A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns! This is a big chonk of a book with some heavy material (especially the lynching descriptions in the chapters about the Jim Crow South), so it took me a while to get through, but if you’re interested in the history of the Great Migration (the exodus of Black Americans from the South to the North from roughly 1915-1970), this gives a good overview and also a recounts in detail the life stories of three of the migrants.

Wilkerson often compares the experience of the migrants to the immigrant experience: like immigrants from across the sea, the migrants from the South brought traditional foods and stories, clubbed together with other migrants from the same area, loved to talk about life in the Old Country, etc. Although the comparison is illuminating, Wilkerson notes that many of the people she interviewed disliked the framing, because it made them sound as if they weren’t already Americans when their ancestors had been in this country for hundreds of years.

I also read W. E. Johns’ Worrals in the Wastelands, a delightful book! Worrals and Frecks embark on a mission to capture escaped Nazi Anna Schultz, who is hiding away at a remote lake in Canada panning for gold. Tense, pacy, that amazing Johns plotting where he sets up so many moving parts that everything follows logically and yet you know can guess what will happen next, evocative scenery descriptions, the obligatory menacing wildlife encounters.

And I finished Maria Louisa Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock, a Victorian children’s fantasy beloved by Nancy and her friends in Jennie Lindquist’s The Golden Name Day. When orphaned Griselda is sent to live with her kindly but fusty great-aunts, her quiet days are enlivened by the cuckoo from the clock, who takes her on a series of magical adventures. My favorite was the bit where they visit the sea on the dark side of the moon, a strange quiet sea, so peaceful that it wraps around to eerie.

Newbery book for the week: Marguerite de Angeli’s Black Fox of Lorne, in which twin Viking brothers shipwreck on the coast of Scotland, swear vengeance on the treacherous Scottish lairds who killed their father and his crew, then forswear vengeance after they convert to Christianity and also Scottishness. (But don’t worry, both treacherous Scottish lairds get their just deserts! One betrays and kills the other and is then in turn executed by the king.)

Another 1950s Newbery Honor book with intense religious themes! As I go back, I’ll be curious when this theme starts to show up, as it wasn’t present at all in the 1920s books. Current hypothesis: this is a 1950s special, part of the God and country craze accompanying McCarthyism and the Red Scare. We’ll see if I’m right.

What I’m Reading Now

Gretchen Rubin’s Life in Five Senses, which is about living a fuller, richer life by the thoughtful deployment of one’s five senses. I just finished the chapter about sight, which already made my life richer and fuller with this photograph of a bowl with feet.

What I Plan to Read Now

In Jennie Lindquist’s The Little Silver Tree, Nancy and her friends fall in love with Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Mary’s Meadow, so of course I intend to read that as a follow-up to The Cuckoo Clock.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last I’ve finished Bruce Catton’s Never Call Retreat! This is the final book in his Centennial History of the Civil War, and of course covers the end of the war. I hadn’t realized just how little territory the South had left by the end of 1864: at that point they’ve got Virginia and the Carolinas and some outlying bits of Texas and Florida, but basically the rest of the Confederacy is under Federal control. There’s no possible way they could win! And yet they keep going for three more months!

This seems to happen a lot in war history. Long wars really do end like a game of Risk: the winning side becomes clear long before the actual end, but the war nonetheless grinds on and on till the loser is totally defeated.

Also at long last (this was a week for finishing books I’ve been working on for ages), I finished Katharine Hull & Pamela Whitlock’s Crowns! This is the final book that Hull and Whitlock wrote together, their only collaboration not part of the Far-Distant Oxus trilogy, and, alas, not quite up to par with their other books. It’s a fantasy novel, but a fantasy constructed in a frame story: four cousins are going about their daily lives in London, then meet up at the yearly Christmas party, where they either have a magical adventure or perhaps just imagine a magical adventure in a land where they’re all kings and queens… I’ve read books that use this sort of ambiguity to good effect, but here it contributes to the general feeling that the book is underbaked.

I’ve been meaning to read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo for quite some time, and this week I finally got around to it! And I quite enjoyed it, although I must admit that I lost faith in the book when I realized that some of the quotes (many of the chapters are compilations for quotes describing, say, a White House soiree, or Abe Lincoln’s face, or what have you) are completely made up. They have citations and everything! And some of them are certainly ascribed to real people who really wrote about Lincoln (Elizabeth Keckley, William Herndon), and presumably those quotes are in fact quotes, but it bugs me that I don’t know for sure. The book would have really benefited from a history note.

Finally, I continued my Newbery journey with Walter and Marion Havighurst’s Song of the Pines: A Story of Norwegian Lumbering in Wisconsin, which is not only about Norwegian lumbering but Norwegian immigration in the mid-19th century more generally. Immigrant stories seem to have been quite popular in the 1950s (also pioneer stories), and this one also leans hard on the theme of What It Means to Be an American.

What I’m Reading Now

Still working on The Warmth of Other Suns. I’ve finished the first section, detailing life in the Jim Crow South; now the book has moved on to the migration, which met with enormous opposition in many southern communities, as the white landowners were determined not to lose their captive labor force.

Wilkerson draws a parallel between the South and the Soviet Union, which pleased me, as I extrapolated such a parallel from Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer, then wondered if it’s just that I have the Soviet Union on the brain… but if Wilkerson sees it too, presumably there’s something to it. It is curious that white Southerners tended to be the most vociferously anti-Soviet people in America while also living in the most Soviet system.

As a lighter counterpoint, I’ve begun Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm. Jones wrote this not long after the Tough Guide to Fantasyland, and I’m really curious if the earlier book inspired this one - did she just keep thinking, “What if there really were tours of Fantasyland? How would that affect the lives of the Fantasyland inhabitants?”

What I Plan to Read Next

John Davis Billings’ Hardtack and Coffee, highly recommended by Bruce Catton as one of the liveliest memoirs of everyday life in the army during the Civil War.