A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Lyuba Vinogradova’s Defending the Motherland: The Soviet Women Who Fought Hitler’s Aces, which suffers the indignity common to books I actually own, which is that I started it and then it languished for months as library book after library book took precedence. An unjust fate for this book, which is fascinating, although also sometimes bleak, as books about the Eastern Front are wont to be.

I also discovered that I had misremembered the fate of Lilya Litvyak from Elizabeth Wein’s book about Soviet women flyers: I had carried away the impression that her body was found decades later by one of her comrades (who later taught school in the area and for years organized the schoolchildren to search for downed planes). As it turns out, this intrepid woman and her schoolchildren found lots of other downed planes and often did manage to identify the pilots, but they never found Litvyak’s. Someone else apparently found a plane with a female pilot in the area, which presumably was Litvyak’s, female pilots being not too thick on the ground; but it wasn’t investigated properly at the time, so we’ll never know for sure.

Also Lisa See’s latest, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, which in contrast I read over the course of one afternoon! As this sprint perhaps suggests, I really enjoyed this book. ( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

In Chantemerle, we have just been introduced to another fair cousin, who has had a tendresse for Gilbert ever since they met eight years ago in Somerset. A prophecy: Gilbert will marry this Somerset cousin, leaving Louis and Lucienne free to marry!

Also continuing on in William Dean Howells’ Italian Journeys. Howells is taking a cab to the quai when a stranger hops on the front seat and starts directing the driver, whereupon Howells starts mentally composing the notice of his death that will likely appear in the next morning’s paper. Howells and I are so different in many ways, and yet we are also the same person.

What I Plan to Read Next

Daphne Du Maurier’s The Flight of the Falcon. I have had this book out of the library for MONTHS and I am DETERMINED that I shall finally read it.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, which has made me want to read his other books, of which there are many… because if there’s one thing I need, it’s a new author to follow, right?

I put off reading Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place because I got the impression somewhere that it was a self-righteous tract about how lying is always a sin, even if you’re lying to the Nazis to protect the Jews hidden in your attic. But now that I’ve read it I’m pretty sure this is actually just the way some Evangelical readers interpret the book, because Corrie had some relatives who followed this philosophy and it worked out for them, through either divine intervention or luck, depending on your view.

Corrie herself lies when necessary, although with pangs of conscience, because she had been raised in the belief system that lying is always wrong. But she doesn’t only lie when forced to it, but actually practices lying: the family shakes her awake at midnight to simulate a possible arrest by the Nazis, so she’ll have practice answering “We have no Jews here” rather than mumbling, groggy and disoriented, “Oh, they’re behind the false wall.”

Willa Cather’s My Antonia is another book I put off reading, in this case because I had the impression that Antonia gets raped at some point in the book, which also turns out to be incorrect. Maybe I should try to stop gathering impressions of books that I haven’t read, although probably it’s not entirely avoidable.

But actually in this case the delay worked out well, because I don’t think I would have appreciated the book as much when I was younger. It’s a slow book, with a lot of description of the Nebraska prairies and the different immigrant groups settling the country and not a lot of action: the narrator, Jim Burden, is often an onlooker rather than a participant, a little bit in love with Antonia and some of her friends (also strong immigrant girls), but not so much that the book ever becomes a love story. Or rather, it’s about love of a time and a place rather than a person.

What I’m Reading Now

The very first chapter of Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women burnt up my hope that maybe the heroines would remain friends for the entire book, but it also got me all invested so I kept reading. All of See’s books seem to have this ur-scene where the heroines’ friendship shatters when they confront each other over some great betrayal - I don’t know why she feels the need to repeat it over and over, but I should probably just accept it and stop hoping for something else.

And although it does share this tic with See’s other work, this book is one of her best - perhaps not quite up there with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but then that is the first See book I read so it may have an unfair advantage. The Island of Sea Women is set on Jeju Island, where women deep sea divers are traditionally the main support for their families, and this portrayal of a traditional society where women have a lot more power and freedom than in many traditional societies is so interesting.

I’ve also been reading Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, which is an unexpectedly delightful look at office culture in interwar Britain. Lord Peter has taken a job as a copy writer for an advertising firm in order to investigate a murder, using his two middle names, Death Bredon, and yes Dorothy Sayers did in fact give her detective the name Death, Lord Peter is the Most Extra and I love it.

What I Plan to Read Next

evelyn_b, we had talked about maybe reading Kristin Lavransdattar in tandem. Are you still interested? I’ve acquired a copy, so we could start whenever is convenient for you.

I’ve also realized that Andrea Cheng’s The Year of the Book, which I read last year, is in fact the first book of a five-book series (although alas there will be no more after that: Cheng died a few years ago), so now I want to read them all.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Lisa See’s China Dolls, which I didn’t much like, sadly. Many of See’s books (possibly all of See’s books? It might not be a major theme in Peony in Love) feature loving but difficult relationships between women: May and Pearl in Shanghai Girls, Lily and Snow Flower in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. She’s clearly going for this dynamic again in China Dolls, but unfortunately the balance is tipped so far in the direction of “difficult” that it’s hard to see why they bother with each other.

Also, the book relied far too heavily on the fact that one of the narrators wasn’t telling the readers the truth, which is a device I find irritating unless there’s a really good excuse for it. The narrator is telling the story to her interrogators and therefore not telling it straight? Fine. The narrator is suffering from partial amnesia but telling us the truth as she knows it? Fine. The narrator is leaving out huge gaps of information because it’s convenient for the author? UGH.

It also means that the big reveal near the end falls completely flat, because there’s been this big betrayal and the character who made it trots out all these reasons for it. But we haven’t heard any of these reasons in her sections of narration, so it feels like she’s making it up to manipulate the others. We’re not supposed to think she’s lying to her friends and is actually a psychopath who gets her rocks off by pitting people against each other, but that’s the reading that makes the most sense.

What I’m Reading Now

Paula Byrne’s Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, which might be summarized “Maybe interwar Britain really was as gay as Jo Walton portrayed it in Farthing? I thought that making literally every single male character except the heroine’s father either gay or bisexual (and probably the father was just hiding his true proclivities from his daughter) had to be overstating things. AND YET.”

I’m much more interested in interwar Britain than Evelyn Waugh himself, but the book is good on both counts - although so far Byrne hasn’t convinced me of her thesis that Waugh wasn’t a snob; so far her main defense seems to be that he was, like, a hipster snob, being snobbish ironically. Okay then.

I’m also reading A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which is a mystery about literary and historical research. Why is this not an entire genre? I for once would read the hell out of it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been thinking about doing a Harry Potter reread. I read the first three books about five billion times when they first came out, but I haven’t reread any of it for years, because I found the later books progressively more disappointing. But now I feel a hankering to give it another go.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Lisa See’s On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of a Chinese-American Family, which is part family history, part history of Chinese immigration to America, and part (a rather smaller part) a history of modern China. I’ve been meaning to read this for years, and I’m glad I finally got around to it, because it’s fascinating. I can also see shadows of See’s later book Shanghai Girls, which draws on a lot of this research, and as I enjoyed Shanghai Girls, this adds an extra layer of pleasure to On Gold Mountain for me.

(As much as I enjoyed Shanghai Girls, I can’t recommend it because ending is completely inconclusive, and the sequel, Dreams of Joy, is not nearly as good. It feels much thinner, less lived-in, Pearl and May spend most of the book apart - and their relationship is really the driving force in Shanghai Girls - and Joy is not nearly as interesting as her mother and aunt. Of course, it’s probably unfair to expect a single person to be as interesting as two people put together...but still.)

I also finished Hilary McKay's Caddy's World, and am moping slightly at having no more Casson books to read. I love the Casson family, which is so odd and disorganized and yet very, very functional: the children are encouraged to do what they loved, and they know that they are loved, not only by their parents (particularly their mother) but by their siblings.

What I’m Reading Now

Maria Thompson Daviess’s Rose of Old Harpeth, to which I give props for having a romantic heroine who is already thirty... although I also take some away because Rose Mary often acts so head-in-the-clouds as to make Anne of Green Gables look like a grounded and level-headed person.

Thinking about this a bit more - I think the difference lies not so much in the quality of their musings, but in the fact that Anne has a fully functional set of emotions, including anger and misery, while Rose Mary seems to have excised anger and sadness from her emotional repertoire. It makes her feel insubstantial.

I’m beginning to think that Phyllis, the first Daviess book I read, was probably her best - or perhaps I should say, was most suited to my personal tastes - because neither this one nor The Golden Bird really grabbed me.

I'm also reading Jaleigh Johnson's The Mark of the Dragonfly, because I was charmed by the title and the giant dragonfly on the cover. This is a somewhat dangerous method of book selection, but so far (I'm only about twenty pages or so in) I'm enjoying it. Our heroine, Piper, lives in a town of scrappers, people who make their living by collecting the debris from other worlds that falls from the sky on the nights of the full moon...and something is clearly about to happen which will turn her life upside down, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

What I Plan to Read Next

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. I am girding my loins for this one.

I feel like such an old person. I stayed up till 11:30 last night reading Snow Flower and Secret Fan, and today I'm dragging around going "is it nap time yet?"

Snow Flower and Secret Fan is great, by the way. The descriptions of foot-binding are so vivid that I keep checking my feet to make sure they're still okay down there. I'm already planning to read the rest of Lisa See's books even though I'm pretty sure they're all going to break my heart and stomp on it: See's China, like Amy Tan's, is a cramped and unhappy place.

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The kindergartners are watching Toy Story. I want to settle down in the back of their classroom and watch with them. To...um, let's see...to observe their television watching skills! Clearly an important educational attainment in today's technologically driven society.