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.

Packing up my apartment. Also cleaning it. My winter of dedicated tea-drinking has left an apparently indelible ring around the drain of the sink. >.<

Also listening to Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence. (I've just discovered the joy of listening to audio books while I drive. Why didn't I realize this earlier? Think of all the books I could have ingested during my commute!) Has anyone else read this? Did you feel a deep and compelling urge to throttle Newland Archer?

He gets engaged to May, who seems like a perfectly charming person, only to immediately fall in love with her beautiful and exotic cousin Madame Olenska - but despite realizing that his feelings for Madame Olenska will poison his marriage with May, he goes ahead with his engagement anyway even though May offers to release him. Because...because...it's never explained exactly why it would be too much effort to extract himself from a marriage that's preordained to be unhappy, but clearly it is.

This preordination, let me add, is entirely of Newland's making: he could be happy with Mary if he was willing to try, but no. Newland Archer would much rather wallow in his adoration of Madame Olenska (and assume that she's fated to be with him, no matter how clearly she says WE CAN NEVER BE TOGETHER), sneer at May for being shallow and insufficiently artistic (never mind Newland also lacks depth, compassion, and artistic talent himself), and luxuriate in his own exquisite misery than make an effort to be a good husband and a good man.

...I hope the books ends with May and Madame Olenska running away to Monte Carlo together. They both deserve someone so much better than Newland Archer.