A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

It was curious, but the smell of coffee made me more cheerful. I knew that from the war; it was never the big things that consoled one - it was always the unimportant, the little things.

This is an unusually consoling quote for Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades, which is mostly a chronicle of despair: our hero Robert starts the book on his thirtieth birthday totting up the dead-end jobs he’s held since the end of the Great War, and ends ( spoilers )

I FINALLY read Nora Ellen Groce’s Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard, which I’ve meant to read ever since high school because my biology textbook included an excerpt. It was worth the wait: this is a short, engrossing book, which discusses both the likely hereditary pattern behind the high incidence of deafness on Martha’s Vineyard in the 18th and 19th centuries (a recessive gene) and the social consequences of its common occurrence, which was that, well, everyone on Martha’s Vineyard spoke sign language.

The result was that deaf Vineyarders were fully integrated into the community, both socially and economically. Groce’s interlocutors often had difficulty remembering who was deaf, in the way that someone in a modern-day community might have trouble remembering precisely who wore glasses: it’s a fact about someone, but not as important or memorable as “He had that really great fishing boat!”

Deaf Vineyarders married at the same rates as hearing islanders (often to hearing partners), earned their living at the same trades (except whaling, possibly because whaling ships tended to get a large proportion of their crews off-Island?), and had similar economic fates: a few earned their fortunes, most got by, and some sunk into penury, just like their hearing counterparts.

I also read Ruth Stiles Gannett’s My Father’s Dragon, but I didn’t particularly like it. Perhaps the whimsicality of it would have appealed to me more if I’d read it as a youngster?

What I’m Reading Now

I have the horrible feeling that Leo in Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies is going to end up paired off with Peter, who is the most obnoxious of the available candidates. He makes a habit of pretending to fall in love with his lonely female patients, on the theory that this will cheer them up and speed their recovery; Leo objects (but thinks, as she does so, “he’s a far better human being than I am,” which could only possibly be true if Leo is a serial killer) that women “don’t really enjoy being helped and done good to,” as if Peter is in fact helping and doing good, rather than essentially lying to and misleading these poor women out of, at best, pity, and at worst as a way of amusing himself (Peter would strenuously deny that characterization but it’s absolutely visible in the way he thinks). As if a man would enjoy it if a pretty lady doctor felt so sorry for him that she pretended to fall in love with him till his vital signs bucked up?

What I Plan to Read Next

Is it time for Wilkie Collins’ Armadale? It might be time for Armadale.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters was perhaps not the best book to read while still in the throes of the pandemic, as it has filled me with thoughts about how to create richer and more vibrant parties (although perhaps I could use some of the book’s suggestions at my next Zoom gathering?). The thing that stuck with me most is Parker’s idea that a gathering is a kind of art - and, as with any piece of art, you want a bang-up beginning and ending, because those have an outsized effect on what people remember and take away from your piece.

Gerald Durrell’s How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist, in contrast, is an excellent book to read during a pandemic, as reading the book feels a bit like taking a trip round the world with Durrell as he shoots a television program called, of course, The Amateur Naturalist. Durrell visits all sorts of lovely locations (there’s a gorgeous description of the northern lights; I so want to see them some day), but I think my favorite section was the chapter describing the rich biodiversity of the humble English hedgerow.

What I’m Reading Now

I was desperate to learn how to be a reporter. The sort of person who always had a notebook in hand, ready to sniff out Political Intrigue, launch Difficult Questions at Governmental Representatives, or, best of all, leap onto the last plane to a far-off country in order to send back Vital Reports of resistance and war.

I picked up A. J. Pearce’s Dear Mrs. Bird because of ladyherenya’s review (and because I’m weak for any and all books set in London-in-the-Blitz), and fell in love with the narrator Emmy’s voice within the first few pages. Perhaps this is a weakness on my part, but I can’t resist Capitalization for Emphasis. Currently zipping through this and loving it; Emmy is a delight and so is her best friend Bunty.

I’ve meant to read Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades ever since learning from Eleonory Gilburd’s To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture that the book was wildly popular (in translation) in the USSR. The book is set in 1930; our hero, a veteran of the First World War, has just met a girl, which has briefly jolted him out of his usual mist of ennui. Will this effect last or will he sink again into the alcohol-fueled mists of despair? Probably the latter, but we’ll see.

What I Plan to Read Next

Out of deference to my fellow library patrons who have it on hold, I ought to read Douglas Boin’s Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome… but I may be seduced by Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies instead.