A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Possibly because it is so cold, possibly because my writing brain has dried up, I have wanted to do nothing but read this week and I have read MANY books, starting with a boatload of Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and Her Unicorn graphic novels. I’ve now read all of them except #13, Unicorn Famous. Slightly sorry that I binged them rather than spreading out the joy a bit more, but you know what, sometimes you just want all the joy all at once.

On a less joyous note, I finished Alex Beam’s American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church, which spends the first half establishing why most of the non-Mormons around Nauvoo loathed Joseph Smith. I too would have reservations about a so-called prophet who set himself up as the temporal authority in a town of 10,000 of his most fanatical followers, who have set up their own large and constantly drilling militia! Especially if said so-called prophet also had the habit of informing teenage girls that God has told him that they are destined to become his plural wives, while publicly claiming that he’s definitely not practicing polygamy AT ALL.

This makes it all the more impressive that Beam manages to make the murder of Joseph Smith so terrifying in the second half of the book. Yes, a bad dude, yes, clearly something must be done, but summoning him to the country jail and then letting him cool his heels there for three days till one of the various anti-Mormon militias (everyone had a militia in the 1840s!) mobs the jail, tossing aside the six guards and storming up the steps to shoot Joseph and his brother to death. Clearly something must be done but also clearly NOT THAT.

And I finished Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s Sawdust in His Shoes, which is about a circus kid who accidentally ends up living on a farm for a year after his dad dies. I was on tenterhooks about how the book would manage to resolve this whole farm-circus dichotomy - having him abandon the circus for the farm is sort of like having a character abandon a magical land forever, and therefore unsatisfying, BUT having him leave the farm without a backward glance after spending an entire book establishing his life there is ALSO unsatisfying…

I won’t spoil exactly how the book squares this circle, but I will say that I DID find it very satisfying, and I also really enjoyed reading about mid-twentieth century circus life - in fact, just mid-twentieth century American life in general; to a modern reader, Joe’s life on a late forties farm seems just as foreign as his circus life.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which is currently misery porn about a medieval lesbian nun, who despite not wanting to be a nun at all has been assigned as prioress to a nunnery that is both starving AND suffering from a choking sickness. Has anyone read this? Does it get less miserable? Maybe I should give it up on the general grounds that my favorite nun book is Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede, which is about nuns who WANT to be nuns, and “I hate being a nun” nuns are never going to scratch the same itch.

What I Plan to Read Next

The 2022 Newbery Awards were announced on Monday, so my reading list just got an infusion of five new books! Fellow readers of Elatsoe may be pleased to hear that Darcie Little Badger got a Newbery Honor for her second novel, A Snake Falls to Earth.