A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last I’ve finished Bruce Catton’s Never Call Retreat! This is the final book in his Centennial History of the Civil War, and of course covers the end of the war. I hadn’t realized just how little territory the South had left by the end of 1864: at that point they’ve got Virginia and the Carolinas and some outlying bits of Texas and Florida, but basically the rest of the Confederacy is under Federal control. There’s no possible way they could win! And yet they keep going for three more months!

This seems to happen a lot in war history. Long wars really do end like a game of Risk: the winning side becomes clear long before the actual end, but the war nonetheless grinds on and on till the loser is totally defeated.

Also at long last (this was a week for finishing books I’ve been working on for ages), I finished Katharine Hull & Pamela Whitlock’s Crowns! This is the final book that Hull and Whitlock wrote together, their only collaboration not part of the Far-Distant Oxus trilogy, and, alas, not quite up to par with their other books. It’s a fantasy novel, but a fantasy constructed in a frame story: four cousins are going about their daily lives in London, then meet up at the yearly Christmas party, where they either have a magical adventure or perhaps just imagine a magical adventure in a land where they’re all kings and queens… I’ve read books that use this sort of ambiguity to good effect, but here it contributes to the general feeling that the book is underbaked.

I’ve been meaning to read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo for quite some time, and this week I finally got around to it! And I quite enjoyed it, although I must admit that I lost faith in the book when I realized that some of the quotes (many of the chapters are compilations for quotes describing, say, a White House soiree, or Abe Lincoln’s face, or what have you) are completely made up. They have citations and everything! And some of them are certainly ascribed to real people who really wrote about Lincoln (Elizabeth Keckley, William Herndon), and presumably those quotes are in fact quotes, but it bugs me that I don’t know for sure. The book would have really benefited from a history note.

Finally, I continued my Newbery journey with Walter and Marion Havighurst’s Song of the Pines: A Story of Norwegian Lumbering in Wisconsin, which is not only about Norwegian lumbering but Norwegian immigration in the mid-19th century more generally. Immigrant stories seem to have been quite popular in the 1950s (also pioneer stories), and this one also leans hard on the theme of What It Means to Be an American.

What I’m Reading Now

Still working on The Warmth of Other Suns. I’ve finished the first section, detailing life in the Jim Crow South; now the book has moved on to the migration, which met with enormous opposition in many southern communities, as the white landowners were determined not to lose their captive labor force.

Wilkerson draws a parallel between the South and the Soviet Union, which pleased me, as I extrapolated such a parallel from Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer, then wondered if it’s just that I have the Soviet Union on the brain… but if Wilkerson sees it too, presumably there’s something to it. It is curious that white Southerners tended to be the most vociferously anti-Soviet people in America while also living in the most Soviet system.

As a lighter counterpoint, I’ve begun Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm. Jones wrote this not long after the Tough Guide to Fantasyland, and I’m really curious if the earlier book inspired this one - did she just keep thinking, “What if there really were tours of Fantasyland? How would that affect the lives of the Fantasyland inhabitants?”

What I Plan to Read Next

John Davis Billings’ Hardtack and Coffee, highly recommended by Bruce Catton as one of the liveliest memoirs of everyday life in the army during the Civil War.

I was thinking of not doing another reading challenge for 2018, because many of the books I chose for the 2017 challenge were so lackluster - books that I'd been meaning to read and hadn't got around to and was happy to have finished largely because that meant I could knock them off my mental list.

Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, Pam Munoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising, and - oh, how this pains me! - Isobelle Carmody's The Red Queen all fell in this category. Few series have disappointed me quite like Obernewtyn did in the end (probably because I have loved few series the way I loved Obernewtyn in the beginning) and it pains me.

But then I finished Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, and I might never have read that book at all had I not have a challenge for "a book with an unreliable narrator or ambiguous ending" - and speaking of ambiguous endings! Good Lord! I am not sure if I'm frustrated or incredibly impressed or WHAT, exactly, I feel about it (in fact I may need to reread the book again before I decide; clearly another book to add to my list of books to buy) - but. In any case. It's certainly very ambiguous.

And it also seemed like a good enough reason to do another reading challenge, because surely the point of a reading challenge is to read books that you might not ever otherwise read? Perhaps I've simply taken the wrong approach by using the reading challenge for books that I meant to get around to someday...

But then the Sayers' books I read this summer clearly fall into that category, and they were excellent in every way. So maybe there is no overarching point - at least not about how to select books.

Anyway! In the end I decided to go with the Modern Mrs. Darcy 2018 Reading Challenge, because I've done the Modern Mrs. Darcy challenge for the past two years and it's worked pretty well for me. Here's the list of challenges:

- a classic you've been meaning to read (perhaps I should finally read Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White)
- a book recommended by someone with great taste (evelyn_b, I may hit you up for this one. I am going to have to insist on something shorter than the six volume set of Proust, though.)
- a book in translation (Finally a push to read The Brothers Karamazov!)
- a book nominated for an award in 2018 (This category will, again, be filled by a Newbery nominee)
- a book of poetry, a play, or an essay collection (Charles Lamb perhaps?)
- a book you can read in a day
- a book that's more than 500 pages (unless this is the category for The Brothers Karamozov. Or The Woman in White, for that matter. Clearly these are books I've been putting off because they're so ungodly long.)
- a book by a favorite author
- a book recommended by a librarian or an indie bookseller
- a banned book (Maybe I should finally read some Kurt Vonnegut?)
- a memoir, biography, or book of creative nonfiction
- a book by an author of a different race, ethnicity, or religion than your own

Thoughts? Ideas? Book recommendations?