A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Joan G. Robinson’s Charley, also sometimes called The Girl Who Ran Away, an enchanting book about - well, a girl who runs away! Through a series of miscommunications, no one realizes that young Charley never arrived at the house of the relation with whom she was meant to spend a holiday. Instead Charley spends a week on her own, making a home for herself in an old hen house and beneath a chestnut tree, finding food and a source of water and wandering in a beautiful copse where she makes up adventures for herself and an imaginary animal companion, a beautiful fawn.

Highly recommended if you like books about runaway children, with lots of rich detail about finding food and water and just generally looking after themselves. Charley comes to the end of her resources a little more swiftly than the Boxcar Children, but she has a wonderful time while it lasts.

I also finished Frances Hodgson Burnett’s T. Tembarom! It 100% turned out just as I expected - this is not a book that you read for surprises - but there’s great pleasure in watching Burnett do a fairly realistic take on a melodramatic plot involving a wandering amnesiac, the unexpected inheritance of a vast English estate, a haughty society beauty, and a self-made fortune from an invention in which Burnett is so uninterested that she simply calls in “the invention.” What does it do? What industry is it used in? Who knows! Who cares! Burnett certainly doesn’t, and honestly it’s inspiring how she flings such trifles aside to focus on the culture clash between a New York street kid made good and the fascinated gentry who live in the county around the estate he just inherited.

And I read ND Stevenson’s Nimona, which I expected to love and ended up hating. I am just extremely over stories where the protagonist kills a bunch of redshirts, and the narrative treats this as a quirky and even adorable personality flaw (Nimona just gets kinda murdery out on heists sometimes! Lookit, she turns into a dragon to do it, so fun), and the protagonist’s friends give her a mild scolding and then continue to shower her with love and acceptance.

I also hate that this story seems completely unable to grasp that there is a difference between “persecuted for being a shapeshifter!” (insert allegory for minority of choice here) and “prosecuted for destroying a WHOLE CITY with MANY CASUALTIES!” and treats ANY attempt to stop Nimona from murdering again as an example of the first. The ONLY allowable method of stopping her is to shower her with love and acceptance until she decides maybe she wants to stop.

And of course the book expects us to root for Nimona and presents “Nimona roams free!” as a happy ending, when she’s just spent the whole book killing people and she’s clearly going to kill again as soon as she feels like it.

What I’m Reading Now

I really meant to keep going with Black Narcissus and Sensational but then my hold on Emily Henry’s Book Lovers came in and as there are 479 holds on it (sadly this is not an exaggeration) I thought that PERHAPS I ought to prioritize that. I’ve enjoyed all of Henry’s books but so far this is a strong contender for my new favorite. Love the protagonist, a literary agent so intense that her colleagues call her the Shark, love her relationship with her sister, tentatively loving her dynamic with the love interest but we’ll see how that develops over the book.

In Dracula, Jonathan Harker has crawled along a ledge outside Dracula’s castle to sneak into Dracula’s room and thereby discovered that the count sleeps in a coffin in the crypt! Fascinating information no doubt but I personally hope that Harker soon turns his attention to the life-or-death question of “How is he going to escape?”

What I Plan to Read Next

Have discovered that the library has David Sweetman’s biography of Mary Renault and I am contemplating whether to read it now or to wait until I’ve read all or at least almost all of Mary Renault’s books. (No one has anything nice to say about Funeral Games so I may… just… not read that one.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis, which has many good points - I enjoyed its sketch of a rural idyll - but ends quite abruptly; I did a bit of hunting and it turns out that she and her editor had a misunderstanding about how much space the story would get, so she had to wrap it up all of a sudden even though she had a longer ending planned.

I imagine she might have lengthened it later, but she dived into Wives and Daughters right after (which I haven’t read, and really ought to) and then died, so she didn’t have the chance. Ah well.

I loved Joan G. Robinson’s When Marnie Was There so much that I snagged The Teddy Robinson Storybook, which is the only other one of her books that my library has. It’s for much younger children and hasn’t grabbed me by the heart like When Marnie Was There, although the teddy bear illustrations are adorable and full of character.

What I’m Reading Now

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowrie’s. Joan Lowrie, the eponymous heroine, is a pit girl of heroic stature and even more heroic character, who bravely steps up to protect a former pit girl who has turned up with an illegitimate child. Joan lifts the baby high so all can see, and castigates them all for attacking such a poor helpless creature, and takes the girl and her baby into her own house so they won’t starve in the streets.

Joan is fabulous. She has also become embroiled in a love quadrangle, in which all the characters involved are far too noble and love each other too much to allow their jealousy to destroy their friendships, and indeed leap at the chance to promote their friend’s love affairs at their own expense: suffering all the while, but making the sacrifice willingly.

Also, Joan has been fearlessly traipsing around in the dark of the night to protect the man she loves from the depredations of her evil father, who was discharged for putting the mine in danger of an explosion and wants VENGEANCE. But he shall not have it while Joan is alive to interpose herself between them!

This is the kind of quality Frances Hodgson Burnett action that I am all about. Channel my id some more, Burnett! (Also I think all four of them will be happily coupled by the end, once one of them unbends enough to actually speak the name of his beloved, LOOKING AT YOU DERRICK, a lot of trouble could have been avoided if you had just said “I love Joan Lowrie” outright when you asked your friend for advice.)

I’ve also started reaching Michael Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, which honestly has been a bit of a slog so far: he’s talking about the history of psychedelics and their legal status and honestly I am just here to learn what they have to tell us about Consciousness et al.

I’m having a similar problem with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870: the title promises plural marriage and women’s place in early Mormonism, but so far the book is mostly following Wilford Woodruff around on his missionary work, with occasional mentions of women he met on the way.

I realize that when one is writing history one must to a certain extent follow the evidence, and Woodruff kept a very thorough diary which makes him a potentially invaluable source, although possibly for a different book. I’m here to read about women, not Woodruff. We’ll see if it gets more interesting once plural marriage begins.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m contemplating interlibrary loaning some of Joan G. Robinson’s books for older children.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Unread Book Club update: Last Wednesday I finished Gildaen, as I didn’t want to leave it hanging when I went away to Miami. If you looking for a fun magical cod-medieval adventure starring a rabbit, I quite recommend it.

While I was in Miami I read A LOT because there were a couple of days when we were more or less trapped inside by thunderstorms, but most of it was NetGalley books which I like to give their own separate post (I finished… five…) and also When Marnie Was There which I also want to give its own separate post because I liked it so much, AND ALSO I still need to review Megan Whalen Turner’s Thick as Thieves which I read before the trip and - say it with me now - wanted to give its own post because I enjoyed it so much…

Oh, but I did read E. W. Hornung’s Mr. Justice Raffles on the trip! Which is the fourth and final Raffles book, a novel rather than a set of short stories like the others, which I thought might be why it often gets shunted to the side in Raffles discussions - perhaps Hornung just wasn’t good at novels?

But actually he does perfectly fine at novels; Bunny and Raffles are in as fine a fettle as ever, and there’s also a totally badass girl who engages in plucky pre-dawn canoeing. But the villain is a Jewish moneylender, and while he does not reach Svengali levels of anti-Semitic caricature, there’s definitely enough of that about his characterization to justify the fact that the book is generally shunted aside.

What I’m Reading Now

Sherwood Smith’s Fair Winds and Homeward Sail: Sophy Croft’s Story, which is the story of a side character from Jane Austen’s Persuasion and quite charming. I really like all of Smith’s Regency romances: her pastiche is good, and you can tell that she knows the period really well because she wears her research so lightly - especially impressive in a book like this, which is stuffed chock full of characters in the navy and could easily bog down in infodumps about naval terminology.

I’ve also started reading Elizabeth Warren’s This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class (for my reading challenge: “a book of any genre that addresses current events”), which is good so far but also sort of a bummer to read because I know that as long as Trump is president and the Republicans control Congress we’re not going to make progress toward any of these goals; we will at best be fighting a holding action, if we can manage that.

What I Plan to Read Next

Angela Thirkell’s The Brandons. If only I’d taken it to Miami with me! Oh well.