A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Perhaps surprisingly, given my lack of enthusiasm for Phyllis Ann Karr’s Frostflower and Thorn, I actually quite enjoyed Frostflower and Windbourne. I enjoyed Frostflower and Thorn’s established friendship and I liked the further fleshing out of the worldbuilding, which I had thought was rather thin in book one, but it came together elegantly here. I particularly liked the solution to the mystery ( spoilers )

I knew from the start that there are only two books in this series, but having finished the second one, I wonder if Karr didn’t originally plan to write more. The conclusion is satisfying, but it leaves a lot of open ends loose in a way that suggests she was planting hooks for a possible sequel.

I also read Elizabeth Goudge’s The Lost Angel, a set of short stories, some Christmas-themed. Uneven as short story collections are wont to be. My favorite was the title story, about a little boy who is supposed to play an angel in the Nativity play but escapes from dress rehearsal and wanders around London dressed as an angel.

And I read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s short story “Seth.” A homely and retiring young man arrives at a mine in Tennessee, hoping for employment, as the mine is owned by a native of his hometown. The handsome young mine owner indeed hires him, and Seth is in return devoted to him. Meanwhile, Bess the landlord’s sharp-tongued daughter seems softer on Seth than she has ever seemed to a young man before, so people tease her she’s sweet on him, to which she responds “Happen I am.”

( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve reached the tragic part in The Life of Charlotte Bronte, where everyone starts dying. First Branwell, and that’s tragic because he never accomplished anything and was in fact a misery to everyone who knew him for the last three years of his life. Then Emily, whose death is differently tragic, because Emily refuses to ask for help or even admit she’s sick till her dying day, when she finally acquiesces to see a doctor mere hours before she dies. And now Anne, who is willing to let Charlotte and the doctors try to help, but nonetheless is fading, fading…

What I Plan to Read Next

Contemplating which Rumer Godden book to read next. The ones I have easy access to are Four Dolls, The Dark Horse, and The River. I’m leaning toward Four Dolls because I usually like Godden’s children’s books better than her adult books, but then again there is In This House of Brede batting one thousand for the adult books... so I thought I’d see if anyone has a strong opinion about the other two.

I waffled about whether to post my Wednesday Reading Meme as usual even though it's Christmas, but in the end the siren song of habit simply proved TOO STRONG, as did the fact that I read Donna Tartt's The Secret History and I simply had to share.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which was An Experience, a little bit like Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, another book full of whip-smart college students in beautiful surroundings having crackling intellectual discussions full of allusions to a thousand books they all read and can quote at the drop of a hat - except that The Secret History is like if Tam Lin took place inside its own insular classics department, and also the magic was… possibly nonexistent? There’s an important (off-page) incident in The Secret History that could go either way.

Or you could also compare this book with Brideshead Revisited, in that both of them begin with a sort of college idyll, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” beautiful well-off young people (and their less well-off admirer) hanging out in the country and drinking far too much and whiling away the happy days as if they have all the time in the world. But in both books, this is an illusion: this is only a golden bubble in time before darkness bears down to crush the characters. (Both books also have an atmosphere saturated with homoeroticism.)

It’s also - well, it’s just an experience. I was also really impressed by Tartt’s use of, hmm, inevitability? The book centers around an event, an murder, that most books would make a great mystery of, but Tartt lays out the basic facts about it in the prologue, and then the first half of the book is just laying out how it came to that point, a march of doom toward a predetermined end - while the second shows what came after.

I also finished William Bowen’s The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure, which, as you may recall from my post last week, is bananas. When last we left Freddie and his friends, they were being menaced by pirates from the reign of King James, who were at length banished with the churchwarden’s Odour of Sanctity (an evil-spirit-banishing perfume that he keeps in a little stoppered bottle) once it finally occurred to him that two-hundred-year-old pirates had to be spirits and not mortal men.

But before the churchwarden realized this, the pirates (with Freddy and company in tow as their prisoners) retired in High Dudgeon, which is their castle stronghold. There’s a certain Phantom Tollboothishness about all this that makes me wonder whether Norton Juster read this book in his youth.

I also finished Aminder Dhaliwal’s Woman World, which I would have liked more if I went into it with the understanding that it’s a gag comic rather than a high concept one. The basic premise is that it takes place in a world where men have gone extinct, so you can see why I expected some in-depth worldbuilding.

But all the world-building questions are dealt with perfunctorily, as in the early comic where Gaia announces to an assembled crowd, “The men are extinct! What will the straight women do?” She ponders a moment, then asks, “How many of you skewed bi anyway?” and then almost all the women raise their hands, and that’s the end of that. We never come back to the question.

It’s not that I wanted the comic to navel-gaze specifically about the difficulty of being a straight woman in a world that no longer has men, but this is the level on which Woman World deals with everything and I found it disappointing.

What I’m Reading Now

The introduction to Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North states specifically that the book is not about amputees, which I suppose is fair enough, but as I got the book specifically because I’m working on a novella where the hero is a Civil War amputee… well, I put it aside for most of the week in a fit of pique. However, I’m sure it has lots of interesting information and I should read it anyway.

Oh! And I also began reading Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch! But then I got distracted by The Secret History, so I haven’t finished it yet, although I’ve gotten far enough to strongly suspect that this book has a truly off-the-charts woobie concentration.

What I Plan to Read Next

A few days ago I realized that I was six books away from reading all the Newbery Honor books of the 2010s (have since whittled this down to three), and my goal is to knock those last three out before 2020. Heart of a Samurai! Splendors and Glooms! (This one has puppets on the cover, which intrigues me. Magic puppets?? And was written by Laura Ann Schlitz, who wrote Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, which I liked a lot.) Bomb: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon! CAN I MAKE IT???

I have also decided that I should read Donna Tartt's other novels, of which there are only two, The Little Friend and The Goldfinch. My impression is that The Goldfinch is more highly regarded than The Little Friend, although possibly this just reflects the fact that I've heard more about it because there was a recent movie adaptation?