A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Gary Paulsen’s Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books, in which Paulsen details the various wilderness experiences that shaped Hatchet. Everything in the book is either something that happened to him (like getting stomped by an angry moose) or something that he tried to make sure it would work - like spending four hours striking flint rocks in a cave wall with a steel hatchet to make sure that you could actually start a fire from the resulting sparks.

The one thing he simply couldn’t do is eat a raw turtle egg. As Paulsen notes, Brian was starving when he managed it, and maybe Paulsen could have done it too if he had been hungry enough, but as a well-fed man training his sled dogs for the Iditarod, no.

I also finished Stella Gibbons’ Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, a collection of short stories, only two of which are Christmas-related. I was a bit disappointed at first to realize it’s not a Christmas collection, but once I recovered from my pique I enjoyed myself for the most part. The story where a charmingly eccentric woman accidentally destroys the happy life she’s carefully built by trying to do a kind deed will haunt me, though.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte. More specifically, I’ve begun a 1900 reprint of the third edition, where Gaskell removed sundry items, such as the assertion that Patrick Bronte had cut up one of his wife’s silk dresses and sawn the backs off of chairs. (Presumably chair backs are inimical to giving one’s offspring a suitably spartan upbringing?) But I know where they were, because the edition has footnotes by Clement K. Shorter, which mention these charges specifically in order to refute them, thus inadvertently renewing these charges once again.

Ever since this book was published, there has been controversy over whether Gaskell overstated the miseries of the Brontes’ lives, so I was amused to find this letter from Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor in the introduction. “Though not so gloomy as the truth,” Taylor wrote to Gaskell, “it [that is, the biography] is perhaps as much so as people will accept without calling it exaggerated, and feeling the desire to doubt and contradict it.”

Apparently there is a third position, which is that Gaskell actually understated matters!

What I Plan to Read Next

Does anyone have any recs for nonfiction books about the French Revolution?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Gary Paulsen’s Alida’s Song, one of the trio of memoirs about his grandmother, who essentially raised him because his parents were a catastrophe. In this book, fourteen-year-old Gary spends a summer working at the farm where his grandmother is the cook. Amazing food descriptions, and jaw-dropping the amount that you can eat when you’re doing heavy farm labor all day. At one point Gary eats a four-foot-long sausage, which you eat by dipping in melted butter, and also rolls and plums and milk potatoes, and this is after a lunch of mashed potatoes and fresh-baked bread and rhubarb preserves and venison and pork and beef and blood sausage and apple pie for dessert.

A lovely book, in the way that the Little House books are lovely, just descriptions of everyday life and music and food.

Also Gerald Durrell’s The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure, the sequel to The Fantastic Flying Journey, in which the Dollybutt children and their eccentric uncle Lancelot fly back in time… to rescue the dinosaurs from a big game hunter who stole Uncle Lancelot’s first prototype of a time machine! My God, Durrell was having a good time writing these.

Also Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891-1937, edited by Melissa Edmundson. I cannot escape the conclusion that Edmundson used the best stories in the original Women’s Weird, as this collection is definitely weaker, but it does include a ghost story by L. M. Montgomery that fully justifies all my maunderings about L. M. M. Gothic.

What I’m Reading Now

We’ve reached the bit where Shirley loses its way, by which of course I mean the part where the book stops focusing on Caroline and Shirley’s friendship. Caroline has reunited with her long-lost mother, and Shirley I believe is about to embark on a romance.

What I Plan to Read Next

A few days ago, I was looking at a book at the library, which seems since to have disappeared into the ether. Can you help me find it? It’s a children’s or young adult novel, and I thought the author was Ursula K. Le Guin. But none of the books in her bibliography on Wikipedia sound right, so it may be some other author around the same area of the alphabet. It begins with the main character at work at the local convenience store and checking out cars as he walks home.

Kicking myself for not getting the title. Baffled by its disappearance. I helpfully put it on the re-shelving cart after looking at it, and God knows where it ended up reshelved.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Work has been so quiet this week that I spent an hour hiding in the stacks reading Gary Paulsen’s The Winter Room, a svelte novel that chronicles a year on a farm in the 1930s (the first four chapters are the seasons of the year). This book is both a loving but unsentimental evocation of life on an old-fashioned family farm, and a meditation on what it means to be a man. This is a recurring theme in Paulsen’s work, and I find him more thoughtful on this topic than a lot of other authors who obsess about What It Means to Be Manly. He doesn’t really go for the Hemingway valorization of action over reflection; his characters do act, but they act with care and reflection, and indeed realize that care and reflection are in themselves actions.

Manliness became an accidental theme this week, because it’s also a central question in Jerry Spinelli’s Wringer, which takes place in a town that has an annual pigeon shoot. At this shoot, ten-year-old boys are expected to wring the wounded pigeons’ necks. Our hero Palmer doesn’t want to become a wringer, but because the expectation is so ironclad and so tied to general expectations about masculinity, it’s hard to refuse or even to admit that he doesn’t want to. It’s his deepest secret.

But this thing did not like to be forgotten. Like air escaping a punctured tire, it would spread out from his stomach and be everywhere. Inside and outside, up and down, day and night, just beyond the foot of his bed, in his sock drawer, on the porch steps, at the edges of the lips of other boys, in the sudden flutter from a bush that he had come too close to. Everywhere.

I tried to read this book years ago, because I loved Spinelli’s Stargirl so much (spoiler: none of his other books are like Stargirl), but noped out about three pages in because of the pervasive themes of pigeon murder. This was probably the right choice at the time, not just because of the pigeon murder, but also because I suspect I wouldn’t have really sympathized with Palmer’s quandary. “Just tell them you won’t be a wringer!” I would have cried impatiently. As I’ve gotten older, I have become more sympathetic to characters who are crushed by social structures.

I also finished S. T. Gibson’s Robbergirl, which I bought on a whim because (a) f/f Snow Queen retelling (the pairing is Gerda/robber girl, not Gerda/Snow Queen, in case you are puzzled), and (b) look at that cover! Isn’t it gorgeous??

An enjoyable light read. I would have enjoyed a bit more of an edge between the two leads (I feel like this is always my complaint about genre romance. “Did not once feel like the two leads might try to kill each other :( Needs more murder vibes!!”), although it certainly had its moments. I particularly loved this line: ”Do you know what it’s like,” Helvig hissed between her teeth. “Watching some girl drag your heart behind her like a pet she’s gotten tired of?”

That but the whole book, please!

And finally, I dove into Patricia McKissack’s 1993 Newbery Honor book The Dark-Thirty with enthusiasm, as I grew up with McKissack’s picture books Mirandy and Brother Wind and Flossie and the Fox. However, I didn’t like it as much, perhaps because The Dark-Thirty has mere woodcuts rather than gorgeous full-color illustrations? But McKissack’s A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl had no illustrations whatsoever, and that was one of my favorite Dear America books…

Possibly spooky is just not McKissack’s strength as a writer. The stories in The Dark-Thirty are all ghost stories, more or less, but none of them are really spine-tingling.

What I’m Not Reading, After All

Guess what finally showed up after SIX MONTHS in transit? (Admittedly we were closed for two of those months but NONETHELESS.) Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. But in its circuitous travels, this book missed its window of opportunity: I opened it, read two pages, yelled "I JUST CAN'T READ ABOUT TRAUMA RIGHT NOW," and sent it right back.

I also gave up on John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down because, similarly, I just don’t feel like reading about a girl going into illness-related anxiety spirals right now. These spirals are of course not about coronavirus - the book was published in 2017 - but nonetheless.

What I’m Reading Now

Christopher Paul Curtis’s Elijah of Buxton, a historical fiction novel that takes place (so far) in the settlement of Buxton in Canada, an all-black town founded by escaped slaves. (Our hero, Elijah, was the first free child born in the settlement.) Eventually Elijah is going to head to America, where I expect picaresque adventures, but the book is in no hurry to get there and neither am I; I’m enjoying all the historical detail about the town (I’m getting the impression it was a real place? I suspect the epilogue will tell me, and anyway I don’t particularly want to know if it wasn’t until I’m done reading the book), like the way that the settlement rings the church bell twenty times anytime someone new escapes to Buxton: ten times to ring out their old life and ten times to ring in the new.

What I Plan to Read Next

Now that I’ve finished Robbergirl, I need to decide which book to read next on my Kindle. Stephanie Burgis’s Moontangled? Llinos Cathryn Thomas’s A Duet for Invisible Strings? Or Onoto Watanna’s Miss Nume of Japan? (Onoto Watanna was the pseudonym of Winifred Eaton, a Chinese-British author who wrote Japanese-themed romances while living in New York City in the early twentieth century. Her sister, under the pen name Sui Sin Far, wrote books about the Chinese-American experience, which evidently were less popular, as evidenced by the fact that none of them are available on Gutenburg.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Jane Langton’s The Fragile Flag, and aaaaaaaah, I really liked this book, you guys. Young Georgie (also the heroine of Langton’s The Fledgling) finds an old American flag in the attic, which gives people visions if it wraps around them; she decides to march on Washington with it, in hopes of convincing the President not to launch the Peace Missile (for which read Reagan’s Star Wars; the book was published in 1984).

Naturally the march swells to enormous size as it continues on, and George manages to meet the president in the end, etc. etc. Of course it’s escapism, but it’s really nice escapism in the current political climate. And the book is beautifully constructed, too, all the pieces of the plot (it’s more complicated than I’ve made it sound here) all come together like clockwork, and strike like midnight at just the climactic moment.

I also finished Warren Lewis’s The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, which I read because the Inklings book I read recently praised it (Warren Lewis is C. S. Lewis’s brother) and also because I’ve long meant to learn more about France, and indeed it is a pleasant and readable introductory work to seventeenth century France.

And, for the Unread Book Club: I reread William McCleery’s Wolf Story, which in our youth my brother and I liked so much that we importuned our father to read it multiple times. I think he got bored and started making up new twists in the story to amuse himself, although I can’t be sure because the father in the book (who is telling a story to his child in the book) also gets bored with the story he is telling and keeps trying to come up with twists to end it quickly. It’s very meta.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m slogging through Margaret Stohl’s Black Widow: Forever Red, which I am not liking nearly as much as I expected sadly. I think this is partly the fault of my own expectations - I thought this would be about Natasha’s childhood or at least give us large lumps of backstory, perhaps flashbacks!, but it really does not. But it’s also not very strongly written.

Really not feeling this one. Maybe I’ll just give it up.

I’m also working on Gary Paulsen’s The Island, which is an oddly poetic book - I mean, not odd really, or only because my main association with Paulsen is Hatchet which is more of a survival story. This one involves a lot of our hero sitting on the island, contemplating nature.

And I continue to chug along in Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight!

What I Plan to Read Next

Norah of Billabong is winging its way through the mail to me as we speak! So definitely that.