A Certain Slant of Light

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

Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Twelve Great Black Cats, and Other Eerie Scottish Tales, a delightfully spooky set of ghost and ghost-adjacent stories. My only criticism is that the title is Twelve Great Black Cats and there are only ten stories and the mismatch offends my sense of the fitness of things.

Also Gerald Durrell’s The Fantastic Flying Journey, in which three children go on a round the world adventure in a hot air balloon! after taking a powder that allows them to speak to animals!!! with their fat and lovably foolish uncle Lancelot who I am almost certain is Durrell’s self-caricature. (He keeps getting himself in dangerous situation - chased by a rhino etc - and then sternly warning the children that they need to be more careful, as they attempt not to giggle.)

Not quite as good as his memoirs, but still fun. It obeys to a T the cardinal rule of children’s fantasy: asking yourself “What would I have liked to read about when I was eleven?” and then writing it.

The 2024 Newbery Honor books continued strong with Pedro Martín’s Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir, a graphic novel about a trip to visit his parents’ hometown in Mexico that the whole family (nine kids!) took sometime in the 1970s. (Young Pedro’s favorite TV show is Happy Days, and he yearns to be as cool as The Fonz.) Lots of fun! I especially loved the sequences about Pedro’s grandfather’s work as a mule driver during the Mexican Revolution, which Pedro envisions in superhero style.

What I’m Reading Now

Not much progress on Shirley this week, as I was traveling over the weekend. Shirley and Caroline have planned a romantic getaway trip to Scotland, and also started a plan for the relief of the poor of the parish who have been thrown out of work by the war and the new cloth-making machines.

What I Plan to Read Next

This Saturday I have a date with John Le Carré’s The Looking Glass War.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Gerald Durrell’s The Ark’s Anniversary, a book commemorating not only the twenty-fifth anniversary of Durrell’s zoo, but also his triumph in establishing captive breeding as an important practice for saving desperately endangered species. “If captive breeding was mentioned twenty-five years ago within the hearing of a group of earnest conservations,” he notes, “they flinched and spoke loudly of other things, rather as if you had the bad taste to confess that you thought necrophilia a suitable means of birth control.”

His earlier books tend to be pure romps, whether they are memoirs of his family or his animal collecting adventures. This one is a little bit more political (“When ecology becomes a luxury then we are all dead,” he comments with exasperation, with regard to certain obstructive politicians), but still very funny, as in this description of a colleague who lost his luggage on a flight.

In one hand Tom clasped what seemed to be all his worldly goods in a briefcase which had apparently been constructed out of the skin of an ancient crocodile suffering from leprosy. His suit looked as though it had been slept in by seventeen tramps and then discarded as being of no further service… His tie – at one time I have no doubt a magnificent piece of neckwear – looked as though it had been seized and thoughtful masticated by one of the less intelligent dinosaurs and then regurgigated. His shoes completed the whole ensemble: Charles Chaplin spent years trying to get his shoes to look like that without success…

littlerhymes and I also finished Ghost Hawk, which we put on our list because Susan Cooper wrote it and it was available in both our countries. I have in the past sung the praises of going into books sight unseen, but in this case I wish we had done a bit of research, because it turns out that this is a book about how Colonialism Is Bad. This is of course laudable, but as with books about how Women Had It Tough in the Ancient World (or indeed simply in The Past), I feel I’ve done my time with this one, and indeed also with Slavery Is Bad, Racism Is Bad, War Is Bad, etc. etc. I’ve got it. I’ve grasped the concept. I don’t need to read another book about it.

Because it’s Cooper, the prose is of course beautiful, and she evokes the woodlands of Massachusetts just as in other books she evokes the mountains of Wales or the Scottish lochs. But I did feel it was really more about its message than about a story.

What I’m Reading Now

After a long hiatus in fairy allusions, Jane Eyre comes back strong when Jane meets Rochester. In fact, the first reappearance of the fairy allusions is from Jane toward Rochester: when Jane first hears Rochester’s horse on the road, she half-convinces herself that this is the sound of the gytrash, a fairy creature who preys on unwary travelers.

Once Jane sees him, the fairy illusion is dispelled, or rather passes from Jane to Rochester, because next time he sees her, he teases, “And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on that stile?”

“For whom, sir?” asks Jane, startled.

“For the men in green: it was a proper moonlight evening for them. Did I break through one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the causeway?”

And Jane falls instantly in with his joke: “The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago,” said I, speaking as seriously as he had done. “And not even in Hay Lane, or the fields about it, could you find a trace of them. I don’t think either summer or harvest, or winter moon, will ever shine on their revels more.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I have after all acquired Elizabeth Wein’s Cobalt Squadron.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sarah Vowell’s Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, an essay collection about life in America in the 1990s (with excursions into Vowell’s childhood and youth in the 1970s and 80s). I enjoyed it, but I think I’d only recommend it for a Sarah Vowell completist. It’s fine, but only fine, and there are just so many books in the world.

Also Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, a slim travelogue about a two-week walking trip that Stevenson took through the Cevennes. Some interesting information here about the Camisards, a Protestant sect that the Catholic church spent twenty years attempting to suppress in the early 1700s before flinging up their hands in despair.

What I’m Reading Now

Gerald Durrell’s The Picnic and Other Inimitable Stories. In the title story, Gerald’s brother Larry is coming back to England after an absence of ten years—

“Ten peaceful years,” corrected Leslie.

“They weren’t at all peaceful,” said Mother. “We had the war.”

“I meant peaceful without Larry,” explained Leslie.

The family attempts to have a pleasant seaside picnic. I laughed so hard I almost cried. Just what I needed after a rather stressful weekend.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have run into a minor roadblock with Project Read All the Franny Billingsley: I can’t remember if I’ve read Well Wished or not. I know that I borrowed it from the library, only to discover that the book had been bound so that after chapter 10 or so, it started over at chapter 1… but did I hunt out a properly bound copy and finish it?

Surely I must have done? Surely the lure of the Quest would have pulled me on until I found an unblemished copy and finished reading the book.

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!