A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I finished Mary Stewart’s last Arthurian novel, The Prince and the Pilgrim, which is based on the medieval Arthurian legend of Alisander, who sets out to avenge his father’s death and go to Camelot… and neither avenges his father’s death nor ever makes it to Camelot, but instead marries the Pretty Pilgrim, who takes one look at him and informs him, “I love you.”

In Stewart’s version, Alexander is the one who takes one look at Alice and instantly announces he loves her - not twelve hours after he last rose from Morgan La Fay’s bed. OH ALEXANDER. There’s a bit where his mom is like “Thank God he’s pretty because he’s not very smart,” and it’s fortunate that Alice will be in a position to do his thinking for him forthwith.

I also read J. R. R. Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas, which is a collection of the letters that he wrote for his children from Father Christmas and Father Christmas’s various helper, like the North Polar Bear and the elf secretary Ilbereth. As they were written over a period of almost two decades, there isn’t an overarching story per se, but rather the ongoing happenings of life at the North Pole, such as North Polar Bear’s various scrapes.

The copy I read includes facsimiles of the letters (each character has his own distinctive handwriting: Father Christmas’s is shaky because he’s old, North Polar Bear writes a blocky hand because he’s writing with his paw, etc.), plus Tolkien’s beautiful illustrations. A Christmas feast.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve been struggling to keep up with my email reading commitments! Whale Weekly has suddenly become Whale Almost Daily (and a chunk of chapters each day, at that! Ishmael and Queequeg are already sharing a bed like newlyweds), the letters from The Lightning Conductor are flying thick and fast, AND the first chapter of A Study in Scarlet arrived from Letters from Watson, which wasn’t supposed to start till January 1st! Oh my.

The daily Christmas Carol installments, however, continue just the right size. Scrooge has just bid farewell to the Ghost of Christmas Present, but not before being introduced to the Ghost’s terrifying hangers-on, the wretched children Ignorance and Want. One of the few scenes that didn’t make it into The Muppet Christmas Carol! Perhaps the filmmakers thought it interrupted the Ghost’s leave-taking.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been enjoying A Christmas Carol so much that I’m taking the plunge on David Copperfield.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Tolkien’s three translations of Middle English poems for my April reading challenge! I quite liked “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and “Sir Orfeo” - I recommend “Sir Orfeo” particularly; it’s a retelling of the Orpheus myth, except the Eurydice character is taken away by Faerie instead of Death. But “The Pearl,” which is not a story but a theological musing in the form of a poem, I found rather a slog.

I also read Colleen McCullough’s The Ladies of Missalonghi, because it was recommended to me as being “just like The Blue Castle, but in Australia,” which indeed it is! In fact there was apparently a plagiarism controversy, which honestly I think is silly. She didn’t copy the prose, and storylines are made to be revamped and reused. Shakespeare did it!

The sexual politics are a bit dated in places (more so than in The Blue Castle actually, which is funny given that The Ladies of Missalonghi was published in over sixty years later), but it does an A++ job on the dowdy young woman past her first youth taking control of her life and standing up to her repressively respectable extended family.

Unread Book Club: I finished The Incredible Journey! Overall, I felt rather lukewarm about it, but the ending did make me cry (because it was almost sad! And then it wasn’t!) so perhaps it wormed its way a little farther into my heart than I realized.

This brings us up to 17 books from the Unread Book Club for the year so far. Not too shabby! Of course many of them are children’s books, which helps.

What I’m Reading Now

Joan E. Dejean’s The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual - and the Modern Home Began, which is about the switch from magnificent grandeur to comfort as the goal for architecture/furniture/clothing styles in Frances in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Moderately interesting but not grabbing me so far.

What I Plan to Read Next

missroserose has pointed out that Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is in fact an immigrant story, and therefore counts for my next reading challenge, and as it has been vaguely on my list anyway… so I’m going to read that.

What I’ve Finished Reading

William B. Irvine’s A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt - And Why They Shouldn’t, which is about the history and social function of insults. It includes a chapter about friendly teasing & ambiguous insults, which I found especially interesting, and also a fair amount of space on how to respond to insults - one of the suggestions was to say “Thanks,” which I think is beautiful in its simplicity and ability to throw the insulter off their game. (Probably not for backhanded compliments, but otherwise.)

He also talks about the self-esteem movement a bit, the main point being that the movement saw the correlation between high self-esteem and achievement and got the causation backwards - probably, excuse my grumpiness, because cooing “You’re so special!” at everyone is so much easier than taking the time and effort to foster genuine achievement.

Irvine also makes the point - which ought to be obvious, but lots of commentators seem to miss it - that if the Millennial generation seems narcissistic, it’s because that’s the inevitable outcome of inflicting “You’re Thumbody special!” programs on a generation. You can’t din that in a generation’s ears for years and then act shocked, shocked! when they take narcissism tests and answer “Yes” to the question “Are you special?”

Unread Book Club progress: I finished Virginia Sorenson’s Miracles on Maple Hill, which has lots of delightful detail about tapping maples, wildflowers, the countryside, etc. It doesn’t go very in-depth about Marly’s father’s PTSD, but after all it’s a book about Marly, not her father, and I did think the author did a nice job showing how her father’s less-than-joyous return from a prisoner of war camp has affected Marly while balancing that with the more light-hearted “And then we met the resident mountain hermit!” bits.

What I’m Reading Now

Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I must confess I had some concerns about it: I skipped a lot of Tolkien’s poetry when I read Lord of the Rings, and long-form poems in general are not my thing. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’m liking it so far. (It helps of course that I already read & liked the story in prose.)

I’ve also started reading Margaret Stohl’s Black Widow: Forever Red, which suffers a bit from not being my Natasha headcanon, ha - but we’ll see if Stohl wins me over to hers as I keep reading. I’ve only just started, so she’s got plenty of time.

What I Plan to Read Next

Warren Lewis’s The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Lewis XIV is waiting for me at the library. Warren Lewis is C. S. Lewis’s brother and mainly remembered for that these days, although (according to The Company They Keep) his books about French history are well-researched and well-wrought reads in their own right. I have long meant to learn more about France and this seemed like a good spur to give that a go.

"The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies." - George Eliot

I've been reading Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch, which I must confess to enjoying more than Middlemarch itself. I've always admired Eliot's literary goal of extending her readers' sympathy, but I find her hard to read, even tedious: Middlemarch's exhaustive delineation of all its characters mental states is rather, well, exhausting.. Of course it's nice to have everyone's perspective on everything, but at the same time, must we get their perspectives at quite such great length?

Mead's book, however, I've been enjoying a lot, particularly for its examination of the way that a favorite book can become a part of the self. "Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself...There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft on a tree," she writes.

As such, there's an element of memoir to the book, as Mead is showing how Middlemarch has shaped her (and how her life has shaped her reading of Middlemarch. But Mead keeps the focus firmly on Eliot: both on Eliot's biography and on Middlemarch itself. Mead has more sympathy for Lydgate than I do - I tend to think that, given his opinions, Rosamund Vincy is exactly the wife he deserved - but the chapter about Casaubon, "The Dead Hand," is particularly fine, particularly in its discussion of insecurity and uncertainty.

***

I don't think that art necessarily enlarges the sympathies. In fact, I think there are certain kinds of art where the fact that one's sympathies will remain comfortably unenlarged is part of the appeal - war stories about the action-packed excitement of killing faceless enemies, or love stories where the protagonist's romantic rival is a completely unworthy person whose feelings about being losing their beloved need trouble the reader not at all. Doubtless there are other such stories, too.

Although I think often books have both elements to them - in most books, the circle of sympathy extends this far and no farther, if only because the nature of a book means that the author has to focus on certain things and not others.

For instance, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies play up the "excitement of killing faceless enemies" bit of Tolkien's books (the faceless enemies are there in the books, although perhaps not so much the excitement of killing them?). But I wouldn't say that Lord of the Rings is on the whole an unsympathetic book. It's just that Tolkien directs the readers' sympathy and attention not to finding humanity in enemies, but toward sympathizing with the fallibility of good characters who succumb to temptation, like Boromir and Gollum and Frodo. (Perhaps Denethor, although in a very different way?)

Even for authors who do take enlarging sympathy as their goal, they need to find a receptive partner in their readers. The first time I read Middlemarch, despite all Eliot's care I found Casaubon vastly irritating: I described him, and I quote, as "a cramped and petty man with a mildewed soul, too small to commit any actual evil, but possessed of a personality so arid that it sucks the vitality out of everyone around him."

Clearly I was not about to allow my sympathy to be enlarged, at least not enough to include an anxious, fretful middle-aged pedant. But Mead's book has accomplished what Eliot did not: I do begin to feel for him, despite all the suffering their marriage visits on poor Dorothea.