A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’ve been on a children’s books binge, which means LOTS OF BOOKS, children’s books being pleasantly small & bite-size.

On Saturday night I was having trouble sleeping, so I broke out Christina Diaz Gonzalez’s The Red Umbrella... and then I ended up reading the whole thing in one go, oops. It’s been two years since the revolution in Cuba, and Lucia’s life as the fashion-obsessed daughter of a banker has gone on just as usual. But then a feverish revolutionary excitement infects her small seaside town, slowly growing more oppressive and violent until Lucia’s parents decide to send her and her brother to the United States for safety.

The book is painful in an entirely unintentional way: parents fleeing political persecution could once send their unattended minor children to the United States for safety and actually expect them to find it. But it’s also good on its own terms: Gonzalez does a good job showing the slowly ramping tension as support for the revolution becomes ever more compulsory, and Lucia’s adjustment to the United States is well-done, too.

I also read Deborah Ellis’s Parvana’s Journey, the sequel to The Breadwinner. Parvana has been separated from her family and must travel through war-ravaged Afghanistan to find them, first alone but soon accompanied by a ragtag band of orphans - although it occurs to me that this phrase suggests that the story will be charmingly picaresque, which it is not. I wouldn’t call it depressing, but it’s definitely grim, and I suspect the series can only get grimmer from here - but I’m already hooked so I’m just going to keep going.

On a lighter note, I finished Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks at Last, the fifth and final Penderwicks book. I enjoyed it, though I think I should have reread the earlier books in the series before reading this one: essentially everyone showed up again and I didn’t remember who they all were so it got somewhat confusing sometimes.

Also Raina Telgemeier’s Drama! Which is a graphic novel about Callie, a seventh-grader on the set crew of her middle school’s drama club, and the various romantic entanglements that swirl through the club. The romantic entanglements do take up a good bit of time but to the book’s credit, there’s also plenty of drama club detail: I particularly liked the plot line about Callie’s quest to build a cannon that will fire an appropriately lively burst of confetti on stage.

And at last I’ve completed My Brilliant Career! And can therefore say with confidence that this is one of those rare cases where the movie is better than the book.

What I’m Reading Now

Nayana Currimbhoy’s Miss Timmins’ School for Girls, which I got off a list of books about girls’ schools. It’s all right so far. The book feels like a story being told after the fact, rather than shown to us, which has a distancing effect; but I’m not very far into the book so we’ll see how it develops.

What I Plan to Read Next

My interlibrary loan on Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Eyes in the Fishbowl has come through!!!

What I've Just Finished Reading

Who has two thumbs and has finished reading The Gulag Archipelago? That's right, me! I think that most of the meat of the trilogy is contained within the first volume - not that the second and third books aren't worth reading, because they are, but they are in a sense supplemental material to Solzhenitsyn's thesis, which he expounds in volume one, "that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil."

And therefore any and all attempts to clean or perfect humanity by killing the portion of it that you deem evil are not only evil in themselves, but useless at the outset. If you want to kill the evil portion of humanity, then you'd have to kill all humans.

There is this one quote, though, from the third volume, which I've been turning over like a stone in my hand - about forgiveness. It's a long one, so ( behind the cut: )

I also read Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which I really enjoyed. It's a series of case studies about unusual neurological disorders that have come through Sacks' office over the years, some of which are a bit nightmarish (I suspect which cases one finds most upsetting will change from person to person; the one about the woman who lost her proprioception, her sense of her own body - who now feels literally disembodied, like a ghost - really got to me), but all of which are thought-provoking. Some of his terminology is a bit dated - the book was published in 1984; I don't believe anyone uses "moron" as a diagnostic term anymore - but Sacks is nonetheless a thoughtful, compassionate writer.

I also finished Annie Jacobsen's Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, which is a book that is interesting more for its subject matter than for its treatment of it. Jacobsen lays out a convincing case that the US Department of Defense willfully turned a blind eye to the Nazi pasts of many German scientists it brought to the US - up to and including scientists who committed human experimentation at concentration camps - but somehow all the details slipped through my mind like water through a sieve. The subject is clearly worth exploring, but I can't quite recommend this particular book.

In less heavy (both in size and in subject matter) reading material, I read the latest Penderwick book, The Penderwicks in Spring, which I enjoyed but not as much as the earlier books in the series.

What I'm Reading Now

I've returned to Sarah Rees Brennan's Unmade. I am determined to finish this book, but my progress is dragging because of two seemingly contradictory reasons. First, because I've heard that a character (I don't know which character, but apparently someone everyone likes, because all the reviews I've seen were annoyed) is going to die; and secondly, because the supposedly wicked murderous sorcerer now in charge of Sorry-in-the-Vale has failed to kill any of the characters we like, which makes it hard to take his wicked murderousness seriously.

Possibly when I get to the death, that will make him seem like a slightly more formidable antagonist, but so many characters have escaped certain death already, I suspect that it's going to make the authorial intervention when someone finally bites the dust seem very obvious. You've taken care of everyone else so far, so why didn't so-and-so deserve your protection too, Brennan?

What I Plan to Read Next

Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia.

Read a very nice book today: The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and One Very Interesting Boy, by Jeanne Birdsall, a children's book about four sisters and their summer holiday in a guest cottage in the enormous garden behind a mansion. It was published in 2005, but feels old-fashioned in the best sense: strong sibling relationships, lots of adventure, a formula that I think was much more popular decades ago.

And no cell phones or internet, although one of the characters does type her book up on her father's computer. (She's a budding writer, and occasionally narrates her life in the voice of her alter ego/heroine, Sabrina Starr. She is awesome.) The Stargirl books are devoid of cell phones and internet, too - although I think maybe they're set in the eighties? Though maybe I just thought that when I read the first one, because of the lack of modern electronics.

I wonder if this bothers young readers today? Obviously in my time it didn't stop me from adoring Stargirl, but then I wasn't a very wired teenager; I didn't have a cell phone till I went to college. Perhaps they just think, as I thought with Stargirl, that books like this are something in the way of a period piece.

But this is a tangent. The eponymous Penderwicks are well-sketched if not deep; the aforementioned writer, Jane, was naturally my favorite, but I liked them all. The littlest sister, who goes by the delightful nickname Batty, reminded me of Mei from My Neighbor Totoro. They're both so very four. And the villains I thought were well-done: properly villainous, but not inhumanly so.

And! There are two sequels! I'm quite pleased.