A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in preparation for reading The Testaments. This is actually a reread: I read the book in high school as a possible book for my term paper, which I ended up writing about A Tale of Two Cities because I figured that would be easier.

I was almost certainly right about this, not least because I super loved The Handmaid’s Tale and it’s often harder to write about things that you love. It wasn’t quite the same bolt from the blue this time (but then, how could it be, being a reread?) but I still loved it. It’s a look at a character living in an oppressive society and trying to eke out a little happiness despite the odds stacked against her, and that’s something that I really love in books and in fact often miss in dystopian novels: so many of them involve people directly rebelling against oppression, not just trying to live their lives.

I also read Jen Wang’s Stargazing, in which Christine befriends Moon, who she thinks is way cooler than she is - so much cooler that she’s afraid Moon will inevitably abandon her for other friends. This is a dynamic that I had with a friend growing up and I thought Stargazing absolutely nailed it, to the point that it swept away my usual dislike for a certain plot twist: ( Spoilers for the plot twist )

And finally I finished Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch, which I really liked. I’ve heard that Goudge’s adult fiction is preachy, and certainly this book was written with a heavier hand than her books for children, but ultimately I felt that this book managed to deal with heavy themes without crossing over into preachiness.

I’ve often found it puzzling, given that I’m not religious myself, that I’m drawn to books by religious authors with religious themes - like Goudge, or C. S. Lewis, or Rumer Godden - but I think ultimately what draws me to them is this willingness to grapple with heavy themes, to look directly at the inevitability of death or the problem of evil and say “Well, wanna make something of it?”, which I rarely find in secular books. Which is not to say that secular authors don’t deal with weighty themes - see above The Handmaid’s Tale - but often it’s a different set of themes. The religious authors give the kaleidoscope another twist.

What I’m Reading Now

Things are heating up in William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance: Bartley has just published a story that he stole from a friend, which may prove the tipping point for Marcia to realize that her husband is not a good man who makes mistakes, but an unprincipled man who mostly manages to convince people he’s good because he’s got a charming way with words. Will she divorce him and marry his old college friend Ben Halleck, who clearly has an enormous crush on her?

“What could be worse than marriage without love?” Ben Halleck demands of a friend, with whom he has been discussed the Bartley/Marcia problem without directly mentioning that he’s in love with Marcia.

“Love without marriage,” the friend replies.

This exchange may be the key to all nineteenth-century Anglo-American novels.

What I Plan to Read Next

Perhaps Jen Wang’s The Prince and the Dressmaker?

Oh! Oh! And the 2020 Newbery winners should be announced shortly!!!