A Certain Slant of Light

I have been ill, so this Wednesday Reading Meme is alas two days late!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I reread Francesca Forrest’s “The Bee Wife,” (Amazon link here, but available through other retailers as well), which I have been gently prodding her to publish ever since she first let me read it. A lovely sweet and sad story about a beekeeper who loses his wife Joy, and the bees try to comfort him by forming a replacement Joy…

Love the magic of the bees and the characterization of the children, five children over a wide span of ages trying to understand the appearance of this new mother, and the story’s grounding in Catholicism. Is this a miracle? Witchcraft? Can the magic of the bees be holy, since we thank them specially for their candles at Easter? Shout out to the overwhelmed priest who is not at all sure what to do about an apparently resurrected Joy showing up at the church door, and even less sure when she assures him, “I am a new creation.”

What I’m Reading Now

My mother kindly delivered my hold on Our Mutual Friend when it arrived at the library, so I have at long last started reading it! So far, it’s about making your living by pulling dead bodies from the river and emptying their pockets of all their moveables before handing them over to the police (the river always seems to turn pockets inside out, the boatman says ingenuously), and a guy who is reading The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to a pair of retired servants who have come into a fortune.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have been eyeing the latest Newbery winner, Erin Entrada Kelly’s The First State of Being, with misery and dread since I got it from the library, but I suppose I’d better get it over with.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

As a birthday present to myself I read Elizabeth Wein’s White Eagles, a short novel about a young woman flying with the Polish army at the beginning of World War II. If you know anything about the invasion of Poland, you’ll be able to guess that this has some dark moments, but overall it’s about our heroine flying away from Poland (with a stowaway!) so the grimness-to-adventure ratio ultimately tilts toward adventure.

As a further birthday present to myself (White Eagles is QUITE short), I read Francesca Forrest’s new short story Duplication, which takes place in a world a little slantwise from ours: sometimes people, especially children, will duplicate for a few hours, a day or two at most, so that there are two of the same person running around for a while till they merge back into one.

The story is concerned with the everyday experience of a mother whose daughter suddenly becomes two daughters, and the philosophical question - although with a certain lived urgency that philosophical questions often lack - of what it means for one person to become two. To what extent are the duplicates two separate entities? What does it mean - what is lost - what the duplicates merge back into one?

I also finished Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, which I read because I enjoyed the miniseries adaptation so much. (Well, enjoyed seems like the wrong word for such a bleak story, but you know what I mean.) It turns out that the adaptation was extraordinarily faithful, to the point that Grace tells her story in the exact words she uses in the book (I often had the eerie sense of hearing the words in the actress’s voice as I read), which, well, if you’ve got Margaret Atwood’s words at your disposal, why wouldn’t you?

The main difference is that the book includes a subplot in which Dr. Jordan, the doctor interviewing Grace Marks to try to prove her innocence, becomes sexually entangled with his landlady. In general I found Dr. Jordan’s POV unpleasant to read: he has such an instrumental view of people, always with an eye for how they can be of service to him (sexually, for women, and in his career, for men), and few signs of actual affection for anyone. Thus, the book induces an even stronger feeling of “WHY ARE MEN” than the miniseries, which also didn’t skimp in this regard.

What I’m Reading Now

I finished part one of Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, and I’m taking a break before I read part two because it’s such a dense, intensely emotional book.

Thus, I’m treating myself to Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha. Following series order, I should have read Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station, but the ebook was checked out and I figured, “There’s not super a lot of continuity in this series, it will be fine if I skip it for now!”

Reader, it turns out that Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha builds heavily on Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station. So I’m kicking myself, although honestly it doesn’t matter all that much: the books are clearly interrelated, but not so much that I’m finding anything in Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha hard to follow. Anyway one doesn’t read the Mrs. Pollifax books expecting surprises, but because it’s such a pleasure to spend time with Mrs. Pollifax and whoever she has befriended in the course of this book’s spying mission.

A quote I noted down, as exemplary of Mrs. Pollifax’s character: “Mrs. Pollifax measured intelligence by curiosity, rueing people who never asked questions, never asked why, or what happened next or how.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I intend to continue my Margaret Atwood journey with The Penelopiad, but before that, I really MUST attend to this stack of library books that has been moldering patiently on my bookshelf. (I’ve been clinging to them in the superstitious sense that we might go back on lockdown at any time, but I am coming to the conclusion that this would be MUCH too sensible for the government to ever actually do it.) First up: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A short story by Francesca Forrest, The Boy on the Roof (the link takes you to both a written and an audio version of the story), which is somehow heavy and light all at once. There’s just enough detail to hint at a much larger story of devastating climate change, but the story itself is a quiet, contemplative moment, a brief meeting between a traveler and the titular boy on the roof, who has been married to the clouds in the hope that he’ll bring rain.

Chad Sell’s The Cardboard Kingdom, a graphic novel about a neighborhood where a bunch of kids play a series of loosely interconnected fantasy games. I loved the concept for this one, but I thought it could have benefited from more focus: there are sixteen (!) main characters in this fairly svelte book, so by the time that all the characters had been introduced, the book was basically over. I would have liked more space to get to know them.

Alternatively, this is a concept that could have made a good series: the character introductions could have been spaced out more, and there would have been more time to get to know each character, too.

What I’m Reading Now

I am beginning to suspect that I was correct when I thought William Dean Howells’ A Foregone Conclusion would deal with a love triangle, and I am VERY SAD about it because one of the characters is a Catholic priest which pretty much ensures he’s getting an unhappy ending out of this.

But, on the other hand, he’s already pretty unhappy, because he doesn’t like being a priest and really isn’t very well-suited for it (and also Venice in 1861 was apparently a terrible place to be a priest, because according to Howells the populace hated the priests and saw them as spies for the Austrian empire). He has just explained how he came to be a priest in the first place: when he was a little boy he liked to make puppets and pretend to put on Masses and his relatives interpreted this, understandably but totally incorrectly, as an interest in priesthood rather than an interest in making puppets.

I JUST WANT THEM ALL THE BE HAPPY and I have horrible presentiments that none of them are going to be happy at all. How can Howells work this out?

I’ve also been reading Marie Brennan’s Turning Darkness into Light, which is slower going than the Lady Trent series - although I should keep in mind that I found the first Lady Trent book somewhat slow going, too; the fifth book had, well, five books of momentum behind it. So I should modify my expectations a bit here, perhaps.

Our heroine is Audrey, Lady Trent’s granddaughter, who has been hired to translate a set of Draconean tablets that seem to contain an origin story. She is joined in her quest by Cora, the ward of the dimwitted but voraciously greedy antiquities hunter who discovered the tablets, and Kudshayn, a Draconean scholar, by which I mean both a scholar of ancient Draconean but also a Draconean himself.

There is one scene where Cora asks intrusive questions about Kudshayn’s family life, and afterward Audrey has a talk with Cora wherein Audrey realizes that she’s never asked about Cora’s family and decides that this means that ~she’s the one who was rude~, when really… no? Why on earth would it be rude for Audrey not to ask prying personal questions about Cora’s family that Cora might not want to answer?

Or possibly I’ve been mortally offending all my coworkers by not demanding that they spill their tragic backstories. Hmm.

What I Plan to Read Next

I really ought to read the 2019 Newbery Award winner, Merci Suarez Changes Gears, before the end of the year.

But let’s be really, I’m probably going to read Thanhha Lai’s Butterfly Yellow next, instead.

Fun (or possibly slightly alarming) fact: I got so absorbed in thinking about asakiyume's "On the Highway" that I, like the heroine Jolene, skidded on the icy road.

Unlike Jolene I wasn't going very fast, so I just skidded a bit before I got the car back under control. In the story, however, Jolene slides right off the highway into a ditch - and that's where she's sitting when a helpful stranger finds her...

I really liked the story - possibly more than was good for me, clearly - the ghostly wayfarer thing it's got going on (which is also reminiscent of that Emily Dickinson poem: "Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me"), the New Year's Eve setting (I love holiday stories and it's always fun to see one for a holiday that is not Christmas), the lovely atmospheric writing and particularly the contrast between the warmth and cold. He helps Jolene into the cab, which is warm and golden, like the inside of a jack-o-lantern...

It's a lovely New Year treat.