A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

We think, therefore we sort.

Judith Flanders tucks this gem near the end of A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, which is not merely a history of alphabetical order but touches on many different sorting methods, such as the history of file folders (hanging folders weren’t invented till the 1890s), with excursions into all sorts of fascinating historical tidbits. Did you know that in medieval times, hours expanded and contracted with the seasons? There were always twelve hours of night and twelve hours of day, but a summer day hour was perforce much longer than a winter day hour.

In other news! I’ve finally taken the plunge on Biggles with Biggles Learns to Fly! This is one of the earliest Biggles books and perhaps a little different than later books in the series, which I believe are sheer action adventure with spies, secret island bases, Noble Enemies, tentacle monsters etc. Biggles Learns to Fly is a more serious war story (though not serious to the extent that it isn’t also an action-adventure yarn): characters die, there is some musing on the horror of the blighted countryside, Biggles’ best friend is maimed off screen by a perfidious German pilot who shoots his plane after it is on the ground. This unsporting behavior shocks all the British pilots to their core and Biggles vows VENGEANCE, and because at the end of the day this IS an adventure novel and not Serious War fiction, he not only achieves it but it actually makes him feel better.

What I’m Reading Now

After an eight-year-hiatus following Pippa Passes, I’ve tentatively returned to Rumer Godden with Black Narcissus, as rachelmanija promised me it is a book about NUNS. Currently the nuns are establishing a nunnery in an old palace in rural India.

I’m also reading Kim Todd’s Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters”, which I’m enjoying, although I must admit my most powerful reaction so far has been a burning desire to read Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House. Conveniently, it’s available on gutenberg.org! Perhaps I will put that next in queue after I finish Frances Hodgson Burnett’s T. Tembarom...

Speaking of T. Tembarom, things are heating up! After an initial period of distrust, the neighborhood has welcomed Tembarom with open arms, largely because the local duke (an aging bon vivant) found Tembarom’s New York manners a breath of fresh air and novelty after years of tedious country living. The ongoing culture clash between New York bootblack-turned-newspaperman Tembarom and the English gentry is fascinating, and Hodgson is just the woman to write it: she grew up in England but moved to America as a girl, and captures both cultures so perfectly that she makes it look easy.

Although clearly it was NOT, because as we will see when we finally get to the Quentin parts in Dracula, your average English writer at this time really struggled to reproduce the American vernacular.

Speaking of Dracula! At last we have news! Jonathan Harker LIVES, but remains in dire straits. Dr. Seward notes that his patient Renfield has begun collecting spiders, to which he has fed most of his previous fly collection, which I’m sure is not alarming foreshadowing in any way.

What I Plan to Read Next

I decided it’s been too long since I’ve let Mary Renault wreck a train through my life, so I’m going to read Promise of Love (the US title of Purposes of Love). I would say “Wish me luck” but TBH anyone who reads a Mary Renault novel on purpose is spitting in the face of luck to begin with.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This week I finished two books that I’ve been working on for ages: Judith Flanders’ Christmas: A Biography, which I started last Christmas, and Brian Switek’s My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs, which I’ve been reading intermittently since… possibly before the pandemic, God help us all.

I’ve loved some of Flanders’ other books (Inside the Victorian Home was my gateway drug to the nineteenth century), but I found Christmas: A Biography a slog. However, I was interested to learn that possibly the oldest extant Christmas tradition is “complaining that Christmas is too secular these days.” Apparently churchmen have been complaining about that essentially since the beginning of Christmas, whereas almost all the other age-old Christmas traditions (Christmas trees, carols, mummers’ plays, even Yule logs) are of more recent origin.

In contrast, I enjoyed My Beloved Brontosaurus while I was reading it… but once I put it down I never felt any impetus to pick it back up, hence the fact that it languished for months at a time. However, it is a good update on What’s New in Dinosaur Science since I was seven. (Probably a bit outdated now, as the book was published in 2013.) I was particularly delighted when Switek name-checked my younger self’s very FAVORITE dinosaur documentary, the 1992 PBS four-parter The Dinosaurs!, featuring such luminaries as Jack Horner and Bob Bakker. (The latter of whom gave a talk at the local university when I was eleven or so, which I of course attended spellbound.)

I also read Howard Caldwell’s The Golden Age of Indianapolis Theaters, partly as research for my Depression-era tramps book (thus discovering that my heroes could not have attended a summer matinee at the Indiana theater in 1937, as it was closed that summer, clearly a question which will animate MANY readers) but also as more general research for a possible Indianapolis book. Plans for this still extremely nascent!

What I’m Reading Now

skygiants' wonderful review of Aoka Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are reminded me what a good job the translator Polly Barton did, so I thought I’d check if the library had any of her other translations. It does, sort of! Izumi Suzuki’s Terminal Boredom is a collection of seven stories, translated by six different translators, so potentially this is a good way to find more translators I like?

I must admit that the first story does not bode well for the rest of the collection. It’s called “Women and Women,” and the heroine lives in a society where the dwindling supply of men are kept locked away in prison-like hospitals, but one night she sees a ~boy outside her window and even though she’s never seen a man before she can tell he’s a boy because of his ~ineluctable masculinity~, etc. etc., and also technology and infrastructure are crumbling because the men used up all the resources before going into decline (isn’t that just like them?) and also maybe women just don’t know how to repair roads. Has anyone read this book? Are the other short stories worth it or should I cut my losses?

I’m also about halfway through James Otis’s Toby Tyler: Or, Ten Weeks with a Circus, which is heavier on “running away to join the circus is awful, actually,” than I was hoping, although there are a certain amount of madcap circus hijinks. Young Toby has been befriended by the Living Skeleton and his wife, the circus’s fat lady, an adorable couple.

What I Plan to Read Next

In my final Wednesday Reading Meme of 2020, I mused, “I need to attend more to what I want to read at this moment, and trust that the time will come for any book I really need to read,” and this philosophy has really worked out for me in 2021. It’s been truly a gem of a reading year and I hope I can keep that momentum going in 2022.

Authors at the top of my mind for further exploration: Mary Renault, Kazuo Ishiguro (I loved Klara and the Sun but have yet to follow up on his other books), D. K. Broster, D. E. Stevenson. I also intend to return to Japanese novels in translation. As well as Terminal Boredom, one came through the library just the other day: Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Has anyone read it? Did you like it?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The latest Baby Sitters Club graphic novel, Boy-Crazy Stacey. The first time I read the BSC books, back in the days of my youth, my favorites were all the girls who I felt were like me in some way: Mary Anne, Claudia, Mallory. (Not that I disliked the others the first time round, I just didn’t super connect with them.) One of the pleasures of reexperiencing these books in this new form is that I’m now old enough to also enjoy Stacey, even though her tendency to fall in love at the drop of a hat still makes her feel like a space alien to me: now I can accept and embrace the alien-ness instead of just gazing on in incomprehension.

Jean Webster’s The Wheat Princess is an ungainly duck of a book, and yet I became very fond of it as I read. It gets off to a rocky start - the first chapter is all scene-setting, like reading a rather boring guidebook - but after that it slowly gains steam, and you can see Webster beginning to write the kind of exploration of intellectual growth that makes Daddy-Long-Legs such an excellent and unusual book: one of the few college books (Tam Lin is another) that is actually about the intellectual discovery of college, rather than just the emotional entanglements.

Webster is still learning how to do this in The Wheat Princess (it’s only her second book), which accounts for the ungainliness, but it’s so interesting to see her take her first steps in that direction.

What I’m Reading Now

I finished the first half of Edward L. Ayers’ The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America. The war is almost over! Reconstruction awaits! It sounds like we’re getting to the good part when I put it that way, but actually we’re getting to the “things will look up briefly and then all hope will be ruthlessly crushed” part.

I’ve also begun Judith Flanders’ The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London, because I acquired her earlier book Inside the Victorian Home lo these many years ago and read it so many times that the cover is peeling; it really began my Victorian obsession, my interest in English history generally. The Victorian City will undoubtedly not be so formative, but so far it seems set to be a good time.

What I Plan to Read Next

Reading Boy-Crazy Stacey awakened a desire to tear through a few graphic novels, so I’ve put a few on hold. Next up: Rainbow Rowell’s Pumpkinheads and Colleen A. F. Venable’s Kiss Number 8. And maybe it’s time to finally read the Phoebe and Her Unicorn series?

What I’ve Finished Reading

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men, which is reasonably entertaining but not one of her best. (Rose in Bloom will now and forever be my favorite Alcott book.) But it did do a good job showing Jo and Professor Bhaer as a well-suited match: I just can’t see Laurie running a school with Jo, or indeed living a life active and varied enough to suit her.

Also William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham. Howells is unusual among nineteenth century American writers in that he writes comedies of manners, like a male gaze-y version of Austen (which I suppose would make him an American Trollope…) I find his books mildly entertaining on the literary front, but fascinating for their vision of nineteenth-century American life among the settled middle classes: he’s like a grown-up and less blatantly moralizing version of Alcott.

What I’m Reading Now

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I’ve wanted to read this since reading The Paris Wife, but put it off because another book - sadly, I can’t remember which - said that A Moveable Feast was vicious and score-settling, particularly with regard to Gertrude Stein.

So far, however, Hemingway’s tone toward Stein is if anything bemused. She was clearly a complicated and sometimes exasperating person, who did not so much talk as pontificate, even when she was talking about things she didn’t actually understand. It would be easy to write a vicious caricature, and instead Hemingway writes about her with affectionate amusement. It seems like he still doesn’t know quite what to make of her, forty years later.

(On the other hand, he also describes someone - I forget just who, but he does tell us the name - as having the eyes of a “failed rapist.” I can only assume the man was dead by the time the book was published, because talk about character assassination!)

I’m also reading Judith Flanders’ Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin, which is about the four MacDonald sisters and their illustrious marriages. I really enjoyed Flanders’ later book, Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, but this is clearly more of a journeyman effort. It’s not precisely boring, but the prose (and the people) don’t come to life like they do in Inside the Victorian Home. I keep getting Agnes and Louisa (and their respective husbands) mixed up. They have no distinguishing features.

Also continuing in The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp. Tara has just met the boy she had a huge crush on when she was ten, only to discover that he doesn’t remember her and that he’s gotten kind of full of himself. WOE.

What I Plan to Read Next

Probably Garth Nix’s A Confusion of Princes. For years he never published anything I found interesting, and now he’s gone and put out not only A Confusion of Princes (space opera), Newt’s Emerald (magical mystery Regency romance), and Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures (magical adventures, aimed at adults).

Oh, and! Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Witch’s Brat.