A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Letters Regarding Jeeves has begun! We started off with a perfectly ripping story called “Jeeves Takes Charge,” in which Jeeves shimmers into Bertie Wooster’s employ and saves him from an engagement with a most unsuitable girl (though she did have a splendid profile), as well as a hideous checked suit. So glad that I signed up for this. It’s going to be a delightful ride.

And I have at last completed E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat! This is a collection of the essays that he wrote for Harper’s from 1938 to 1942, and one thing that struck me is how very bloggish it felt. A few of the essays are more structured (like the one where he inveighs against Anne Lindbergh’s book about how totalitarianism is the wave of the future, and who can fight the future? Maybe you can’t fight the future but maybe in this case we should TRY, says White), but some are quite disconnected, a few thoughts here and a few thoughts there and an observation about the agricultural life and we have a post magazine article.

Here’s an observation which I think is even more apropos today than it was in White’s time: “Even intelligence is an accident of Nature, and to say that an intelligent man deserves his rewards in life is to say that he alone is entitled to be lucky. Maybe he is, but I sometimes wonder.”

What I’m Reading Now

MANY HAPPENINGS in Sir Isumbras at the Ford! ( Spoilers )

What I Plan to Read Next

Fate is against me: a second volume of L. M. Boston’s memoirs has now slipped through my fingers. Alas!

Books I’ve Just Finished Reading

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Promises to Keep. Atwater-Rhodes’s books are not what you might call “good,” but I keep reading them because they are ridiculously idtastic, although sadly nothing has quite reached the idtastic heights of Shattered Mirror. (Although Hawksong, featuring a political arranged marriage turned love match meant to reconcile two warring species of shapeshifter, got pretty close.)

So on about page five of Promises to Keep, our hero Jay Maranitch starts flirting with a vampire, who is all “So how about some homoerotic blood-sucking action,” to which Jay is like, “Sure,” because vampire-hunters in Atwater-Rhodes are always interested in vampire nookie - no, seriously, they always have vampire lovers. It’s kind of weird.

Jay, however, is apparently an exception to this rule! Because despite spending the book palling around dozens of vampires (well, okay, two vampires, but one of them calls Jay her “pretty witch,” come on), no one sucks Jay’s blood at all. I felt so cheated.

On the other hand, in Promises to Keep Atwater-Rhodes kind of blows up the social structure of her universe, so I have to give her some points of chutzpah.

Books I’m Reading Now

L. M. Boston’s The Rivers of Green Knowe, which is the third book in the...I hesitate to call it series, because this third book has swept away the characters of the first two as if they never existed. Where have Tolly and his grandmother Mrs. Oldknow gone? There doesn’t seem to be a big time gap between books to explain their disappearance.

As such, this book lacks the family history aspect that I so enjoyed in the first two books, where Tolly sees ghosts and learns their stories piecemeal. In its place we have a trio of children - Ida, Oskar, and Ping (whose real name is Hsu, which Oskar changes because he thinks it’s too hard to pronounce) who spend their days messing about in a canoe, finding hermits and giants and islands of winged horses.

I daresay in 1959 Ping’s existence in the book was rather progressive, especially given that he speaks proper English (rather than allegedly comical pidgen) and is no more or less comic than any of the others. (If anyone is wondering how he and indeed Oskar got to Green Knowe: they are refugee children.) But, uh, the other characters randomly changed his name. I am just saying.

Also Les Miserables. I have met the Amis! Grantaire sounds like the most annoying person in the history of the universe and also kind of a stalker! Enjolras is like, “Please go away, you are so annoying,” and Grantaire is like, “NEVER, I am just going to sit here and look at your face and bask in your ridiculous but nonetheless attractive ideals.”

(Maybe I should finish the Enjolras/Grantaire story by having Enjolras take out a restraining order.)

People in Hugo just seem to display their love via stalking; I still haven’t forgotten that scene where Valjean is like, “I don’t even know Cosette and have at this point no intention of adopting her, even though I just got her a super expensive present. But I think I’ll just creep around the Thenardiers’ house like a creeper to figure out where she sleeps, so I can watch her.”

What I Plan to Read Next

More Green Knowe! I intend to sweep through the entire series this summer. I save it for coolish days, when I can open up all the windows and read it in the cross-breeze while drinking tea.

Also Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds, because sineala recommended it to me and I am nothing if not malleable in the face of recommendations. Chinese inspired fantasy! It should be fun.