A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Anne Lindbergh’s Travel Far, Pay No Fare, which I’m almost certain I somehow confused with Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light, because a children’s portal fantasy is definitely the kind of book I expected Travel Light to be. This is not a promising expectation with which to begin Travel Light, but it’s exactly right for Travel Far, Pay No Fare, which is a frolic. Owen’s soon-to-be-stepsister Parsley (what a name!) has a magic bookmark that will take you into a book, and soon the two are bopping in and out of Alice in Wonderland and Little Women (Parsley has a crush on Laurie! Oh my God) and The Yearling.

I also finished John D. Billings’ Hardtack and Coffee, Or, The Unwritten Story of Army Life, a memoir about life in the Union Army during the Civil War. An excellent research resource! Loads of fascinating, detailed information, sprinkled with amusing anecdotes and plentiful illustrations (over 200 sketches by Charles W. Reed!), and I love that he included chapters about mule drivers and wagon trains, vital parts of army life that often get glossed over.

And James Herriot’s The Lord God Made Them All. All of Herriot’s books are like a warm bath, which is a bit ironic when Herriot spends so much time in each book delivering lambs shirtless in snow-flecked early-spring fields. It gives the books that delicious “reading by the fire while bad weather rages on the other side of the window” feel.

What I’m Reading Now

James Herriot’s Every Living Thing. Herriot has just acquired an assistant vet who goes everywhere with his pet badger riding on his shoulder! Oh to reach such a level of eccentricity.

Also Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, which is not so much a history of ancient Rome but a dissection of the historical sources we have to try to figure out how trustworthy any particular bit of information is. Absolutely delighted to learn that ancient Romans were just as apt as modern retellers to massage awkward bits of myth or history: Cicero, for instance, was so uncomfortable with the whole fratricidal business in the tale of Romulus and Remus that he just kind of lets Remus fade out of the story after the twins are suckled by the wolf. No need for Romulus to kill him if he just fades away!

She also tells a story during the Social War (that is, the war between the Romans and their Italian allies who felt they were being treated as possessions rather than allies), where a comedian makes anti-Roman jokes on stage, and the Romans in the crowd are SO mad that they murder him then and there - and then the next comedian comes on! No other choice! If he runs, they’ll probably hunt him down and kill him, and if he makes jokes they don’t like they’ll also kill him!

So on stage he goes, and he says, “I travel through Italy searching for favours by making people laugh and giving pleasure. So spare the swallow, which the gods allow to nest safely in all your houses!” And the crowd (part Roman, part non-Roman) is touched by this appeal, and he lives to tell jokes another day.

What I Plan to Read Next

One more Anne Lindbergh! I just couldn’t resist The People in Pineapple Place, in which a boy makes friends with children from another time. Possibly a bevy of other times? I’m not sure, but either way you know I’m weak for stories about children frolicking across the timeline.

Also might delve deeper in Mary Beard’s work. Does anyone have a favorite, or conversely one that you anti-rec?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Teresa Lust’s A Blissful Feast: Culinary Adventures in Italy’s Piedmont, Maremma, and Le Marche, an enchanting culinary memoir about Lust’s journeys to Italy to learn about the food and the language. (Lust also has family connections in the Piedmont, so there are aspects of family memoir here, too.) The book was published in 2020, but most of the events took place in the 1990s, which gives it a pleasantly nostalgic effect, and the descriptions of food are delicious. Highly recommended if you enjoy food memoirs.

Also Elizabeth Enright’s picture book Zeee, in which Zeee (a fairy the size of a bumblebee) keeps finding lovely new homes (a tent of burdock leaves, an empty wasp nest, an abandoned sand pail), only to have them destroyed by humans. Until at last she befriends a human, and the human gives her a dollhouse! Loved all the little homes and the descriptions of Zeee’s tiny fairy furniture.

What I’m Reading Now

James Herriot’s The Lord God Made Them All, his fourth book of memoirs about practice as a rural vet in mid-twentieth century Yorkshire, except this time there are also a few chapters about his trip to the Soviet Union in 1961 as ship’s vet on a ship delivering a cargo of sheep! As you can imagine I am SO excited about the Soviet angle in this one.

Mostly, however, the book takes place in the waning years of World War II, after Herriot returns from his stint in the RAF. He mentions that many prisoners of war were billeted on Yorkshire farms, and in many cases this situation created such lasting friendships that the Yorkshire families would visit their prisoner-friends in Germany or Italy for decades after the war. (There were Russian prisoners too, apparently, but when they made it back to the USSR they were either imprisoned or shot.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Lensey Namioka’s Den of the White Fox, the secret final book of the Zenta & Matsuzo series! For reasons that are obscure to me, it doesn’t show up on a lot of internet lists of Zenta & Matsuzo books. (I also found a list that includes The Phantom of Tiger Mountain as a Zenta & Matsuzo book, but as further research indicates The Phantom of Tiger Mountain takes place in 10th century China I believe this is an error.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Susan Coolidge’s A Guernsey Lily; or, How the Feud Was Healed. The subtitle suggests a feud-forward story, but in fact it is 90% about the Wreford family traveling to the Channel Isles (for Mama’s health, you know!) with a little wisp of a feud that shows up about halfway through, about which Coolidge cares so little that she can’t even be bothered to marry the eldest daughter of one feuding family to the eldest son of the other.

Honestly Coolidge is 100% correct: I am down to read a travelog to the Channel Isles at any time. Bring on the ever-blooming flowers and the tidal cave alive with anemones! Also delighted by the fact that on Guernsey, the Wrefords rent their home from Mrs. Kempton (wife of a sailor constantly away on long voyages to South America) and her friend Elizabeth, who met in service, bought the house together for the purpose of renting it out, and as far as I can tell live there together as the landladies.

I also finished E. Anthony Rotundo’s American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, which I must confess I bought mainly because it includes his article “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900” more or less unaltered. Sometimes you just want to read about early- to mid-nineteenth century youths sleeping in their BFF’s arms after a long intense chat about their feelings, you know?

(It’s always kind of weird reading straight men’s writings about this because you can kind of feel them vibrating with longing that never actually makes it on the page because there is no way to say “if only my BFF and I could snuggle and talk about our feelings” that will not sound gay to a modern audience.)

And I finished James Herriot’s All Things Bright and Beautiful, a lovely and soothing read as all James Herriot books are. I especially enjoy the dog and cat stories, possibly because I am familiar with dogs and cats but have never had the opportunity to become personally acquainted with a cow.

What I’m Reading Now

Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox. Our boys in blue are marching into the Wilderness and the pages are thick with the promise of the horrible slaughter to come!

What I Plan to Read Next

In the afterword to The Friendly Young Ladies, Mary Renault scorned Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness as an excessively glum picture of lesbian life and recommended Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women instead, and after some resistance (is it really WISE to read a book recommended in The Friendly Young Ladies) I have succumbed and ordered Extraordinary Women through interlibrary loan.

(I really ought to read The Well of Loneliness at some point but everything I read about it suggests that it is indeed lugubrious, and ugh.)