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

The next two Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels, The Truth about Stacey and Mary Anne Saves the Day. You know, I read a lot of BSC back in the day, but I guess I never read any of the first few books in the series, so it’s been kind of delightful to meet my favorite old characters again in a new format in new-to-me stories.

I’ve also reread Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America as research for my next book - or rather the parts of it that are about the Chicago World’s Fair. The fair chapters and the murder chapters are quite separate: you can read one without the other. This book is so good at creating that “you are there” feeling that is so delicious in reading about history. I suppose the book would have been less of a success this way, but I wish he’d dropped the murder chapters entirely and filled the book with even more description of the fair: a fuller description of a performance at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a walk around the Algerian Village, more detail about the exhibits on view in the great white palaces.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Chimney-corner. During a chapter about public amusements (Stowe is in favor, and feels that church censoriousness tends to turn amusements that could be innocent into corrupting influences), Stowe talks a bit about public amusements in Germany, which people attend with “their faces radiant with that mild German light of contentment and good-will which one feels to be characteristic of the nation.”

I’m always a little startled when 19th century people say this sort of thing (you can see it in Alcott, too, when she’s talking about Professor Bhaer); it’s so different than the 20th & 21st century ideas about Germany.

Other things this chapter taught me: Sunday school fetes and picnics (like the one Anne is so wild to attend in Anne of Green Gables were an innovation of the 1860s. Who knew? It strikes me that when we talk about “the nineteenth century,” at least in America, what we’re really talking about is the last half - even the last third of the nineteenth century, and the earlier part of it has quite a different character.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, which I’m enjoying more than the Bastables. (Sorry, Bastables.) The children have found a Psammead, a sand fairy, which has obligingly agreed to grant them one wish a day - now I know where Edward Eager got this structure!

I’ve also just begun Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress: A Story of the City Beautiful. This is research for my World’s Fair book - but it should be very pleasant research indeed! I can’t wait to find out what FHB made of the World’s Fair.

We haven’t gotten to the fair yet, though; right now the Two Pilgrims (Meg and Robin) are stuck at their Aunt Matilda’s farm, a large and successful operation that she manages on her own as a female farmer.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve discovered that my library has a copy of Dorothy Gilman’s A Nun in the Closet. Well, clearly my fate is sealed! I must read it!

A most successful hunt through the bookstores yesterday! Although amusingly I got the most books at a bookstore I had not realized existed: I stopped in the library for a drink of water, and there was the Friends of the Library bookstore, and I found TWO books there, hooray!

I also found a copy of E. Nesbit's The Railway Children, which I have long intended to read, in a Little Free Library, which is the first time I have found something I really wanted in a Little Free Library and marks an epoch in my life.

( The Little Free Library! )

And eventually it grew too hot for traipsing from bookstore to bookstore, so I stopped at a cafe for a lemon bar and finished Strong Poison (v. much approve, have already started Have His Carcase, Peter has proposed to Harriet approximately five times including by telegram:

FOLLOWING RAZOR CLUE TO STAMFORD REFUSE RESEMBLE THRILLER HERO WHO HANGS ROUND HEROINE TO NEGLECT OF DUTY BUT WILL YOU MARRY ME - PETER

I feel that this persistence ought to be annoying but instead I find it weirdly charming.)

The cafe also had this delightful little door in the wall.

( The fairy door )

I have always loved stories about tiny people who live in the walls. In fact when I was in kindergarten I invented a long one to amuse myself at school. The Paintwater Witches lived in the drains in the back of the classroom and used all the dirty paint water we poured down in their potions. Clearly the tiny people living in a cafe can expect far more gourmet fare!