A Certain Slant of Light

What I Just Finished Reading

Loads of books! I went on a short vacation this weekend and did not take my computer, and I read piles of books and also did a lot of hiking and even got to see a couple of movies for my women film directors project, one by Agnes Varda & another by Dorothy Arzner, about which I will write reviews… later.

And by “piles of books” I mean three. (And I also finished Enid Blyton’s Last Term at Malory Towers before I headed out on the trip. The last of the Malory Towers books! How shall I get my boarding school fix now??? Probably the Twins at St. Claire’s or the Naughtiest Girl, this is actually not a difficult question at all.)

I finally got to read Dorothy Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club! Which I believe means that I am out of Lord Peter books, aside from Five Red Herrings which I have been Warned Against, which on the one hand is sad, but on the other… well, none of these books have Harriet Vane in them, now do they?

I also read E. K. Johnston’s Queen’s Shadow, which I thought was supposed to be super femslashy? - but now it occurs to me that it may have been Johnston’s Ahsoka that was supposed to be super femslashy, hmm. This one does include the delicious (and repeated!) line “My hands are yours,” but Padme and Sabe are separated for most of the book which does cut down on just how femslashy it can get.

Mostly what this book made me feel was exasperated at the prequel trilogy for just how criminally is underutilized Padme. Given that the trilogy is about, you know, the fall of the Republic, her political plotline should have gotten AT LEAST equal billing with whatever shenanigans Anakin was up to… but NO.

And! Last but far from least! Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls, which is the third book I tried for my reading challenge “a book outside your (genre) comfort zone,” - and third time’s the charm! Because I really liked this book. In fact, I liked it so much that I’m going to have to write a longer review of it; for now I will just say that it was really refreshing to read a book about quote-unquote “bad” girls in which the bad girls, although they sometimes suffer from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (and sometimes those slings etc. arise from the fact that their behavior is socially unacceptable), never suffer a comeuppance.

What I’m Reading Now

Henry Louis Gates’ Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, which is… well, it’s about as cheerful as you might imagine, from that title. It’s so depressing to read about Reconstruction, because the more I learn, the clearer it gets that the only thing that might have really changed the outcome was a lengthy Union military occupation, and even then… I’m not sure there’s a military occupation long enough that southern whites, at the end of it, would have gone “Oh yeah, white supremacy IS bad, maybe we should try… racial equality?”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve decided that I should take advantage of the fact that I’m still working on Honeytrap to cram in at least one more Soviet history book: Anna Larina’s This I Will Not Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow which has been on my list… probably since I studied Soviet history in college.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“Last year I saw three migrating Canada geese flying low over the frozen duck pond where I stood. I heard a heart-stopping blast of speed before I saw them; I felt the flayed air slap at my face.”

Guess who finished Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Me! Me! Me! It remains to be seen whether it was worth wading through it, but at least it is DONE.

I also read Bill Geist’s Lake of the Ozarks: My Surreal Summers in a Vanishing America, which is a fun, fairly breezy memoir about the summers of his youth that he spent working at a hotel by the Lake of the Ozarks. I’m a sucker for this sort of thing: it’s at its best when describing the shenanigans the young seasonal hotel employees got up to.

And I reread Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, on the theory that it might give me some good food details for Honeytrap. It did not (there’s surprisingly little description of actual food), but it was a salutary reminder that the 1950s, for all that they have crystallized in the national memory as a time of stasis (depending on your views, either a golden age or a hell hole), were actually just as complicated and contradictory as any other time and probably only seemed calm in comparison to the massive cultural changes of the sixties.

It also occurred to me that I’m trying to hit notes of both golden age and hell hole in Honeytrap, which perhaps accurately reflects the complicated nature of history but also may be a tall order to pull off.

What I’m Reading Now

On skygiants’ recommendation, I’ve been reading Barbara Michaels’ Someone in the House, the first quarter of which is pretty much a description of an idyllic summer at an English manor that has been transported to America for Reasons (Reasons being Rich People), which has now given way to - well, I think it’s a succubus. We’ll see! Enjoying it so far.

And I’ve begun In the Fifth at Malory Towers! Darrell and company seem to be a little bit drunk on the power of being fifth-formers, capable of handing down any punishment they please to the tykes of the lower forms (I know British schools really ran this way, but… they really ran this way???? I suppose if your goal is to train the young to exercise arbitrary power and social prestige, it probably makes sense), but I am looking forward to the play they’re going to put on. And Mademoiselle’s trick!

What I Plan to Read Next

It turns out that Barbara Michaels is a pseudonym for Elizabeth Peters, who wrote the Amelia Peabody series, (I believe I knew this at one point but it had slipped my mind), so there’s another possibility for a new mystery series to read!

She also wrote the Vicky Bliss series, which is lesser-known but features a professor of art history who investigates international art crime AND ALSO a charming art thief (I’m picturing the Cary Elwes character from Psych, but that might be setting myself up for disappointment) which is EVEN MORE up my alley and also shorter, so I might start with that series instead.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The Sundial is one of Jackson’s lesser-known books. There are times when I’m puzzled by the way that an author’s works are remembered - why is such-and-such a book lesser known when it seems just as good as the most famous one? - but this is not one of those times. The Sundial contains many of the qualities that will become so powerful in Jackson’s later work: the creepy yet beloved house, the sense of dissolving boundaries between the characters and the outside world - I’m not sure if I’m putting that right - the sense of disorientation that makes it feel as if the characters’ identities are dissolving.

But these qualities haven’t reached their full potential yet. In particular, I think the ending doesn’t quite work, mainly because it doesn’t really feel like an ending at all, but as if Jackson realized she had written herself in a corner where any ending would be anticlimactic and therefore just stopped.

On a lighter note, I read Anne Bogel’s I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life, which is a light read about… well, what the title says. It has short chapters and it fits nicely in a purse, which makes it a good book to carry around for errands or doctor’s appointments or any other time when you’ll have bits and pieces of reading time.

I also treated myself to another William Heyliger book, Detectives Inc, which I expected would be about a boy detective… but in fact the boy is a mere sidekick to his uncle, former police detective Dr. David Stone, who went blind five years ago but still solves crimes with the aid of his nephew and his trusty Seeing Eye dog Lady (the book begins with a prefatory chapter about Seeing Eye dogs and you get the impression that Heyliger learned about the program and was so enchanted he felt he HAD to write a book), but mostly relies on his powerful deductive reasoning skills, insight into human nature, intricate mental map of the town, ability to orient himself by reading air currents and the temperature gradients of shadows, and also echolocation.

I read a recent nonfiction book that mentioned a blind man who navigates on bicycle by echolocating through clicks of his tongue, so this is actually a thing some humans can do.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Enid Blyton’s Upper Fourth at Mallory Towers and I will remain forever sad that I didn’t read these books as a child. I’m enjoying them now, but if I had read them when I was ten I think I could have joyfully obsessed over them. Their boarding school is in Cornwall right by the sea! They can hear the waves in their dormitory! THEY HAVE AN OCEAN POOL TO BATHE IN.

I’m also reading Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s A Street in Marrakech, which I’m not loving quite as much as her earlier memoir Guests of the Sheik - Fernea’s children leave her less time for charting the intricate social world of women in Marrakech than she had in the village in Iraq where Guests of the Sheik is set. However, it’s still interesting, and I’m definitely planning to read the memoir that comes in between the two, A View of the Nile.

What I Plan to Read Next

The library has the new Charles Lenox book, The Vanishing Man! I actually HELD IT IN MY HAND but it was on hold for someone else so I haven’t gotten to read it yet. :( :( :( BUT SOON IT WILL BE MINE.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, about which I babbled AT LENGTH in a comment to a previous post, which I won’t copy here because otherwise it will take over my entire Wednesday Reading Meme. But it’s there if you’re interested.

Katherine Applegate’s Crenshaw, which is good as all of Katherine Applegate’s books are. (I think I probably missed out by not reading Animorphs. Not enough to actually read Animorphs now, though.) This one is about an economically insecure family that may be on the verge of homeless - not something that you see very often in children’s books - but in a way that is light enough to be readable without glossing over the difficulties of homelessness.

Crenshaw is the hero’s imaginary friend, a giant cat who likes to stand on his head, a la the giant bunny in Harvey. In fact, Applegate references the movie in the book’s epigraph.

What I’m Reading Now

Keeping on with The Odyssey! Odysseus has arrived back in Ithaca and will at any moment rain down unholy vengeance on the suitors. (I remember this part from the Wishbone version. I’m looking forward to the bit where Odysseus shoots his arrow through twelve axes.) Although right now he’s chatting with his son Telemachus while pretending to be just some random beggar dude, which I’m sure is killing him inside.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. One of the things I find particularly interesting about this book is that Ulrich not only has Martha Ballard’s diary, but also the remarks of commentators from later in the nineteenth century, and it’s so interesting to see what these readers considered worthy of note. They’re surprised, for instance, that Ballard spent so much time gadding about to visit her neighbors.

I wonder if it’s actually that nineteenth-century women actually spent less time gadding - or if it was actually pretty comparable, but the ideal was that women should be the heart of the home and rarely stir from the hearthside, and so people just kind of failed to see how much time women (even respectable married women) spent outside of the home. But the written record of Martha Ballard’s movements made it plain and impossible to ignore.

I’ve also begun Dorothy Sayers’ Unnatural Death. I find the way she talks about spinsters kind of annoying, especially considering that she married late herself - but maybe that just makes increases the temptation toward condescending magnanimity.

Oh! And I’m working on Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island (having run out of Mallory Towers for the moment), which has a very Boxcar Children-type appeal: four kids on their own figuring out how to provide themselves with shelter and food and so forth.

AND FINALLY (deep breath) (I’m reading a lot of books this week) (too many maybe?) I’m reading Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, about Smarsh’s childhood among poor white farmers in Kansas, which I can only read in small doses because it’s so infuriating reading about how thoroughly the government has undermined the middle and working classes.

Not least by pretending that the working classes don’t exist. Everyone is middle class in America! What do you mean you’re working 60 hours a week not to get by? Everyone is middle class in America. If we say it enough times that will make it true even as we enact policies that dismantle worker protections and favor large companies and factory farms.

It occurred to me - this is not a point Smarsh makes, just something that came to mind - that maybe part of the reason the “fake news” narrative has gained traction is that the media has in fact systematically ignored or misrepresented working class experiences for decades, so there are a lot of people in this country who don’t trust the media because… why would they? What has the media done to deserve it?

What I Plan to Read Next

The library for some reason has loads of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books in Spanish. I’ve been thinking I should polish up my Spanish, and the Famous Five is probably about the difficulty level I can take after letting my Spanish go to seed for so long, so maybe I’ll give them a go.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Enid Blyton’s The Naughtiest Girl in the School. I feel VERY put out, because the library has only the first book in this series and I want to read the rest of Elizabeth Allen’s adventures! Oh well. Perhaps if I haunt used bookstores long enough, I might find the rest.

In particular, the picture of Elizabeth Allen’s school is fascinating: Whyteleafe is a progressive co-educational boarding school ruled by the students along socialist lines: the children all put their pocket money in the school kitty, and each gets to withdraw two pounds a week; if they want more they have to apply to the student council for it, and the council is a body with actual power, not basically decorative like the student councils in my day.

I wonder if this general powerlessness of modern student councils contributes to the difficulty getting young people to vote. In student council elections, they’re voting for a governing body that has no actual power. We’re basically training kids that voting is useless.

Anyway! Whyteleafe is a very different school than the traditional girls’ boarding schools Blyton wrote about in Malory Towers and St. Clair’s, and it’s interesting to me that she wrote so impartially; her characters find good friends and fun things to do at both kinds of school. You don’t get the sense that Blyton is arguing that one type is better than the other - they’re just different.

I finally finished Martha Finley’s Elsie at the World’s Fair, which lost focus on the World’s Fair at the end, alas, although I did garner a certain amount of good detail before then. My ideas about the World’s Fair book have been evolving: I hadn’t realized so many women artists worked on the fair and now I’d like to focus on the novel on one of them. And there is the possibility of a fantasy element - so many people compare the fair to a fairyland - and couldn’t there be an actual court of the fairy on the Court of Honor?

But I don’t think Faerie as written in urban fantasy these days would be suitable for the World’s Fair, so I’ll have to think abuot this more.

And also I finished Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s A Fabulous Creature. MY FEELINGS. MY FEELINGS. HOW CAN YOU STOMP ON MY FEELINGS LIKE THIS? ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Josephine Daskam Bacon’s Smith College Stories, which continues to be moderately interesting but not engrossing. Possibly I shouldn’t have read it so soon after rereading Shirley Marchalonis’s College Girls? I feel that she quoted from most of the most interesting stories.

I’ve also begun Remember, Remember: The Selected Stories of Winifred Holtby, which begins with a selection of autobiographical stories, including one about a man who never really appreciates life till he receives a fatal diagnosis, at which point he starts gazing upon the apple trees wondering if he’ll live to see them blossom in the spring, etc. It sounds rather trite, but knowing that Holtby wrote it after her own diagnosis it’s almost unbearably sad.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been struggling to decide what to read for my final reading challenge (“a book by an author of a different race, ethnicity, or religion than your own”) - so many possibilities! But then one of my friends gave me Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (with a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, who did the covers of Monica Furlong’s Wise Child and Juniper), and I’ve long meant to read something by Allende, so there we are.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Tracy Porter’s Treasures in the Dust, a novel about two girls who are friends during the Dust Bowl, which is told with alternating first person narrators. Now, my standards for books with multiple first person narrators were set by Sarah Monette’s Melusine, which is perhaps unfair - it would be impossible to mistake a paragraph of Mildmay’s narration for a paragraph of Felix’s and that’s an awfully high bar to clear - but nonetheless I did not feel that the narrators here were as well differentiated as they should have been.

I’ve also finished the sequel to The Friendship Matchmaker, The Friendship Matchmaker Goes Undercover, and I’m sorry that there aren’t more in the series, which is a little odd given that I always end up arguing with the morals of the story. At the end of the last book, Lara Zany gave up friendship matchmaking in order to focus on her own budding friendship with Tanya. In this book, she is drawn back to her beloved old hobby, which she takes up again on the sly because she promised not to do it anymore.

And then the book ends with her giving it up again and - I don’t see why she has to give it up. It would be one thing if she were bad at it, or interfering when people didn’t want it, but in fact she’s very good at helping people with friendship problems and her fellow students come to her begging for her aid. And she loves helping! Yes, she clearly needs to work out a better work-life (hobby-life?) balance, so she has time for her own friends too, but I see no reason why she has to give up her friendship work entirely. She has a gift! Let her use it!

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve almost finished The Enchanted Wood! The children have just been turned into toys, and then turned back into children again by Santa Claus, and now goblins have invaded the Faraway Tree, as they do. It’s quite a picaresque novel, isn’t it? There’s not really any kind of overarching plot or even character arcs - just lots of little adventures.

And I’ve just started Lauren Wolk’s Wolf Hollow, which I was rather dreading in a vague way because I was reading it because it won a Newbery Honor, not because I had chosen it for myself - but actually I’ve really liked it so far; I was hard pressed to put it down last night, even though it was late and I really only meant to read the first chapter before I went to bed. In the event I read six, in the vain hope that our heroine Annabelle might vanquish Betty Glengarry, a bully with an unfairly euphonious name - but clearly Betty Glengarry is going to remain a problem throughout the book.

What I Plan to Read Next

2018 is approaching! And with it, the beginning of my next reading challenge! I have decided to save The Brothers Karamazov for “a book in translation” and The Woman in White for “a book that’s more than 500 pages” (both are very long and I think I’ll have more luck with that when the weather is brighter), which still leaves me to decide what to read for “a classic you’ve been meaning to read” in January.

Maybe Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow? Or I’ve been meaning to read Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. Does that count? But upon investigation the library only has it in gigantic omnibus editions, and I hate giant omnibuses, so perhaps it had better be The Black Arrow after all.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At last I’ve finished Tom Reiss’s The Black Count! General Dumas’s life was a rip-roaring adventure (there’s a part where he stands on a bridge and single-handedly holds off a whole horde of Austrians until the French reinforcements can arrive) and Reiss writes it well, so it should not have taken me ages to finish this book. But I dragged my feet because I knew going in that the French Revolution was going to degenerate into a bloodbath, and then (after a five year pause of comparative sanity, during which France invaded everyone, so really it wasn’t that sane after all) Napoleon was going to take over and rip the beating heart out of revolutionary ideals, and that’s all just such a bummer.

Also! Also! People familiar with French history doubtless already knew this, but APPARENTLY France crossed the Alps and conquered Italy in 1796-97 - only to lose it again when Napoleon stranded a large portion of the French army in a bitter campaign in Egypt. So all this ballyhoo about “Napoleon crossing the Alps” only became necessary because Napoleon vainglorious self-aggrandizing narcissistic invasion of Egypt ruined France’s previous gains.

Also he was super racist and reinstated a lot of racist laws that the Revolution had overturned and re-legalized slavery in the colonies where it had never successfully been eradicated (it being somewhat difficult to enforce a policy on a colony that is halfway around the world when one’s own government at home is in a constant state of turmoil). Everything I learn about Napoleon lowers my opinion of him. I am heartily sorry that his fellow generals didn’t assassinate him the way that Brutus and Cassius assassinated Caesar when he got too big for his britches.

What I’m Reading Now

Fire and Hemlock! Which I am quite enjoying. It’s definitely got it’s “the past was another country” moments: I can’t imagine anyone today letting a ten-year-old girl go off to London to spend an entire day with a strange man she barely knows, and met when she accidentally gate-crashed a funeral. This seems even weirder to me than the magic, although the magic as yet is still quite subtle.

I missed out on most of Diana Wynne Jones as a child - I read Witch Week 10,000 times so I’m not sure why I didn’t go on to the others; I think I read one of the other Chrestomanci books and didn’t like it as much and that was that? Clearly unfortunate. Must rectify it.

I’ve also started Enid Blyton’s The Enchanted Wood, which sadly I think I would have appreciated it 200% more if I had first read it when I was eight or so and too young to care about characterization and prose style or lack thereof.

In a way this is a relief because it means I’m off the hook for reading Blyton’s 500 other books (that number may not be an exaggeration: she was very prolific), but at the same time she’s a titan of children’s literature so I’m sorry I’m not appreciating her more. I’ll at least finish this book just in case it grows on me.

What I Plan to Read Next

Emma lent me Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War, which I really ought to read in time to give it back to her at Christmas.