A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

AT LONG LAST I have finished Wilkie Collins’ Armadale! It probably would not have taken so long, but honestly I found the suspense so stressful that I often had to take breaks before I could go on… Perhaps not what you’d expect from a book that’s 150 years old, but what can I say, Wilkie Collins knows his craft.

( Spoilers )

After Armadale, I wanted something short to read as a palate cleanser, so I read Paula Fox’s One-Eyed Cat, in which a boy in upper New York in the 1930s gets an air rifle for his birthday, which his father forbids him to use… but the boy sneaks it out that night and shoots at a moving shadow - or maybe not a shadow? - it was really too dark to say, but when he sees a one-eyed cat later, he becomes convinced he shot that cat. Some lovely nature descriptions and a lovely picture of his relationship with his mother, who suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis.

I also zoomed through Gerald Durrell’s The Whispering Land, in which Durrell travels to Argentina to film penguins and seals and gather specimens for his zoo, including “an orange-rumped agouti, a large rodent with dark eyes, slender legs and the disposition of a racehorse suffering from an acute nervous breakdown.” A jolly romp, like all of Durrell’s books. I also particularly enjoyed this description of trying to book passage home for a collection of animals:

Most shipping people, when you mention the words “animal cargo” to them grow pale, and get vivid mental pictures of the Captain being eviscerated on the bridge by a jaguar, the First Officer being slowly crushed in the coils of some enormous snake, while the passengers are pursued from one end of the ship to the other by a host of repulsive and deadly beasts of various species.

What I’m Reading Now

lucymonster recommended Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and I’ve started reading it because I’m weak for all things Soviet… But it may take me some time to finish it, because the Soviet Union keeps losing entire armies because Stalin refuses to allow them to retreat, and then the Nazis encircle YET ANOTHER SOVIET ARMY and I shriek “WHY? WHY? WHY?” (this is a cry of existential angst rather than a request for clarification) and then I have to take a little break to read something else.

I’ve also been reading Monika Zgustova’s Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag. I plan to write a longer review (or at least post a selection of quotes), but here’s one for the road. In 1950, Susanna Pechuro recalls, one of her teachers condemned a classmate’s poem as anti-Soviet:

“Don’t you see it’s sad? Some feelings are not meant for Soviet youth.”

“But we’re all sad sometimes,” I objected.

“Soviet youth should never be. Sadness is decadent,” the teacher cut me off.

This is five years after the end of World War II, in which those entire armies kept getting destroyed. But no sadness! Sadness is decadent, comrades!

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m back in the saddle with the Newbery Honor project. I’ve got seven books from the 90s left to go, plus the five (!) Newbery Honor books from this year.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

In Northern Ireland, peace has such a bad name that in order to achieve it they will have to call it something else.

Sally Belfrage’s Living with War: A Belfast Year is about, well, Belfrage’s year in Belfast, speaking to people on both sides of the conflict (this was in the 1980s, during the Troubles). What struck me as I was reading is, how shall I put this, the mind-boggling denseness of the assumed reader - the kind of person who cares enough to read a whole book about the Troubles, but approaches the whole thing with a wrinkled brow and the plaintive, baffled question, “But what are they fighting about?”

I say this not as a criticism of Belfrage, who is trying very hard to break through that willful obtuseness. But the intellectual climate that produces a whole contingent of cultured, literary, presumably intelligent people who look at conflicts and wonder Why We Just Can’t Get Along? strikes me as very characteristic of a certain kind of 80s/90s smug complacent liberalism that eventually found its apotheosis in The West Wing.

I also finished Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game, which I think made a mistake in having a fifteen-year-old narrator. The book keeps having to twist itself into a pretzel to justify Louisa’s presence at scenes where a civilian child’s presence makes no sense. Louisa should have been a few years older and connected in some official capacity to the airbase.

But that wouldn’t solve my biggest problem with the book, which is that ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Gerald Durrell’s Two in the Bush. I was delighted to discover that this Gerald Durrell book takes the reader to New Zealand (that’s the part I’m at) and points beyond. Durrell has just watched penguin hopping from rock to rock, apparently for no other reason than rock-hopping is fun, and it sounds like the cutest thing.

And I’m going onward in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. Lydia Gwilt is ON THE CUSP of arriving at Thorpe Ambrose, in the guise of Miss Milroy’s governess, in order to win Allan Armadale’s heart (the Allan Armadale who actually uses the name Allan Armadale, to clarify) and thereby secure Allan's fortune!

Am I rooting for her to succeed in this nefarious plot? IDK, kind of, I must admit that I find Allan Armadale kind of annoying (he’s SO careless, he LOST a BOAT because he forgot to tie it properly, my inner Swallows & Amazons is APPALLED). But on the other hand it might bring pain to Ozias Midwinter, the woobiest woobie to ever woobie (he loves Allan because Allan is the FIRST PERSON who was EVER NICE TO HIM, oh my God) and I just can’t be having with that.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve put on hold a lot of the Irish books recommended in my last post (plus Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which, like so many books, I’ve meant to read for years). What better time of year to do it, with St. Patrick’s Day coming?

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.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Bill Brittain’s The Wish-Giver: Three Tales of Coven Tree, a Newbery Honor book in which a salesman rolls up at a church social, sells four wishes (a mere fifty cents a pop), and then rolls out of town, leaving his customers to deal with the chaos that their poorly conceived wishes create. I felt a little bit that the wishes were intentionally badly worded so as to have the most dramatic effects (a girl wishes that a traveling salesman would “put down roots,” which ends up turning him into a tree, when what she really wants is for him to fall in love with her - why wouldn’t she just wish for that?) - but I did enjoy the down home country narrative voice, which was flavorful without being over the top.

I also read Sally Belfrage’s Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties, which is more introspective than her other books that I’ve read (A Room in Moscow, Freedom Summer) and suffers for it: Belfrage is oddly opaque in describing herself, unable to dig beneath the surface as she can in describing 1950s Moscow or 1964 Mississippi. She talks about the split consciousness of her childhood, learning about American democracy and freedom in school while at home her father (who edits a leftist newspaper, The National Guardian) is under constant surveillance by the FBI for his political views, but it comes to feel repetitious, like we’re circling around some greater truth without ever really zeroing in on it.

The book is effective at evoking the terror of the 1950s Red Scare, however, and the way that it decimated progressive circles, by destroying some progressives’ lives and careers (through arrest or employment blackballing) and frightening the rest into silence. What struck me, as I read this, is that the culture war in America is not anything new; the only thing that’s changed is that progressives finally have the numbers to effectively fight back. (They certainly didn’t in the 1950s, when “78 percent of Americans said they thought it was a good idea to report relatives or acquaintances suspected of being Communists.” A nation of stool pigeons!)

I also liked this quote: “My father lived on hope, and made hope his chief bequest to me: a lifetime’s basic faith in people, which must be disabused daily, when every morning’s newspaper comes as a blow to the naive optimism that somehow grew again in the night as you lay helpless to defend yourself.”

What I’m Reading Now

Other people keep hogging door duty at work so I haven’t had as much time to read Gerald Durrell’s Fillets of Plaice as I would have liked. :( On the other hand, this means that I get to savor it for longer, so that’s nice??? This book is actually five mini-memoirs stuck together; I just finished the one where the Durrells settle briefly in London after leaving Corfu in advance of World War II, and young Gerry fills his time by getting a job in a reptile pet shop. He accidentally befriends a colonel after dropping a box of terrapins on a bus, and it turns out the colonel has filled the attic of his house with meticulously painted model soldiers for use in hours-long war games.

I’m also reading Jeff Dickey’s Rising in Flames: Sherman’s March and the Fight for a New Nation, from which I learned (1) German and Irish immigrant identity in the 1860s were both A Big Deal (actually I knew this already, but it’s easier to ignore when you don’t have a book shoving it in your face), so I can’t just give Russell a German father and an Irish mother (what church did they marry in, by the way? Are they both Catholic?) and skip merrily onward giving it ne’er a further thought, and (2) I almost certainly have Russell marching with the whole entire wrong army for the backstory I’ve given him. If he joins up from an Eastern college, he would march with the Army of the Potomac, not the Army of the Tennessee.

(I can’t make him Catholic and let him keep a fiancee with the incredibly WASPy name “Julia Gage.” Surely the Gages would collapse in prostration at the prospect of their daughter marrying a Papist.)

I strongly suspect that I’ve Dunning-Krugered myself. “Oh, I definitely know enough about the Civil War to write a book about a Civil War veteran who wakes up in 1964!” I cried, knowing next to nothing about the Civil War, in which happy state of ignorance I’ve already written a book featuring TWO Civil War veterans. At least The Threefold Tie has no historical pretensions (at least about the Civil War, it definitely has historical pretensions about Non-Monogamous Nineteenth Century American Marriage Customs) and simply uses the Civil War as an excuse for Jack and Everett to make out in a barn.

What I Plan to Read Next

A footnote in Emily Mayhew’s Wounded (I’m still working my way through) has led me to Jeffrey S. Reznick’s Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain During the Great War, which I hope might be more helpful in answering my question “So what were the prospects for a double leg amputee following the Great War?” than Wounded, although it will almost certainly be less mind-blowing and unbedizened by poetry.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read Gerald Durrell’s The Drunken Forest, about his collecting trip in South America which was cut unfortunately short by a revolution in Paraguay. Durrell seems to be one of those people who lives more in six months than many people do in their entire lives: he’s just gotten together a good collection when the revolution makes it impossible to get most of his specimens out of the country, so he has to release the animals and leave on a rickety little plane… but within a few days he throws himself into collecting rheas (ostrich-like birds) on the pampas in Argentina. I aspire to react to setbacks with such sangfroid.

I also zoomed through Gale Galligan’s graphic novel adaptation of the Babysitters Club book Logan Likes Mary Anne!, which I don’t think I ever read in novel form. In fact, I’m not sure I ever read any of the first ten or so books in the Babysitters Club series, which is weird because I read so many of the others. Why, younger self??

I don’t know if M. F. K. Fisher herself revised How to Cook a Wolf, or if some later editor got a hold of her marginal notes and then inserted them into the main text, always [closed off with brackets] to show where the edits have been made. This makes for an annoyingly choppy reading experience, especially as the effect of the notes is almost always to diffuse the power of the original passage.

Otherwise I enjoyed the book, but boy do I wish I had a copy with the original unrevised text, or at very least a less disruptive way of adding in the revisions.

And finally, I galloped through Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s A View of the Nile, about the years that she and her family spent in Egypt in the early 60s. The book is a bit slow to get started (I galloped partly because it’s an interlibrary loan with a tight turnaround time), but it hits its stride once Fernea and her husband leave Cairo for Nubia to complete an anthropological study before the Aswan Dam floods all the traditional Nubian villages.

I knew almost nothing about Nubia before reading this book, and Fernea paints such a fascinating picture of the Nubian community where she lives with her husband and two young children that I was left rather sorry that the book didn’t include an epilogue; I would have loved it if the book checked back in to see how the community fared after the Egyptian government transplanted it above the Aswan Dam.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m back in the saddle with Svetlana Aleksievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, although I have to take it slow: too much at once and you drown. The mother of a girl who was badly injured in a terrorist bombing on the Moscow Metro tells Aleksievich, “You’re a writer, you’ll understand what I mean: Words have very little in common with what goes on inside of you.” And yet she keeps talking, and Aleksievich keeps recording: words are insufficient, but they are all we have.

Also, a quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope, her memoir about her husband (the poet Osip Mandelstam)’s arrest and the Stalinist era more generally. She’s musing, here, about a fellow that she thinks might have informed on Mandelstam: “But he scarcely matters. He was just a poor wretch who happened to live in terrible times. Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m pining away for Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning. I’m first in line on the holds list! Hurry up and read the book, person who has it checked out!!!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Gerald Durrell’s Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, his second memoir about his childhood with his eccentric family on Corfu. He just comes up with the most beautiful metaphors, like this description of fallen olive leaves, “as curled and crisp as brandy-snaps.”

He’s also so good at painting character in just a few swift pen strokes. So many characters are lots of fun, but I think my very favorite is Gerry’s pretentious, sex-obsessed brother Larry. Upon learning that snails are hermaphroditic, and when two snails mate the female half of one snail mates with the male half of the other and vice-versa, Larry cries, “I think that’s unfair. All those damned slimy things wandering around seducing each other like mad all over the bushes, and having the pleasures of both sensations. Why couldn’t such a gift be given to the human race? That’s what I want to know.”

I also finished Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station, which was a fun ride (it reminded me of the bit in one of Ruth Reichl’s memoirs where she visited China right after it began to open up for tourists), but the ending was definitely “I’m run out of word count! How do I wrap this up in two thousand words or less?” (As I recall, this is not the first Mrs. Pollifax book that has run into this problem, so obviously I’m not reading these books for the endings.)

I also liked this piece of advice, which Mrs. Pollifax offers to an unhappy tour member: “There are no happy endings, Jenny, there are only happy people.”

What I’m Reading Now

Jeanine Basinger’s The Movie Musical! (The exclamation point is part of the title.) I’ve loved Basinger’s movie writing ever since I read Silent Stars back in high school, which kicked off a valiant but largely unsuccessful quest to fall in love with silent movies (she just makes them sound so fun!); fortunately, movie musicals are a genre that I already know I enjoy, so mostly what this book has done is give me MANY more titles to check out, like Ernst Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow. I also went through a Lubitsch stage back in high school, but somehow I missed that one.

What I Plan to Read Next

Guess whose hold on Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder arrived at the library? MINE!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

If ladyherenya hadn’t posted about it, I probably never would have heard about Jill Paton Walsh’s Fireweed, and that would have been a great pity. The children’s book centers on two teenagers who end up living on the streets during the early days of the Blitz in London - or rather, living on the streets during the day and in the bomb shelters by night, because the Blitz somewhat ironically has made it much easier to be homeless.

This book is more serious than The Boxcar Children, but it’s got a similar kids-on-their-own feeling, with prose that is simultaneously lyrical and transparent. The narrator is telling the story years later, which gives the story an “Et in arcadia ego” feeling, the sense of the narrator looking back on a golden past that he realizes was not really golden (bombs dropping from the sky, and so forth) and yet remembers with great fondness.

We saw London getting knocked apart. We knew where there was ruin, and we knew that it wasn’t all in the papers. We saw a lot of terrible things. But the strangest thing, in a way, was the way things were the same. It sounds silly to say that the oddest thing was that the leaves turned gold and fell off while Hitler’s bombers filled the sky; of course they would, and they did. But in all that disruption, in the midst of so much destruction, when everyone’s life was changed and we were alone, standing on our own feet for the first time, looking after ourselves, familiar things seemed as exotic and unlikely as hothouse flowers.

I continued my James Baldwin journey with Go Tell It on the Mountain, a semi-autobiographical novel that draws on Baldwin’s time as a youth preacher. The story is set, steeped really, in the traditions of a Black church in Harlem, which is both the characters’ savior and their tormentor, which provides them with a strait and narrow path through the grim circumstances of their lives and yet tortures them with the torments of hell when they slip and stray..

I realize that this makes the book sound absolutely grim, and that’s not inaccurate, but it’s written with such clarity and truthfulness that it has a certain raw horrifying beauty. In this quality it reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s work, even though in many ways the two authors are quite different; but both of them look at the dark side of the human soul without flinching.

She found herself fascinated by the gun in his holster, the club at his side. She wanted to take that pistol and empty it into his round, red face; to take that club and strike with all her strength against the base of his skull where his cap ended, until the ugly, silky, white man’s hair was matted with blood and brains.

On a much lighter note, I read Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, the memoir which inspired the TV show The Durrells in Corfu, about an English family living on the Greek island of Corfu in the late 1930s. In terms of specific incidents, there’s actually not a lot of overlap between the book and the show, but they share very much the same feeling and atmosphere: the eccentric family having madcap adventures, featuring animals collected by young Gerry and exasperated epigrams by his older brother Larry, an aspiring writer.

And I read Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha, which is jolly good fun, as Mrs. Pollifax books generally are. This one features a cameo from a sidekick in a previous book, plus of course Mrs. Pollifax’s new husband (technically her name is now Mrs. Reed-Pollifax, although the narration still calls her Mrs. Pollifax, presumably so as not to confuse us), to whose existence I am becoming resigned.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, which tells Penelope’s story both before and after the Odyssey (it begins, in fact, when Penelope is already dead, a shade looking back at her life, and Atwood’s glimpses of life in the Greek underworld are darkly comic), interwoven with a Greek chorus of the twelve maids who Odysseus kills at the end of the Odyssey for dallying with the suitors. I’m not very far in, but so far I’m really enjoying it.

What I Plan to Read Next

My forward motion in the Mrs. Pollifax series has been tragically arrested by the fact that the library doesn’t have the next three titles (Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle, Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish, and Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief). Alas! I intend to request that the library purchase them as soon as possible, but unfortunately the library’s purchase request form is down right now on account of the pandemic, so who knows when THAT will be?

In brighter news, I’ve discovered that the 1971 adaptation Mrs. Pollifax - Spy stars Rosalind Russell, so that may very well be worth watching.