A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Work has been so quiet this week that I spent an hour hiding in the stacks reading Gary Paulsen’s The Winter Room, a svelte novel that chronicles a year on a farm in the 1930s (the first four chapters are the seasons of the year). This book is both a loving but unsentimental evocation of life on an old-fashioned family farm, and a meditation on what it means to be a man. This is a recurring theme in Paulsen’s work, and I find him more thoughtful on this topic than a lot of other authors who obsess about What It Means to Be Manly. He doesn’t really go for the Hemingway valorization of action over reflection; his characters do act, but they act with care and reflection, and indeed realize that care and reflection are in themselves actions.

Manliness became an accidental theme this week, because it’s also a central question in Jerry Spinelli’s Wringer, which takes place in a town that has an annual pigeon shoot. At this shoot, ten-year-old boys are expected to wring the wounded pigeons’ necks. Our hero Palmer doesn’t want to become a wringer, but because the expectation is so ironclad and so tied to general expectations about masculinity, it’s hard to refuse or even to admit that he doesn’t want to. It’s his deepest secret.

But this thing did not like to be forgotten. Like air escaping a punctured tire, it would spread out from his stomach and be everywhere. Inside and outside, up and down, day and night, just beyond the foot of his bed, in his sock drawer, on the porch steps, at the edges of the lips of other boys, in the sudden flutter from a bush that he had come too close to. Everywhere.

I tried to read this book years ago, because I loved Spinelli’s Stargirl so much (spoiler: none of his other books are like Stargirl), but noped out about three pages in because of the pervasive themes of pigeon murder. This was probably the right choice at the time, not just because of the pigeon murder, but also because I suspect I wouldn’t have really sympathized with Palmer’s quandary. “Just tell them you won’t be a wringer!” I would have cried impatiently. As I’ve gotten older, I have become more sympathetic to characters who are crushed by social structures.

I also finished S. T. Gibson’s Robbergirl, which I bought on a whim because (a) f/f Snow Queen retelling (the pairing is Gerda/robber girl, not Gerda/Snow Queen, in case you are puzzled), and (b) look at that cover! Isn’t it gorgeous??

An enjoyable light read. I would have enjoyed a bit more of an edge between the two leads (I feel like this is always my complaint about genre romance. “Did not once feel like the two leads might try to kill each other :( Needs more murder vibes!!”), although it certainly had its moments. I particularly loved this line: ”Do you know what it’s like,” Helvig hissed between her teeth. “Watching some girl drag your heart behind her like a pet she’s gotten tired of?”

That but the whole book, please!

And finally, I dove into Patricia McKissack’s 1993 Newbery Honor book The Dark-Thirty with enthusiasm, as I grew up with McKissack’s picture books Mirandy and Brother Wind and Flossie and the Fox. However, I didn’t like it as much, perhaps because The Dark-Thirty has mere woodcuts rather than gorgeous full-color illustrations? But McKissack’s A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl had no illustrations whatsoever, and that was one of my favorite Dear America books…

Possibly spooky is just not McKissack’s strength as a writer. The stories in The Dark-Thirty are all ghost stories, more or less, but none of them are really spine-tingling.

What I’m Not Reading, After All

Guess what finally showed up after SIX MONTHS in transit? (Admittedly we were closed for two of those months but NONETHELESS.) Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. But in its circuitous travels, this book missed its window of opportunity: I opened it, read two pages, yelled "I JUST CAN'T READ ABOUT TRAUMA RIGHT NOW," and sent it right back.

I also gave up on John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down because, similarly, I just don’t feel like reading about a girl going into illness-related anxiety spirals right now. These spirals are of course not about coronavirus - the book was published in 2017 - but nonetheless.

What I’m Reading Now

Christopher Paul Curtis’s Elijah of Buxton, a historical fiction novel that takes place (so far) in the settlement of Buxton in Canada, an all-black town founded by escaped slaves. (Our hero, Elijah, was the first free child born in the settlement.) Eventually Elijah is going to head to America, where I expect picaresque adventures, but the book is in no hurry to get there and neither am I; I’m enjoying all the historical detail about the town (I’m getting the impression it was a real place? I suspect the epilogue will tell me, and anyway I don’t particularly want to know if it wasn’t until I’m done reading the book), like the way that the settlement rings the church bell twenty times anytime someone new escapes to Buxton: ten times to ring out their old life and ten times to ring in the new.

What I Plan to Read Next

Now that I’ve finished Robbergirl, I need to decide which book to read next on my Kindle. Stephanie Burgis’s Moontangled? Llinos Cathryn Thomas’s A Duet for Invisible Strings? Or Onoto Watanna’s Miss Nume of Japan? (Onoto Watanna was the pseudonym of Winifred Eaton, a Chinese-British author who wrote Japanese-themed romances while living in New York City in the early twentieth century. Her sister, under the pen name Sui Sin Far, wrote books about the Chinese-American experience, which evidently were less popular, as evidenced by the fact that none of them are available on Gutenburg.)

I've been reading John Green and David Levithan's Will Grayson, Will Grayson, which is really two books smushed together. Specifically, it is one book that I like and one book that makes me want to stab somebody with a spoon, and that somebody is definitely, definitely, definitely the main character.

Will Grayson #1 is a reasonably entertaining John Green book about Will Grayson, who is laid-back to the point of passivity. This sounds like an irritating character trait, but I actually find it rather fascinating, simply because I’ve met people like this but haven’t seen this trait reflected in many characters. He's not really sure what he wants, and mostly thinks he wants to be left alone. He has two rules for achieving this: "shut up" and "don't care."

But at the same time, it's clear that he does care. He loves music, he looks after his friends, and he has a ridiculous tiny crush on Jane, whom he definitely doesn't want to date ever because it's really safer to admire from afar. Not actually dating her is almost the same as not caring, right? Right?

But at the same time, he's mostly willing to go along with it when other people drag him into things. He has awesome friends, so mostly they're dragging him into awesome things that he kind of secretly wants to do anyway. I strongly suspect that as the story progresses, Will is going to start going after things he wants without his buddy Tiny Cooper throwing him at opportunities.

Will Grayson #2 is about another boy named Will Grayson, who has joined House, Professor Higgins, and Lila West (from season 2 of Dexter) on the short list of characters who I would happily see strangled with their own socks. He’s basically a gay male Bella Swan, except infinitely worse than Bella because all the flaws people accuse Bella of having are literally true and dialed up to eleven for Will Grayson.

1. Bella's interests in cooking and Jane Austen and Jacob may feel a little tacked on, but at least the narrative gestures toward the fact that she has interests outside of Edward. Meanwhile, Will's boyfriend is honest to God the only thing he cares about in the world. Will's only hobby is mockery. He treats his friend Maura like shit and mocks her emo goth poetry (internally, of course, because he's too much of a coward to actually express the depths of his assholish nature), but at least the poor girl actually does something sometimes, even if she does it badly.

(I am rooting for Maura to punch Will in the face. Hopefully repeatedly. Possibly with an implement.)

2. Bella is indifferent and verging on vaguely disdainful to most people: there are multiple scenes where people (particularly Jessica) talk to her and Bella just tunes them out. But Will actively despises everyone in the world who is not his boyfriend. He goes on for pages and pages and pages about how boring and normal and mediocre everyone else in the whole entire world is, and how dull their lives are, and how ridiculous it is for them to yearn for love and connection.

Will Grayson is a huge, huge hypocrite. He's the dullest, most mediocre person in the book, and I can't stand the way he sneers at other people's desire for love even while he carries on an affair of gag-worthy soppiness with his internet boyfriend. They spend ten minutes saying goodbye to each other at the end of every conversation. Whenever there's a lull in their conversation, they just text "I'm here" back and forth at each other. I think that absolutely destroys his cred for mocking anyone else for sappiness ever again.

Bella, whatever her flaws, doesn’t hypocritically mock the idea of other people finding love even as she writes sappy IMs to Edward. One of the few nice things she does for her friends is encourage their romances.

I've reached the part of the book where Will Grayson has made plans to meet up with his internet boyfriend, whom he's never actually met before. I hope that the internet boyfriend turns out to be a serial killer, and the way the two books are going to intertwine is that Tiny Cooper will drag the other Will Grayson into a murder investigation.