A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, which is lots of fun if you love punctuation and anecdotes about the New Yorker editorial office. (It’s definitely stronger on the punctuation front than the anecdote front, somewhat to my surprise. I also enjoyed the chapter about profanity.) I read the chapter about dashes with particular attention, because I’ve been contemplating changing how I style my dashes. Currently I do them with spaces on either side, which can create weird formatting in print (basically, the dash will fall on a new line, sundered from word before it), which I thought using M-dashes without spaces might solve…

But evidently that’s just how computers format dashes. Maybe I should just use fewer dashes? That might be sensible, but my whole soul revolts against this solution.

At work we’ve been assigned to read Ibram X. Kendi & Jason Reynold’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, which is an abridged version of Kendi’s hefty tome Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. I realize that the library probably had good reason not to assign us all a five-hundred-page-long book, but I would probably prefer the long version, because it might make me feel less talked down to. Stamped is an abridgement aimed at teenagers and boy could I feel it.

I spent a lot of time going, “Wait, but it’s more complicated than that. How can you lump Puritan New England and colonial Virginia together as if they’re culturally and economically indistinguishable? How can you skim over the Civil War so fast? (It occurs to me that it’s hard to explain the Civil War once you’ve rendered regional distinctions illegible. This may also explain why the book is vague about the Great Migration.) How can you just skip Reconstruction?”

Also at work, I’ve been spending a lot of time on door duty (ensuring that everyone who comes in is wearing a mask and that the building stays below capacity), so I’ve been looking for short books to read while on door. Thus, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means.

Although I got them because they’re both short, they both turn out to have a number of other commonalities: they are both intensely evocative of place (a convenience store in modern Tokyo; a girls’ residential hotel in World War II London), neither cares particularly whether the characters are likable, and in both books I felt that the author was trying to make a point which I didn’t fully grasp, although I enjoyed the view into the complexities of their seemingly mundane worlds so much that it didn’t really matter.

And finally, I read E. F. Benson’s David Blaize and the Blue Door, which is an Alice in Wonderland-ish fantasy that has absolutely nothing to do with the original David Blaize. Benson could just as well have named the hero Otis Crumpet. Possibly he connected the two as a fiendish marketing ploy to draw in unsuspecting readers who enjoyed the first book?

What I’m Reading Now

I was hoping that I had grown into William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, but alas, I’m still finding it a hard slog. Still, I have persevered, and it’s becoming slightly less hard as I get used to the fact that the characters sometimes speak in poems of ten stanzas.

However, I think perhaps I have grown into Willa Cather. I didn’t like Song of the Skylark when I read it in college, but last year I enjoyed My Antonia, and now I’m reading O Pioneers! (by way of research for a book I’m contemplating) and enjoying it too. I’ve always been a sucker for immigrant stories.

What I Plan to Read Next

E. Lockhart has a new book out (Again Again) and guess who is going to read it? ME, apparently. I saw it on the shelf and couldn’t resist it. E. Lockhart, why can’t I quit you?

IMOGEN is a runaway heiress, an orphan, a cook, and a cheat.

JULE is a fighter, a social chameleon, and an athlete.

An intense friendship. A disappearance. A murder, or maybe two.

“How nice,” I thought, as I read this flap copy on E. Lockhart’s latest book, Genuine Fraud. “An E. Lockhart book where the female friends actually care about each other and their friendship is central to the plot. That will be a departure.”

HA! HA! HA!

( spoilers )

What particularly pisses me off is that the book’s dedication is “For anyone who has been taught that good equals small and silent, here is my heart with all its ugly tangles and splendid fury.” Lockhart doesn’t seem to realize that it matters what you are splendidly furious about, and what you do with that fury. Murdering an innocent person in a fit of rage doesn’t make a character a feminist hero.

I finally got over The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks enough to read E. Lockhart’s earlier novel, Dramarama, which I enjoyed, although it was a very different book than I expected. Whoever wrote the flap description is simultaneously a genius - who wouldn’t want to read a book about

...a season of hormones,
gold lame,
hissy fits,
jazz hands,
song and dance,
true love,
and unitards
that will determine their future
--and test their friendship?

- and also kind of a terrible summary writer, because that description is going to sucker in a lot of people who want to read about a girl (and her gay best friend, which I realize sounds like a recipe for stereotype-ville, but actually Demi the gay BFF is quite well-developed beyond his surface fabulosity) finding their true home and heart family in the theater. Kind of like Menolly in the Harper Hall trilogy, but without fire lizards.

Dramarama is not that book. It’s so emphatically not that book that it’s practically a deconstruction of the trope.

The narrator, Sadye (which is pronounced Sadie, and yes I stumbled over the spelling for the entire book), is a fish out of water in her hometown: too intense, too interested in musical theater, entirely too much. She and her BFF Demi make their way to summer drama camp, where they intends to find their people and embark on a fabulous new life.

At first it seems like Sadye’s having typical protagonist struggles (she doesn’t get the part she wants any of the musicals, the boy she likes doesn’t notice her, the play director is totally incompetent…). The normal difficulties that make triumph all the sweeter when it arrives.

Only it never arrives. Sadye becomes increasingly aware that she’s a fish out of water at drama camp, too: only here it’s because she’s less talented, less intense, less special than everyone else. As she grows more aware of her own shortcomings, she becomes less cooperative with her teachers and more critical of what she sees as the cult-leader status of the director. The director of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is clearly leading them toward a performance as disastrous as the previous summer’s legendarily terrible production of Oedipus Rex. All the actors know it, so why should they stay silent?

(The book doesn’t spell this out - I'm not even sure it meant to imply the possibility - but if Sadye overcomes her disenchantment with the theater, I think she might consider becoming a director herself. She certainly has strong enough feelings about staging.)

I don’t often read YA books and wonder what I would have thought of them when I was a teenager, but I really did with this book. Reading it at 25, I found it thought-provoking; I’ve spent a certain amount of time since I read it wondering about Sadye’s future. Will she conclude that musical theater is simply not her metier and recover her self-confidence? Or will she decide that her bad experience at theater camp proves she’s simply not special?

But if I had read Dramarama for the first time as a high schooler, I wonder if I would have felt betrayed. It does feel kind of like a slap at the face to all those ugly duckling stories, where the Menollys of the world leave home and find a place where their talents are appreciated and they themselves are loved.

I'm going to post about something other than books at some point, I swear, but I just keep READING things and then I have stuff to SAY about it and, well. Here be reviews!

First, E. Lockhart's Fly on the Wall, a slim novel about a girl who is transformed into a fly on the wall of the boy's locker room at her school.

Let us begin by admiring the brilliance of this premise. It makes absolutely no sense (and no explanation is ever offered), but it allows Lockhart to write a hundred pages thinly plotted pages about boys being naked. I bet this book enjoys a lot of covert popularity among junior high girls.

( Unfortunately… )

On a slightly different but still disappointed note, a review of Jaclyn Moriarty's The Ghosts of Ashbury High, the fourth of her Ashbury High companion novels.

I loved the earlier novels - especially The Murder of Bindi Mackenzie - and therefore approached this latest effort in a pitch of anticipation so fevered as to be deleterious to anything short of a tour de force. And, though Moriarty's characters are buoyant and beautifully realized as ever, The Ghosts of Ashbury High is hardly a tour de force.

For one thing: not nearly enough Bindi Mackenzie.

More seriously, though, The Ghosts of Ashbury High has pretty epic pacing issues.

( More )