A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, about which I babbled AT LENGTH in a comment to a previous post, which I won’t copy here because otherwise it will take over my entire Wednesday Reading Meme. But it’s there if you’re interested.

Katherine Applegate’s Crenshaw, which is good as all of Katherine Applegate’s books are. (I think I probably missed out by not reading Animorphs. Not enough to actually read Animorphs now, though.) This one is about an economically insecure family that may be on the verge of homeless - not something that you see very often in children’s books - but in a way that is light enough to be readable without glossing over the difficulties of homelessness.

Crenshaw is the hero’s imaginary friend, a giant cat who likes to stand on his head, a la the giant bunny in Harvey. In fact, Applegate references the movie in the book’s epigraph.

What I’m Reading Now

Keeping on with The Odyssey! Odysseus has arrived back in Ithaca and will at any moment rain down unholy vengeance on the suitors. (I remember this part from the Wishbone version. I’m looking forward to the bit where Odysseus shoots his arrow through twelve axes.) Although right now he’s chatting with his son Telemachus while pretending to be just some random beggar dude, which I’m sure is killing him inside.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. One of the things I find particularly interesting about this book is that Ulrich not only has Martha Ballard’s diary, but also the remarks of commentators from later in the nineteenth century, and it’s so interesting to see what these readers considered worthy of note. They’re surprised, for instance, that Ballard spent so much time gadding about to visit her neighbors.

I wonder if it’s actually that nineteenth-century women actually spent less time gadding - or if it was actually pretty comparable, but the ideal was that women should be the heart of the home and rarely stir from the hearthside, and so people just kind of failed to see how much time women (even respectable married women) spent outside of the home. But the written record of Martha Ballard’s movements made it plain and impossible to ignore.

I’ve also begun Dorothy Sayers’ Unnatural Death. I find the way she talks about spinsters kind of annoying, especially considering that she married late herself - but maybe that just makes increases the temptation toward condescending magnanimity.

Oh! And I’m working on Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island (having run out of Mallory Towers for the moment), which has a very Boxcar Children-type appeal: four kids on their own figuring out how to provide themselves with shelter and food and so forth.

AND FINALLY (deep breath) (I’m reading a lot of books this week) (too many maybe?) I’m reading Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, about Smarsh’s childhood among poor white farmers in Kansas, which I can only read in small doses because it’s so infuriating reading about how thoroughly the government has undermined the middle and working classes.

Not least by pretending that the working classes don’t exist. Everyone is middle class in America! What do you mean you’re working 60 hours a week not to get by? Everyone is middle class in America. If we say it enough times that will make it true even as we enact policies that dismantle worker protections and favor large companies and factory farms.

It occurred to me - this is not a point Smarsh makes, just something that came to mind - that maybe part of the reason the “fake news” narrative has gained traction is that the media has in fact systematically ignored or misrepresented working class experiences for decades, so there are a lot of people in this country who don’t trust the media because… why would they? What has the media done to deserve it?

What I Plan to Read Next

The library for some reason has loads of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books in Spanish. I’ve been thinking I should polish up my Spanish, and the Famous Five is probably about the difficulty level I can take after letting my Spanish go to seed for so long, so maybe I’ll give them a go.

What I’ve Finished Reading

Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy, which I liked more than I expected, but not so much that I intend to read the sequels. The story begins when it is prophesied that the prince’s bride will come from an isolated mountain village. Therefore, all the village girls are therefore sent to a Princess Academy for a year to learn how to be ladies before the prince meets them at the ball.

It’s a set-up that suggests that the girls are going to compete with each other to win the princess, complete with several stereotypes that seem inevitable in this kind of girl: the snobby outsider, the mean girl who fights to win. But then the book sets out to undermine the expected storyline: there is some competition, but the girls also work together, and the bad girls turn out to have more complicated personalities than it first appears.

But it feels somewhat mechanical - like Hale went into it with a list of tropes she wanted to subvert and carefully ticked them off her list. It’s competent, but never really catches fire.

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowrie’s, on the other hand, is all fire from start to finish. Some of my predictions from last Wednesday reading meme turned out to be incorrect (not everyone I expected to get engaged did so - but then I think it’s only a matter of time before they do), but on the whole it’s a satisfying and weird book - although sometimes only weird because it’s a Frances Hodgson Burnett book. If it was any other nineteenth century writer, Joan’s prominent conversion to Christianity would be absolutely par for the course.

I also read another Aunt Dimity book, Aunt Dimity and the Next of Kin. Good cozy comfort reading, as always. There ought to be more mystery series that don’t always center on murders. Not that I don’t like a good murder as much as the next person, but variety is the spice of life.

What I’m Reading Now

Still working on Tamora Pierce’s Tempests and Slaughter and Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, and by “working on” I mean I haven’t made much progress at all in either one. It’s been a busy week! Neither one is really grabbing me! I got totally distracted by Aunt Dimity. :(

I have made some good progress in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females, at least. As the book has gone on we have gotten a higher concentration of women’s diaries and letters, but it’s still a very different book than I expected based on her earlier book, The Age of Homespun, which dissects ideas about women’s work and the age of homespun as a patriotic American myth about an edenic lost past of wholesome home-based industry.

A House Full of Females has much less analysis and much more purely chronological history of the Mormon migration to Salt Lake City - and the analysis of Mormon polygamy in the context of nineteenth-century gender norms is what I really wanted to read about. Oh well.

What I Plan to Read Next

I suppose I’d better start reading I’ll Give You the Sun for my September reading challenge, “a book recommended by a librarian or indie bookseller.” I am not entirely jazzed about a reading challenge that involves someone else telling you what to read, but who knows, maybe I’ll love it.

It is my duty and my pleasure as a grad student to complain about most of the books that I read for class – to bemoan the low quality of academic writing, to scourge irritating monographs on LJ, and to ruminate the grim possibility that I will spend years of my life writing a thing that no one will ever read.

But sometimes! Sometimes, gold rises above the dross. Here are a couple of books that I’ve read that are thoughtful and witty and fun.

First, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. I must confess that I haven’t read the whole book yet – we’re reading it for class, and I’ve found that specific details fade if I don’t read the chapters in the week they’re assigned. But on the basis of what I’ve read, I’m so confident in this book’s excellence that I recommend it to anyone who has any interest in colonial America, or trade relations (and, intimately related, cultural relations) between European settlers and Native Americans, or material culture in general.

Or indeed, anyone with a taste for nonfiction and also good books. Ulrich’s book reads, in the best way possible, like a novel: she weaves her extensive research together into a rich, fascinating tapestry of colonial and early republican America, much more complicated than the linear story related by history books. This is not a vision of history as a series of unfortunate events: this is history as a place where people lived.

Second, Christopher Lasch’s The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type, which was published in 1965 and is therefore probably very out of date, but never mind. I’m a historian, I don’t believe in out-of-dateness.

(Actually, I think contemporary historians are perhaps rather invested in the idea of out-of-dateness. Must contemplate this fact.)

Lasch’s book is worthwhile not so much for its purported subject matter, although his take on it is interesting and well-researched and, most importantly, well-written – I probably shouldn’t view “well-written” as the sine qua non for historical writing – but because his take on intellectual radicalism challenges the idea of the scholar-as-activist, which is so popular among my cohort.

This sounds, I realize, like Lasch is arguing that the scholar-activist ideal out to be abandoned like a sinking ship, but that’s not what I mean and I don’t think that’s what he meant. He is not arguing that scholars ought to give up on politics under the mistaken impression that knowledge ought to be pursued (and can be pursued) apolitically, but that we need to think more clearly about why we find it so enticing about the ideal of the scholar-activist and what we expect to be able to accomplish through this kind of activism.

After all, writing yet another Foucaultian monograph that will be read by no one but grad students is unlikely to shake the foundations of the kyriarchy. Think bigger, young activists!