A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’m not sure I should count David L. Robb’s Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, as I got bored about seventy pages in, but in my defense, the book really only has enough information for a single magazine article: the Pentagon shapes Hollywood action movies by allowing or denying moviemakers access to military assets.

There, I’ve saved you from having to read the book. The rest of it is just piling up examples. You can pretty much take it as read that any Hollywood action movie that uses fighter jets, tanks, battleships, submarines, etc., probably danced a tango with the Pentagon in order to borrow those props from the military, because that’s so much cheaper than renting them.

I also finished Hampton Sides’ In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Journey of the USS Jeannette, which is very good, although ( I’m not sure spoilers is the right word for a work of historical nonfiction, but... )

I think I’m going to take a break from Sides after this. The only other of his books that the library has is about a rescue mission in the Pacific during World War II, which sounds a bit grim just from that description.

What I’m Reading Now

Continuing my Betsy-Tacy binge, I’ve reached Betsy in Spite of Herself, the tale of Betsy’s sophomore year of high school. I am torn between the desire to tear through these books as fast as possible, and the countervailing desire to read them at a measured and stately pace, the better to savor them with. They make perfect bedtime reading: interesting enough that I’m always excited to read more, but not so exciting that they interfere with sleeping.

I enjoyed Mrs. Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks so much last fall that I’ve started reading The Perpetual Curate, another work in her series The Chronicles of Carlingford (I hope it doesn’t matter too much that I’m reading them entirely out of order). I am a bit at sea with all the church politics in this one; in between this book and the TV series Grantchester, I’ve come to the conclusion that my understanding of the Church of England is deplorably sketchy. I have lumped together rectors and curates and vicars in my mind as “church people,” even though clearly they are vastly different types of church people (and curates, at least, always seem to suffer under excessively straitened salaries).

Also, in this week’s installment of “the more things change, the more they don’t stay the same at all”: one of the subplots in The Perpetual Curate concerns a bit of gossip going around Carlingford that the rector was seen walking! with a pretty child! (who is always described as a pretty child. I originally thought was about eight, although I think I underestimated her age slightly) and maybe is courting her! which is VERY SHOCKING!...

...because she’s the daughter of a lower-class tradesman and not at all suitable for a man of the church, even if he is a lowly curate. I guess if he were out walking (and maybe even meeting in the garden! Meeting in the garden, what degeneracy) with a twelve-year-old girl of an acceptable social background, that might be okay?

(The gossips are confused, and the curate is in fact in love with the age- and class-appropriate Lucy Wodehouse, whom alas he can never ask to marry him because of his miserable curate’s salary.)

What I Plan to Read Next

I have inched my way to the top of the holds list for Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, so hopefully that. Or possibly Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, which I borrowed from Caitlin? We shall see.

I’m also contemplating whether I might want to read some of Maud Hart Lovelace’s non Betsy-Tacy books - Early Candlelight was apparently quite popular - but perhaps I should wait till I finish the Betsy-Tacy series before I make a decision.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Hampton Sides’ Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, which is excellent. If you’re into historical nonfiction and you’re interested in Martin Luther King Jr., the history of the FBI, the history of criminal investigative technology, manhunts, or 1960s America, I absolutely recommend this book.

I enjoyed Hellhound on His Trail so much that I rushed to the library before I’d even finished it to get another one of Sides’ books. so I could continue to bask in Sides’ clear, lucid prose and his excellent and extensive research. That second book, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, is good but not as propulsively enthralling as Hellhound on His Trail.

I think this is partly because I personally find 1840s & 50s America less interesting than 1960s America, and partly because the story more diffuse, skipping across a wide range of people in a wide-ranging territory (all the way from St. Louis to California), so it doesn’t build up momentum in the same way that the collision course between King and James Earl Ray does - or the post-assassination manhunt for James Earl Ray.

What I’m Reading Now

I am continuing Sarah Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of To-Day, the tale of young Elfrida’s maturation as an artist (she has segued from an artist on canvas to an artist of the newspaper article) and member of bohemia. It has currently developed an odd little love triangle, BOO. Hopefully that will resolve in an acceptable fashion - I say, without much hope at all.

I’ve also started War and Peace, but I’m thinking that I’ll probably set aside a day to post about that - perhaps Friday? - so it doesn’t clutter up the reading meme each week.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still waiting for interlibrary loan to send me Heaven to Betsy. Come on, interlibrary loan! I’m champing at the bit here!

In the meantime I have Roller Girl, a Newbery Honor book this year which is about a girl who gets involved in roller derby. That sounds promising!

It also reminds me of my long-standing ambition to read Shauna Cross’s Derby Girl, the book that inspired the movie Whip It. Maybe that should be my next ILL request...