A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Winter Cottage, a wonderful book! Near the beginning of the Great Depression, Minty and Eggs are on the road with their sweet but feckless father when their car breaks down… right next to someone’s charming isolated lakeshore summer cottage. As their current destination is the back bedroom of an aunt who emphatically does not want to put them up, they make only some half-hearted attempts to fix the car before settling into the cottage for the winter. (Conveniently, they arrive with a winter’s worth of provisions, left over from their father’s latest failed business venture: a grocery store.) Exactly as cozy as a book with such a premise should be.

I also read Gerald Durrell’s Catch Me a Colobus, because I realized that the local library has a few of his books I hadn’t read and instantly could not survive another moment with a fresh Gerald Durrell book in my life. This one is a bit of a hodgepodge, I suspect because Durrell wrote it swiftly to get funds to shore up his zoo, which is mostly what the first third of the book is about, as he returned from a collecting trip to find the zoo hovering on the edge of bankruptcy. We continue on a trip to Sierra Leone for his first BBC series (this is the bit that the title comes from, as colobus monkeys are high on his list for the collecting trip), and end with a trip to Mexico to collect the rare Teporingo, a volcano-dwelling rabbit in danger of extinction.

Although hopping from continent to continent like this makes the book a bit formless, Durrell’s prose is a delight as always. I love his metaphors, perfectly apt and entirely unexpected: the “slight squeak” of a Teporingo, “like somebody rubbing a damp thumb over a balloon,” or the experience of walking through a forest of massive bamboo stalks, which “creak and groan musically” in the slightest wind; “It must have sounded like that rounding the Horn in an old sailing ship in high wind.”

What I’m Reading Now

Traipsing along in Women’s Weird. In any anthology, the quality is inevitably a bit uneven, but overall it’s quite high. The scariest story so far is May Sinclair’s “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched” (a pair of lovers stuck together in Hell for all eternity, even though in life they deeply bored each other); Edith Wharton’s “Kerfol” is a classic spooky ghost story, while my favorite for sheer strength of voice is Edith Nesbit’s “The Shadow.” Oh, props to Margery Lawrence for making a saucepan deeply ominous in “The Haunted Saucepan.” The way it just sits there, boiling, on a cold stove…

I should be hitting D. K. Broster’s story (“Couching at the Door”) next week. Excited to report back!

What I Plan to Read Next

An account of getting distracted by Winter Cottage and Catch Me a Colobus, I have made almost no progress on the books I earnestly desired to make progress on last week. Well, such is the reading life. Sometimes a book comes along that you want to read more than anything else, and it’s best to strike while the iron is hot.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Dean Howells’ Tuscan Cities: Travels through the Heart of Old Italy, a collection of Howells’ travel writings about a trip he took through Tuscany in 1883. I approached this with trepidation because I found his earlier travel book, about his time as consul to Venice during the Civil War, rather dull. But either my tastes have changed or Howells hit his stride as a travel writer in the intervening twenty years, because I really enjoyed this one—maybe it helped that I’ve visited many of the cities he’s discussing? I particularly enjoyed his description of walking the walls of Lucca and peeping into the gardens below, because I did the exact same thing.

He’s also uncompromisingly anti-Medici, which is refreshing. Sure, the Medici were generous patrons of the arts, but Howells is not going to let that blind him to the fact that they toppled the Florentine republic and tyrranized over its people! (Next installment of “How to Be a Better Dictator”: suborn the artists! People will be eager to whitewash your reign if only it produces a few sublime paintings or maybe a nice concerto.)

I also just finished Doris Gates’s Lord of the Sky, Zeus, which retells a smattering of the more famous Zeus-related legends. (Also some legends that Gates just felt like retelling, I think. Zeus doesn’t play a big role in the story of Daedalus, but here it is regardless.)

As I’ve been looking into the library holdings of these various mid-century authors, I’ve discovered that an astonishing number of them wrote mythology retellings and biographies. (I suspect that writing biographies in the mid twentieth century was way more fun than writing a biography now, as there was no need to bother one's head about footnotes.)

What I’m Reading Now

There have been GRAND REVERSALS in Sir Isumbras at the Ford. ( Spoilers )

What I Plan to Read Next

Hard to say! I am planning a trip to France, so perhaps it is time to start rounding up France-related books to enrich my journey.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A couple more Rumer Goddens. The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle is delightful retelling of a folktale with enchanting illustrations by Mairi Hedderwick, including a cross-section of the “vinegar bottle,” that is to say, the cylindrical two-story cottage, one room on top of the other with a thatched round roof on top. I love cross-sections (one of my favorite ever Brambly Hedge illustrations is the cross-section of a tree trunk that is a mouse palace) and this one is infinitely appealing in the small perfect snugness of the house.

Also Mouse House, illustrated by Adrienne Adams, in which a little girl is given a little house with a couple of boring little mouse dolls… only eventually the mouse house ends up in the cellar, where a real mouse family moves in, and Mary sometimes goes to the cellar to watch them frolic. Cute! Will probably forget this book in its entirety.

I also read Doris Gates’ A Filly for Melinda, the sequel to A Morgan for Melinda, which suffers as sequels often do from a drop-off in quality from the first book… However, the drop-off is not severe here. I still enjoyed Melinda’s voice, and it was nice to revisit her and her family and her horses (now supplemented by Merry Jo’s baby filly, Little Missy); it just felt inessential.

What I’m Reading Now

In Sir Isumbras at the Ford, ( spoilers )

Meanwhile, in E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat, America has entered World War II. White seems positively relieved by this development, which I understand: it’s much easier to deal with an actual disaster than to live indefinitely in its impending shadow.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have Daphne DuMaurier’s The Flight of the Falcon, about which I know nothing except that Daphne DuMaurier wrote it. In fact I’ve been eyeing DuMaurier’s extended oeuvre, as you might say, by which I mean the books beyond Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn. Any recs or anti-recs?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A school of flying fish flashed by, skimming the surface of the waves like a flock of great silver-blue dragonflies. They dazzled and were gone. You had to be looking at just the right moment, to see flying fish, and then you were never sure you really had—even though you knew you had—it was a sight so bright, beautiful, brief.

Mary Stolz had a knack for writing books that take on classic problem-novel subjects without feeling like problem novels. In Go and Catch a Flying Fish, Taylor and Jem’s parents are lurching fight by fight toward the cusp of divorce, and this is a real and heavy thing that is hanging over their heads, but it never becomes the entirety of their lives or of the book. Taylor’s love of birds, Jem’s love of ocean fish (every three weeks he empties his aquarium and refills it with fish he catches from the bay), give it a lightness, a sense of perspective—an opening out beyond the characters’ personal problems, painful though those problems sometimes are.

This book is the precursor to What Time of Night Is It?, which I read first. Both books more or less stand alone, so this wasn’t really a problem, but nonetheless I wish the fact that the books are linked was indicated in some way on Mary Stolz’s Wikipedia page. (Which probably means I should do it myself. I could point out the Thomas and Grandfather quartet as well… Is it hard to edit a Wikipedia page?)

In 1959, Mary Stolz published Emmett’s Pig, which achieved such long-lasting success that three decades later, in 1991, she published a sequel, King Emmett the Second… in which she promptly killed Emmett’s pig. When Emmett’s parents arranged for a farmer to keep a pet pig for their pig-loving son, they evidently did not arrange that this pig should not be killed for bacon, which frankly seems pretty careless!

Emmett ends up getting a dog instead, which really does seem like a better choice for a pet than a pig he only gets to see once a month. But honestly I’m puzzled by the decision to begin the sequel by killing the pig whose acquisition was the happy ending of the previous book.

What I’m Reading Now

I waffled about getting The Romantic Friendship Reader, a collection of 19th-century short stories and excerpts from novels in which romantic friendships between men play a large role, because I knew it was going to add a bunch of books to my reading list. And lo, it has! Clearly I’ll need to read Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme, in which a cynical wayfarer (his cynicism a thin veneer over his idealism) meets a dreamy artist, which whom he takes long night walks through New York City. Possibly also more of Bret Hart’s western short stories. (The introduction to the story anthologized here, “Tenneessee’s Partner,” notes that it wasn’t uncommon for two men in the west to bach it together all their lives.)

Trundling forward in E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat. World War II has struck, and White is rereading his own youthful journals written as World War I raged in Europe: all ice skating and canoe trips, and occasional musings that perhaps he should think more about the war, but somehow youth kept breaking in even after America joined.

In D. K. Broster’s Sir Isumbras at the Ford, we are on the cusp of learning the Chevalier de la Vireville’s Tragic Backstory! Also the attempted Royalist invasion of France is falling apart due to the incompetence of the commanders, and now the invasion force is all hemmed in on a peninsula rather than fanning out into the countryside, oops.

What I Plan to Read Next

D. E. Stevenson’s Summerhills is here! And I put an interlibrary loan on Doris Gates’ A Filly for Melinda, too. The speed of the interlibrary loan office is really going to spoil me.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Two Mary Stolz books! First, Night of Ghosts and Hermits, the ghosts and hermits of course being species of crab, for the book tells the story of the various sea creatures on the beach at night: hermit crabs searching for larger shells, a heron looking for ghost crabs to eat, a sea turtle dragging herself up the beach to lay her eggs. I found it oddly hard fix my attention on it, but a child with an interest in natural history might find it just the thing.

Second, Bartholomew Fair, which was such a blast from the past for me. In my youth I went through a Tudor phase, in part because children’s publishing was going through a Tudor phase so many fine books were available (although I missed this one somehow), so it was a breath from my childhood to read about these six characters lives’ intersecting at Bartholomew Fair in the late days of Elizabeth I’s reign. Six was perhaps a bit too ambitious for such a slender book – the story might be stronger if it were not so diffuse – but I enjoyed the Tudor London atmosphere of it all.

I also slogged to the end of Agnes Danforth Hewes’ Spice and the Devil’s Cave. Man, these 1930s Newbery books are feast or famine: either I have a great time or I’m dragging myself through by my fingertips, praying for the sweet release of the final chapter. This one is set in Portugal, right before Vasco da Gama sailed around Cape Horn (a.k.a. the Devil’s Cave) to find a direct route to the spices of India. Rather than follow Gama (which would at least be an adventure) we stick around Lisbon for a paint-by-numbers love story.

A point of interest: Hewes is attempting to fight anti-Semitism by showcasing the efforts of Jewish financiers in funding Gama’s voyage. (Since the book was published in 1930, when Hitler and the Nazis were not on the general American radar, Hewes is undoubtedly aiming this at homegrown anti-Semites.) The modern audience, seeing the Age of Exploration through the eyes of post-colonial theory, may wince, but the 1930s reader is expected to see this as a good and heroic thing.

What I’m Reading Now

No progress in Sir Isumbras at the Ford. (I may have to revise my reading strategy for this one, or else it will take ages to get through the book.) I have, however, begun reading E. B. White’s essay collection One Man’s Meat, one essay each morning with my morning cup of tea.

Here are his musings on television, in 1938 when it was still a scientific novelty rather than a home furnishing: “Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images—distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals…”

I think that this prophecy (with the addition of internet sights and sounds, of course) has been more than fulfilled.

What I Plan to Read Next

Pining quietly for Further Chronicles of Avonlea. WILL the library ever bring it to me? Only time can tell…

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carol Ryrie Brink’s A Chain of Hands is not so much a personal memoir as a collection of essays about people Brink remembered from her childhood: “Those I remember best are unimportant people. When I have stopped remembering them, they will cease to exist in this world. So I must write in order to save a few of the faces that belong to a few of the hands…”

A fascinating impressionist image of life in a quiet college town in Idaho around 1900. There isn’t a lot of direct information about Brink’s writing career, but it did confirm that many of her books are based very closely on life. Caddie Woodlawn grew from her grandmother’s stories of her childhood, Two Are Better than One and Louly from Brink’s childhood, and Family Grandstand and Family Sabbatical from Brink’s grown-up life as a faculty wife at the University of Minnesota. (No wonder she did such a spectacular job evoking that big Midwestern university feeling!) I wonder if the Brink family really did take a sabbatical in France…

What I’m Reading Now

In Sir Isumbras at the Ford, Raymonde is on the scene!!! ( Spoilers )

What I Plan to Read Next

In A Chain of Hands, Carol Ryrie Brink reminisces about her college friendship with McKinley Helm (who wrote the state song of Idaho in a college song contest), and recommends his book Spring in Spain, “which detailed his travels with his wife and two Pekinese dogs and a large box of books.” Doesn’t that sound delightful?

But it falls in that awkward mid-century period where the books are still in copyright, but most libraries don’t keep them because they’re decades old. I could probably get it through ILL, but now, perhaps, is not the time… but I record it here on the theory that perhaps I will run across this note again at a quieter time in my life, and decide that it is indeed time for Spring in Spain.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A couple of Newbery Honor books from the 1930s. I got so caught up in Sarah Lindsay Schmidt’s New Land that I stayed up a couple of extra hours to finish it. After years of wandering, the Morgan family has settled on a claim on a new federal irrigation project, and seventeen-year-old Sayre is determined to prove the claim so her family can finally settle down and stay put. In pursuit of her goal, she signs up for a part-time vocational agriculture class at the high school.

Sayre is the only girl in the class, but this is emphatically not a book about a girl blazing a trail in a male-dominated field. It’s not even a school story. Although Sayre attends the classes, the book is almost entirely about her putting what she’s learned into practice on the claim, and more generally about the revolutionary potential of vocational agriculture education to train even wholly inexperienced city slickers such as Sayre and her brother Charley to make a living on the land. (The author’s husband was a vocational agriculture teacher - the book is dedicated to him - and I strongly suspect he’s the model for the kind, thoughtful, inspiring teacher in the book.)

Reading it now is a little bittersweet, as it’s pointing toward a future that didn’t come to pass. The world of family farms in which Sayre and Charley live would be largely swept away a couple decades later by post-war government agricultural policies that favored enormous factory farms.

The other Newbery Honor book was Elsie Singmaster’s Swords of Steel, which is set mostly in Gettysburg from 1859 to 1865, and it’s one of those historical fiction novels which wants to schlep its hero to as many historical events as possible: as well as Gettysburg (which is fair enough when your hero is in fact a Gettysburgian), we take in Harper’s Ferry and Appomattox. There’s nothing wrong with it exactly, but I just never came to care very much about the characters, so it was a bit of a slog.

What I’m Reading Now

Sir Isumbras at the Ford is galloping along! Last week, I expressed concern that the two old ladies youg Anne-Hilarion was visiting were Not All That They Seemed; this week, ( spoilers )

I am continually impressed by Broster’s talent for intuiting major fanfic genres of the future. I don’t usually read kidfic, but part two of this book is A+ kidfic, right down to the part where poor Anne-Hilarion, overcome by just a trifle too much adventure, throws a temper tantrum in a post-chaise. Honestly impressed that he remained so calm for so long!

What I Plan to Read Next

I just realized that the library had a copy of L.M. Boston’s childhood memoir Perverse and Foolish... and foolishly put it on hold, despite knowing full well that sometimes when you put an old book on hold, they decide to weed the book from the collection rather than send it to fulfill your hold!

I really hate it when they do this. Couldn’t they send it out for one last circ, since clearly someone wants it enough to ask for it? Put a note on it! Weed it out when it comes back! Why must they torment me in this way!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished D. K. Broster’s The Yellow Poppy! ( Spoilers )

littlerhymes and I finished Alan Garner’s Elidor, a portal fantasy in which the children are only in the fantasy world for, like, four chapters. They spend the rest of the book home in Manchester trying to protect the magical Treasures that their liaison in Elidor entrusted to them. Garner never does quite what you expect! Although he is very predictable in the sense that the endings always seem to cut off abruptly about two sentences after the climax.

I also read Carol Ryrie Brink’s The Highly Trained Dogs of Professor Petit, which is about a showman whose troop of highly trained dogs are under threat from an unscrupulous competitor who lures in the crowds with his tiger act! Short and cute.

And I read Jennie D. Lindquist’s The Little Silver House, a sequel to her exquisite The Golden Name Day, and just as good as the first book. These books are about happy Swedish-American children having good times and enjoying the fun traditions of their Swedish heritage, like having a picnic at dawn to sing and watch the sun come up.

What I’m Reading Now

My St. Patrick Day reads have been derailed slightly by illness, but I am nonetheless traipsing ahead. In R. A. MacAvoy’s The Grey Horse, Ruairi just rescued the runaway son of the local landowner, and also murdered the Crown agent that said landowner had called in to investigate local Nationalist unrest.

Meanwhile, in Maeve Binchy’s Circle of Friends.... Oh gosh so much is happening in this book. DELIGHTED that Benny finally managed to run the Uriah-Heepish Sean Walsh out of her father’s clothing store. LESS delighted that Sean Walsh proposed marriage to the rich widow who owns the hotel across the street and was immediately accepted, not despite but because of the fact that Mrs. Healy knows all about his crimes. “This will make it easy to keep him under my thumb!” Mrs. Healy thinks. WILL IT, MRS. HEALY? I mean, maybe it will. Mrs. Healy certainly has a spine of steel and a heart to match, so really she and Sean are made for each other.

What I Plan to Read Next

Jennie D. Lindquist’s The Crystal Tree, the third and last book in her trilogy. These appear to be the only books she ever wrote, but WHAT a set of books.

Also, I want to add a Maeve Binchy to my St. Patrick’s Day list for next year. Any suggestions?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I enjoyed Nicholas Best’s The Greatest Day in History so much that I followed it up with his companion piece about the final days of World War II, Five Days that Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II.

The Greatest Day in History is a structural tour de force, drawing together disparate voices all over Europe to provide a multifaceted view of the same event: the armistice that ended World War I. Five Days that Shocked the World, although full of similarly fascinating detail, is more diffuse, and therefore feels less than the sum of its parts rather than more.

It actually ends a week before V-E Day, so although all the different threads are moving together, they don’t quite tie up in the end. Instead you’ve got separate stories: Mussolini’s execution in Italy, British and American forces discovering Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, Hitler’s suicide in Berlin and the consequent rush of all the Nazi higher-ups to get away and backstab each other…

What I’m Reading Now

In The Yellow Poppy, the Duc de Trelan is going to surrender to Napoleon’s Republican forces under a safe conduct pass… only the Republicans have secretly rescinded the safe conduct, so when the Duc goes to surrender he will be in grave danger!!! The Duc’s erstwhile enemy/romantic rival de Brencourt rushed to the Duc to tell him of these rescinded passes, only for the Duc to contemptuously brush aside his warning (can’t blame him; earlier in the story, de Brencourt know the Duc’s supposedly dead wife was alive and didn’t tell the Duc), and is riding directly into danger!

What I Plan to Read Next

Time to start my Irish books for St. Patrick’s Day! I’m especially looking forward to Seamus O’Reilly’s Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? (I know this was recced by someone on my flist… I think maybe especially in audiobook form? If this was you, please advise!)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Other Wind, the last book in the Earthsea series. I deeply enjoyed Tenar’s discussions with the Kargad princess who has been dumped on the archipelago without a word of the language among people she has been raised to believe are wicked soul-stealing sorcerers. That intense culture shock - that’s the good stuff.

Otherwise… hmm. I admire Le Guin’s willingness to blow up her own worldbuilding from earlier books without necessarily admiring the way that she executed said explosion. In particular, I really struggled with the big shift in dragon worldbuilding in book four, and unfortunately the dragons are big in all three of the last books so you just can’t get away from it.

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Family Grandstand is a family story of the kind beloved and popular in the mid-twentieth century: think Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-King Family or Eleanor Estes’s The Moffats. I don’t think many books in this subgenre are being published now, but perhaps it’s due for a revival.

Anyway, I particularly enjoyed this one as it takes place near Midwestern University, the large land-grant college where the children’s father works as a professor, and in short reminded me a lot of my own childhood. Of course in some ways this milieu changed a lot between the book’s publication in 1952 and my own 1990s childhood - one of the plot points in the books is that it’s shameful that the Terrible Torrances are so badly behaved that they still need a babysitter even though they are six years old (and that babysitter is eleven!) - but the atmosphere of a college town on a football weekend remains absolutely spot on.

Deeply relieved to inform you that Annie Fellows Johnston took pity on us all in Mary Ware in Texas, and decided to allow a successful surgery on Mary’s brother Jack’s horribly painful paralyzing spinal fracture from last book. (I realize that I’m supposed to be against miracle cures for social justice reasons but it was too cruel to inflict that on a character ten books into a series.)

Also fascinated to see that a potential suitor has appeared for Mary’s sister Joyce! I really thought Joyce would end out the series as a spinster artist living with her friends in New York City, but now her old friend Jules is on the scene. Of course Mary dismisses the possibility with the comment “Oh, it never can be anything but friendship in this case... Jules is two years younger than Joyce,” but this seems like an extremely superable obstacle to me, so we shall see!

What I’m Reading Now

In The Yellow Poppy, D. K. Broster has at last introduced the yellow poppy of the title: a late-blooming yellow poppy called bride of the waves. The duchesse plucks one for the duc, only for the petals to blow away at once in the stiff breeze… FORESHADOWING MUCH? However, I recall the cruelly misleading foreshadowing in The Flight of the Heron, and sincerely hope that Broster is playing the same trick on us this time!

In David Copperfield, David is beginning to have a wisp of an inkling that perhaps - just perhaps! - marrying the silliest girl in all England was not, perhaps, the recipe for marital happiness. He is gamely attempting not to allow this realization to bloom to full consciousness, which is probably for the best, given the state of English divorce laws at the time and also the fact that Dora would probably wither away and die if thrust out into the cruel world on her own. You’ve made your bed and you must lie in it, sir!

What I Plan to Read Next

I accidentally another stack of World War I books at the library.