A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finally finished Eva Rice’s The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp. I liked it, but it’s a bit uneven: it has two stories and they sort of work against each other. There’s the story of Tara’s coming of age and her relationship with her sister Lucy (and Lucy’s relationship with her husband and her best friend), which is very well done, and then there’s the story of Tara’s rise to pop stardom, which seems a bit tacked on.

It seems like Rice is reluctant to let Tara’s growing fame change her relationships in any fundamental way. Tara comments repeatedly that her stardom will change her whole life, but it really never does, and therefore it never really feels real.

But I did enjoy the coming-of-age story a lot.

Also Sarah Addison Allen’s Lost Lake, which is my favorite book of hers since The Sugar Queen. It feels less self-consciously, quirkily southern than some of her intervening books, while retaining the strong sense of place that I really enjoy in her work. By the end of the book I wanted to visit Lost Lake and stay in one of the cabins.

And G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. This book’s subtitle is A Nightmare, and it makes sense: there is something odd and dreamlike about it, which made it interesting but insubstantial. I had a similar reaction to his collection of essays Tremendous Trifles: he seems addicted to contradictions, whether or not they actually have a deeper meaning or even actually exist.

Emma is a big fan of Chesterton. Maybe you have to be Catholic to really appreciate him.

What I’m Reading Now

Barbara Hambly’s A Free Man of Color. I am a bit in the soup about who all the characters are, but I’ve got the main ones straight and I’m having a good time reading it.

Also Brideshead Revisited, which is very well written and well-observed and extremely English. I’m enjoying all those parts. I don’t think I’m supposed to find Sebastian’s self-pitying decline into alcoholism quite as annoying as I do.

What I Plan to Read Next

Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Cracks in the Kingdom. Yes! It has arrived! I am trying not to get too excited about it, because it’s easier to enjoy things if you don’t pile too much anticipation on them.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

John Steinbeck’s ill-named The Red Pony. I can only assume he picked that title because he realized that the more accurate The Dead Horses might put people off. Yes, multiple dead horses! First the red pony catches the strangles and chokes to death on its own mucus, and then the ranch hand bashes a mare to death in order to extract her baby by Caesarean section.

Yeah. I think that tells you everything you need to know about this book.

What I’m Reading Now

Louisa May Alcott’s Jo’s Boys. There’s a whole chapter in this book about “how to behave around an author,” presumably because Alcott had no other platform on which to castigate her over-invested fans. Jo has become a famous author, and is beset on all sides by rapacious reporters and mooncalf fans. One girl flings herself into Jo’s arms, crying, “Darling, love me!” Oh, fans. Behaving badly since 1886!

I’ve also started Garth Nix’s A Confusion of Princes, which is a little too action-adventure for my taste. There are only so many times the hero can escape assassination before it starts to get repetitive. But perhaps soon he’ll start doing something else.

I haven’t gotten much farther in The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp, because I forgot to take it along when I visited my parents over the weekend. Tara and her sister Lucy have arrived in London! Tara has been swept off on a shopping trip by a woman named Clover.

Also, I feel that this book was not very well copy-edited, because I keep stumbling over small continuity errors.

What I Plan to Read Next

Charles Finch’s The Last Enchantments.

What I’ve Finished Reading

Charles Finch’s An Old Betrayal, the latest of his Charles Lenox Victorian-era London mysteries, to which I am quietly devoted. This is one of the good ones: Finch wove all his subplots together nicely, and the mystery was beautifully twisty without ever feeling unnecessarily so. (I realize that mystery writers need twists, but sometimes I end up thinking “No one plots a murder this complicated, this is getting ridiculous.”)

Also Rumer Godden’s Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, about a little girl who makes a dollhouse for two Japanese dolls she receives. Or, actually, her cousin does most of the actual making, because he knows how to work wood; she just makes some pillows and things.

It’s a somewhat disappointing book, because most of the details of the actual making were moved to endnotes, as has most of the cultural information about Japan. It’s as if the book itself is simply a brisk summary, and all the meat of the story has been shuffled off to the back.

What I’m Reading Now

Still drifting through Eva Rice’s The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp. I’m really enjoying it so far; right now we’re still in Tara’s childhood in the English country, where Tara sings in the church choir and Tara’s sister Lucy has fallen in love with the great country houses of England.

Also Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927, which is about aviation, Calvin Coolidge, botched murders, Babe Ruth, Prohibition, Henry Ford, and all the other strange and fascinating things that were going on in America in the summer of 1927.

I think Bryson’s writing was fresher and funnier in his earlier books, but I should add that this is partly because he set himself a high bar in those earlier books: even with the drop-off in quality, this book has made me laugh out loud a number of times. And I find the organization interesting, too: it’s easy to follow and immensely readable, even though it’s basically just a hodgepodge of disparate things that happened around the same time. There’s a sense of how big the world is.

What I Plan to Read Next

Charles Finch has written his first non-Charles Lenox book, The Last Enchantments, which I have decided to read. It’s about, uh - maybe I should have checked what it was about before deciding to read it… it’s about a passionate love affair during a year’s study abroad at Oxford. Well, this could be awesome, as long as it’s not too painfully autobiographical. (We are talking about the man who gave his detective his own first name, after all.)

Also Jo Baker’s Longbourn, because ladyherenya wrote such a great review of it. I am way, way down on the holds list for this one, though.

I’m also contemplating whether I should try Ibbotson’s adult novels, particularly A Countess Below Stairs or A Song for Summer or A Morning Gift. Does anyone have an opinion about them?

Recently ladyherenya and I have been chatting about “books like I Capture the Castle, because we both love books that could be so described and thought that, hey, it would be so much easier to find them if there were a master list somewhere.

But in making a list it became apparent that “books like I Capture the Castle” needed to be defined, so here’s an attempt at itemizing the necessary qualifications for a book to make the cut.

1. The voice. Cassandra’s voice is, for me, the heart of I Capture the Castle. She’s young and sheltered, but clever, inquisitive, funny; intoxicated with language and all its possibilities. She could natter on about dust bunnies and be brilliant.

I tend to lump everything that echoes Cassandra’s voice into the umbrella category, but there are other qualities that many of these stories share.

2. A eccentric family. The parent figures are loving but somehow deficient - either too distant or too immature to hold the family together - and the sibling bonds are tight, often acting as the support that parents can’t provide. There’s often a sense of isolation from the world, at least at the beginning.

3. The coming of age story. There are lots of kinds of coming of age stories, and this particular sort involves the heroine breaking free of the aforementioned isolation and stepping into the world - both socially and intellectually; and, in The Montmaray Journals, politically. There’s more to say about this, I think.

There’s often a lot of writing about books. I love books about books, and books about the intellect taking shape, and they’re so rare.

4. A peculiar house, preferably a castle, although a decrepit country house is also acceptable. I think this is as much for atmosphere as anything else - doubtless a Cassandra-ish story could be set in a split-level; but who doesn’t love atmosphere?

Those are the main qualities that I’ve thought of so far. Am I missing anything?

***

If you, too, wish to read more books like I Capture the Castle, so far our list contains:

1. Michelle Cooper’s brilliant Montmaray Journals - A Brief History of Montmaray and The FitzOsbornes in Exile, soon to be joined by The FitzOsbornes at War. I’M SO EXCITED. I WANT TO READ IT NOW.

2. Eva Rice’s The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

3. Jean Webster’s Daddy-long-legs

With honorable mentions to:

1. Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, because Juliet sounds like a grown-up Cassandra and because there’s lots of talking about books and ideas even if there’s no coming of age story - Juliet being already quite grown-up - and no castle, worse luck.

2. L. M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon trilogy. I’ve only read the first, but ladyherenya says the later ones follow a Cassandra-ish coming of age story.

It’s not a very long list. If you have any possible additions, please suggest them.