A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My hold on George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London finally came in and I instantly tossed everything else aside and tore through it. Excellent book: it’s Orwell’s memoirs about his experiences when he was flat broke, first in Paris (where he worked as a plongeur, a dishwasher in a French restaurant) and then in London, where he lived among the tramps, with occasional forays into theory, most notably in his pointed comment that the reason tramps exist is that they’re not allowed to stay in the same casual ward more than one night in a row, so they have to tramp to get to a different one to stay out. Policy, not poverty - or perhaps policy combined with poverty? - created tramps.

In Paris, Orwell pals around with a Russian emigre named Boris, who bears enough similarities to the Boris in The Goldfinch (which I also finished this week! Post forthcoming!) that I sometimes had the weird sense of slipping between books.

I also read Erika Owen’s The Art of Flaneuring: How to Wander with Intention and Discover a Better Life, a svelte little book about the joy of taking walks, mostly because sometimes in the winter I need a kick in the pants to actually get me outside in the cold. It worked! I went outside and took a long walk and found a house with a turquoise door and another that exists in a state of perpetual autumn, with faded Halloween decorations in the windows and dead leaves in the yard.

Also big fuzzy buds on the magnolia tree, which is worrisome from a magnolia-flower perspective, because the low is going to be five degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow and I suspect that will kill those magnolia buds dead.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve become reading Wendell Berry’s essays in The Art of the Commonplace and I think I love him. It’s funny, because I’ve always heard him described as a conservative thinker, but a lot of his critiques - of the exploitative nature of the technological economy, both ecologically and in terms of labor relations - sound like something a leftist essayist might write today. (I don’t think this means that our political spectrum has shifted rightward, but rather reflects a fundamental change in the nature of American conservativism, which in its Trumpian incarnation is on the side of the exploiters.)

It’s crushing to read an essay Berry wrote circa 1970, say, where he puts his finger directly on the problem with the American government’s environmental policies, or American society’s attitudes toward low-status labor (this is a good companion piece to Orwell, it occurs to me), and know that not only has nothing changed over the past fifty years, but we’re currently going backward.

But he’s also snarky! Like this summation of the letters people wrote criticizing his refusal to buy a computer: “Some of us, it seems, would be better off if we would just realize that this is already the best of all possible worlds, and is going to get even better if we will just buy the right equipment.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Perhaps I’ll finally read Flight #116 Is Down? I got it from the library basically right after rachelmanija reviewed it, and I keep putting it off because I know from experience that once I start reading a Caroline B. Cooney book, that’s all I’m doing till the book is done… So I keep looking at it and being all “But can I really devote the next few hours of my life to this book?”

Yes, self! You can! Especially given that it’s not particularly long. (I really miss the svelteness of 90s children’s and YA novels. The trend now seems to be toward thicker books, and of course some books need to be that big, but many don’t.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I wrapped up Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, which has the distinction of being the first 18th century novel I’ve enjoyed. (No, wait, there was The Castle of Otranto.) Perhaps I am at last prepared to dive into The Mysteries of Udolpho and Evelina??

...On second thought maybe I should stick with the shorter 18th century novels for now. Both of those are Very Long.

I also finished Shirley Jackson’s The Road through the Wall, which means I’ve now read all the Shirley Jackson novels! (Oh no. Maybe I should have spread them out more?) The Road through the Wall was Jackson’s first novel, and tells the story of a neighborhood rather than following a small group of people, as most of her other books do. (I wished for both a cast list and a map of the neighborhood: there are so many characters that it’s hard to keep them all straight and their houses in the right place in my head.)

And I zoomed through Jenny Han’s Always and Forever, Lara Jean, which is an adorable and fitting end for the series. I particularly love the family relationships in this series - not just Lara Jean and her sisters (although I do love Lara Jean and her sisters!), but also her relationship with her dad, and her dad’s girlfriend, and the way the book negotiates both the difficulties and the pleasures of welcoming a new person into the family. As Lara Jean puts it:

“Families shrink and expand. All you can really do is be glad for it, glad for each other, for as long as you have each other.”

( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summertime and the Baxter Family Especially William, a comic novel about a seventeen-year-old boy in the throes of first love. Tarkington is excellent at portraying the self-important aspects of adolescence - in fact, possibly just self-importance in general; there’s also a little dog with a Napoleon complex who routs a much larger mongrel through sheer force of self-belief.

I’ve also just started George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Currently Orwell has just arrived at the trenches, where he has been issued a rifle so old that it probably can’t fire (he didn’t get one earlier because the Reds have so few rifles that they just keep the ones they have at the trenches and pass them off as new troops arrive), but that’s okay because the Fascist trenches are out of rifle range anyway. Mostly he is contending with the cold and the ever-present stench of excrement.

What I Plan to Read Next

I am repining because I am out of Lara Jean books. Jenny Han has written other books, I know, and perhaps I should give them a try, but the covers suggest they don’t have the same baking-in-your-pajamas aesthetic the Lara Jean books do, and that’s really what I want. But perhaps the covers are misleading? Or perhaps there are books by other authors with a similar aesthetic? Help me find them, DW friends!

Having finished - finally! - going through all my Ilf & Petrov quotes, I can now start unloading George Orwell quotes on you, from the essay collection All Art is Propaganda.

I should start by saying that the title of this book arises from the fact that Orwell repeats this phrase, or variations of it, in at least half the essays - which makes it sound like its going to be very samy, when in fact it isn’t at all, but there are some definite themes running through all the essays. Three of them really stuck out to me.

1. “All art is propaganda,” obviously. Orwell is not arguing that all art is literally propaganda in the sense that the government is paying for it, but in the sense that all art - consciously or unconsciously - advances a view of the world. There’s a particularly excellent chapter where he talks about the boys’ boarding school stories that ran in a popular magazines at the time, and notes that they all have a conservative bent, which arises simply from the fact that they’re set in and subtly glorify the British boarding school establishment.

( This got really long and I still didn’t get it all in, so I’ll have to make a second Orwell post. )