to learn the art of farming - he begins with the charmingly naive impression that he’ll spend six months or so in apprenticeship before he’s ready to strike out on his own - but also to escape an unhappy love affair: he has been refused by his childhood friend and lady-love Rhoda Ware, a gifted painter who believes that she can’t pursue both art and marriage.

As with most Stevenson books, a love affair provides the backbone for the novel (not to mention a convenient stopping point), but also as in most Stevenson novels, the muscle and sinew of the book come from the community around the main pair. In both Vittoria Cottage and Music in the Hills, this aspect is particularly strong: I loved exploring Mureth with James, getting to know the farm laborers there and also the people in the wider world around the farm. In this book I particularly loved James’s Aunt Mamie and her relationship with her husband Jock - a really lovely portrait of a strong, successful, long-lived marriage, which has thrived despite Mamie and Jock’s disappointment at realizing they can’t have children.

I’m not letting the grass grow under my feet this time: I’ve already placed an interlibrary loan on Winter and Rough Weather, the third book in the Vittoria Cottage trilogy! I’m hoping that it will explore more deeply ( Spoilers for Music in the Hills )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Because I liked Frances Little’s The Lady of the Decoration so much, I decided to read another one of her books, Little Sister Snow - and discovered on the very first page that it was illustrated by a fellow named Genjiro Kataoka, an early twentieth-century Japanese-American illustrator who was tremendously popular for Japanese-themed books, including Yone Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, which I have marked down for further reading.

It’s fortunate that I got so much enjoyment out of Genjiro Kataoka’s existence (and his lovely illustrations), because the book itself is a bit of a wash. I was pleasantly surprised that The Lady of the Decoration was so refreshingly low on stereotypes, but evidently Little was saving them all up to use in Little Sister Snow. The book is in the POV of a Japanese maiden who attends an American missionary school, and even with the missionary school connection, it seems that was just a bridge too far from her own experience for Little to grapple with successfully.

However, the award for “most racist book read this week” definitely goes to Jean Webster’s The Four-Pools Mystery. I really had no reason to expect better of Jean Webster, but I love Daddy-Long-Legs so much that I did. The book was published in 1908 and takes place on a post-bellum Virginia plantation and is steeped in the racial attitudes of the time, although at the end it struck me that Webster intended the book to be anti-racist.

Or, as her New York reporter detective explains to the Virginians at the end, his ability to solve the crime that baffled them “proves another thing… which is a thing that you people don’t seem to have grasped; and that is that negroes are human beings and have feelings like the rest of us. Poor old Colonel Gaylord paid a terrible price for not having learned it earlier in life.”

You see, a black vagrant murdered Colonel Gaylord because he was mad that the Colonel had given him a thrashing. The Virginians couldn’t imagine that a black man might hold a grudge about getting thrashed (“it comes natural to niggers to be whipped and they don’t mind it,” the sheriff informs the skeptical reporter) so they didn’t consider the vagrant as a suspect.

Now I realize that racists have believed a lot of weird things, but I just don’t believe that racism has ever rendered anyone incapable of pinning a crime on a convenient black vagrant.

To add insult to injury, the mystery itself is poorly done, too. The narrator is clearly intended to play Watson to the reporter-detective’s Holmes, but a Watson needs to be at least as smart as the reader, not a total bozo who can’t figure out the most obvious things.

I also read D. E. Stevenson’s Celia’s House, which I really liked (it turns out that it’s a stealth retelling of Mansfield Park, and this version actually has enough time for the Fanny & Edmund characters to fall in love at the end. Also, no one is against plays qua plays), but I’m too worn out from writing about the others to write about it properly. Maybe I should do a separate weekly Obscure Old Books post to space things out a little.

What I’m Reading Now

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Short stories are generally not my thing, but I’ve been enjoying these, in a “I would probably like any one of these more if it were a novel and I had more time to get to know the characters” sort of way. So far my favorite is “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.”

I’ve also begun listening to Kevin Henkes’ Junonia, which is not bad. Olive’s Ocean wasn’t bad either. I was going to say that this would be my last Kevin Henkes book, because there’s not enough time in the world to waste it on “not bad,” but it turns out he got a Newbery Honor for The Year of Billy Miller, so there’s at least one more in my future.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Year of Billy Miller, probably. (I’ve decided to get cracking on my Newbery Honor project.) Should I read it on paper, or listen to it as an audiobook? An important question.

In fact it looks like most of the recent Newbery Honor books are available as audiobooks. I’ll need to give this some thought.

What I’ve Finished Reading

I finished Welcome to Night Vale: The Novel. The propulsive force in the plot did eventually grab me and drag me along, but ultimately I wasn’t too impressed with the book; I feel like Night Vale’s world-building probably works much better in radio program form than as a novel, where you have to try to get down to brass tacks about how people actually live in this bizarre and terrible town.

So I might still give the podcast a try someday? But I don’t think the novel is worth reading unless you’re a Night Vale completist or just super into the creepypasta aesthetic.

I also read Elizabeth Yates’ charming Mountain Born, a Newbery Honor book from 1944. (I have sometimes thought about trying to read all the Newbery Honor books, but there are so many! And I think it would be hard to get my hands on the older ones…)

Anyway! Mountain Born is about young Peter growing up in a mountain community and learning how to be a good shepherd, with all sorts of interesting details about sheep and shepherding folded beautifully into the narrative - it’s a bit like the parts in the Little House books where Ma is making butter or Pa is putting together a makeshift door hinge, and the fun of reading it is in learning about how people at the time did things? The success mode of infodump, basically.

Of course ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

D. E. Stevenson’s The Four Graces, the story of the four sisters of the Grace family, all daughters of a village parson. It’s perfectly charming - all the D. E. Stevenson books I’ve read has been perfectly charming, and I am tempted to go out and get all the rest that the Indianapolis Public Library has, but on the other hand I think I ought to keep them in reserve for those times when I hit a reading drought.

Anyway, this book has the odd distinction of being a cozily charming tale of home and village life while also being set at the tail end of World War II (which is when it was written; it was published in 1946). I love World War II books (and movies. And TV shows. And superheroes), but generally speaking they are not full of coziness.

I also really liked the way that the book dealt with its religious themes - it’s not a main theme in the book by any means, but because Mr. Grace is a parson it does come up, and I was glad that Stevenson let it come up and even more pleased because she had interesting things to say. Religious experience often seems to be relegated off to the side in modern fiction, and I can understand why that’s so, but at the same time it’s such a big part of the human experience that it seems like cutting out all mention of food, say, except in books that are specifically designated Food Books and shelved in their own special part of the bookstore.

What I Plan to Read Next

Grace Lin has a new book out! When the Sea Turned to Silver, a third book in her marvelously illustrated series of chapter books loosely based on Chinese folklore. (They’re not a series in the sense that the stories build on each other; they simply share a similar sensibility, and of course the gorgeous illustrations.) I loved the first one, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, and I have high hopes that I’ll love this one just as much.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Fellow fans of mid-twentieth-century British literature! I have a treat for you! I have just finished reading D. E. Stevenson’s Miss Buncle’s Book, which is about a sweet English spinster who writes a book about her fellow townsfolk and thus ignites scandal in her little country village.

If you’re a fan of Stella Gibbons’ books or Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day - even some of Ngaio Marsh’s country village murder mysteries - this is an absolutely splendid book in much the same vein. It has wry humor and vivid characterization and that wonderful command of language that makes British books from the 1930s and 40s such a joy to read.

(A more modern book that captures a similar style - on account of being set in the period - is The Guernsy Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which I also love. My mother and I have very different tastes in books, but we both enjoyed this one.)

What I’m Reading Now

Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. I was sitting around, going “What French books can I read that are not one thousand pages long?” - answer: NONE, all French novels worth their salt are that long; and then I remembered Jules Verne! He wrote perfectly respectable novels! I have been meaning to read some of his work!

In fact I attempted to read Journey to the Center of the Earth last spring, and didn’t even make it into the volcano. But doubtless the experiment will be more successful this time! I have just finished the first chapter, and Passepartout-the-new-manservant seems promising.

What I’m Reading Next

My parents are coming to visit this weekend, and Mom has promised to bring down the box set of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, so I’m finally going to get around to that.