A Certain Slant of Light

An unusual bulletin of What I’ve Given Up Reading: I stalled out on Rumer Godden’s childhood memoir A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep a couple months ago, and have at last admitted to myself that I have no desire to finish it. I usually love childhood memoirs! But Godden seems to be going through her childhood and recollecting which incidents later gave rise to books, and it’s like she already got the pith out of them in making up the stories and there’s just not a lot left.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Château Saint Barnabé, a short memoir about a month that Brink’s family spent at a dilapidated chateau-turned-boarding-house outside Marseilles in the 1920s. The book is structured around the tale of an American woman they met there, who had married a French sea captain forty years before and remained in Marseilles even after his death, though she longed to return to America – and yet when Brink offers to help her return to America, she refuses. “I am afraid…” she says; “afraid it might not be in America as I had dreamed it. I would rather keep the dream.”

Full of interesting details about daily life, and also interesting in that it confirms Family Sabbatical is indeed drawing on actual sabbaticals the Brink family spent in France. In fact, IIRC the novels includes a similar story about a woman who wants to return to America, I believe with a happier ending, although my memory is not too clear on this point.

Also Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, which alas cannot quite live up to its fabulous title, which seems to promise that here we are going to examine the works of Roman women writers. We no longer have enough of their works to support a whole book, it seems. But the book is strongest when we do examine women’s own words: an early Christian martyr’s jail diary, a sequence of four poems carved on an Egyptian statue by a court poetess during Hadrian’s reign (one of them, endearingly, is about how beautiful Hadrian’s wife is, presumably to cheer her up while he’s weeping about the recently deceased Antinous), and—this is my favorite—some letters written by the wife of one military commander in Britain to the wife of the commander of a nearby fort, including an invitation to an upcoming birthday party. It’s so incredibly Mrs. Tim of the Regiment! The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Another Newbery Honor winner! Jeanette Eaton’s A Daughter of the Seine: The Life of Madame Roland. Embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know who Madame Roland was until I read this book.

And I finished Barbara Leonie Picard’s The Lady of the Linden Tree. All in all an undistinguished collection of original fairy tales, but all the same I’m glad I gave it a try.

What I’m Reading Now

Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds, and Other Stories, which begins with “The Birds” (still one of the scariest stories in existence; imagine if the birds ever did decide they wanted to kill all humans), and continues with “Monte Verità,” which is best enjoyed unspoiled but concerns an unearthly mountain. You will be unsurprised to learn that Du Maurier is just as good at suspense in short stories as in novel form.

What I Plan to Read Next

My favorite Purdue library is closing for renovation over the summer! I have a bad feeling they are going to purge the children’s section, so I’ve checked out the books on my list: a couple of Sorche Nic Leodhas’s collections of Scottish ghost stories, two books by Susan Fletcher of Dragon’s Milk fame, Susan Cooper’s Victory, and a children’s history of Thermopylae by Mary Renault.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A profitable week in the Newbery department. I finished Russell Freedman’s Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery, a 1994 Newbery Honor book. I mention the year because the book is very tactful about Eleanor Roosevelt’s possible romantic involvements with women. If you are primed to see romantic potential in her series of very close woman friends who sometimes lived with her, the evidence is certainly here. But if I had read this in the 90s, the possible implications would absolutely have flown over my head.

This struck me particularly hard because in the 2021 winner (When You Trap a Tiger), the narrator’s older sister gets a girlfriend, who is expressly referred to as such in the text. That just would not have been possible in a 1994 book; the world has changed so much and so quickly.

I also read Jean Fritz’s Homesick: My Own Story, a childhood memoir about the author’s life in China in the late 1920s, when her father directed the YMCA in Hankow (which later merged with two other cities to become modern-day Wuhan). On a scale of happiness to misery ranging from Cheaper by the Dozen to Angela’s Ashes, this one is solidly in the middle: the political situation is tense (the family ultimately flees Hankow on an armored gunboat) and the family faces personal tragedy when Jean’s baby sister dies, but the overall focus is much more on Jean’s everyday life and friendships.

Oddly, given the title, the book doesn’t deal with homesickness at all. Perhaps it’s a retrospective title? Given the subsequent history of China, I suspect that Fritz could never revisit her childhood home.

What I’m Reading Now

Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s Moscow and Muscovites, which I expected to love but am actually finding something of a slog. I first read about in the context of a ludicrously rich fish pie and therefore expected it to be about luxury and opulence and instead it’s mostly about slums.

Also Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, which I’m enjoying, although I wish the author would stop apologizing for non-murder digressions about Roman history. I submit that anyone geeky enough to read a book about Roman murder is also interested in other things Roman and will not go “God, why do we gotta talk about political intrigue? Ugh.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I am creeping toward the top of the hold list for Fugitive Telemetry. Any day now!