A Certain Slant of Light

As I commented in yesterday’s post, I am returned from Massachusetts! An excellent trip! Extra shout-out to skygiants and genarti for letting me show up a day early when my initial plan to stop in Ithaca fell through when my hostess’s son took ill. (This resulted in a fourteen-hour drive and PERHAPS the course of wisdom would have been to stop at a hotel, but no regrets.)

Highlights of the trip, in roughly chronological order:

Two days in Concord! On the first day, I recreated (backward) Georgie’s walk in The Fledgling from her house to Walden Pond. (Did not meet a Goose Prince who could teach me how to fly. Perhaps if I had started at Georgie’s house and walked to Walden Pond rather than the other way around.) Also waded in Walden Pond as it was very warm.

Second day: visited Louisa May Alcott’s house, which featured a video of an LMA reenactor warmly welcoming us into the house, when we all know that the real LMA would have been climbing out the back windows to avoid annoying literary fans. Particularly enjoyed the paintings that May (Amy in Little Women) sketched directly on the wall.

In the evening we watched the Biggles movie, in which a perfectly good Biggles movie has been inexplicably chopped up to introduce a time-traveling TV dinner salesman, who is somehow the main character, even though the movie is called Biggles and also the time-traveling TV dinner salesman actor can’t act. Baffling.

(However it did later on contribute to a conversation about plotting, action sequences, World War I pilots etc. which may have finally cracked the story of the World War I princess fighter pilot and her communist BFF who overthrew the monarchy and is now trying to have the princess executed by firing squad! “It’s not personal, Fritzi.” “If it’s so impersonal, then why don’t you shoot me yourself? Or are you too good to complete the same tasks as common soldiers?”)

On Saturday, skygiants and genarti and I visited the Athenaeum! If I lived in Boston I would be DEEPLY tempted to get a membership. If only I could split in two and the second me could make it her life’s work to read in the Athenaeum all day long… Told them the v. important story about how Josephine Preston Peabody and her BFF Abbie Farwell Brown used to use a specific book in the Athenaeum as a post office to leave notes to each other. Doesn’t that sound like the beginning of a novel in itself?

Then the second leg of my journey began! I went to western Massachusetts to visit asakiyume, and we went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, where I would happily leave yet another, third self simple to read through the entire picture book library… However, I suspect this third self would eventually finish the holdings (it is a small library, and picture books are quick to read; I zoomed through Christopher Denise’s adorable Knight Owl about an owl who becomes a knight and befriend a dragon), at which point perhaps it would pop over to the Yiddish Book Center (literally right across the street! asakiyume and I went on a tour with a wonderfully knowledgeable guide) and teach itself Yiddish, because if you can subdivide like an amoeba and have infinite selves then why not?

…Curiously enough asakiyume and I also watched Severance, which is about a different and darker kind of subdivision of selves. Amazing. Can’t believe it ended on a cliffhanger like that. Fascinating to see the different ways that these characters have adjusted (or refuse to adjust) to life in this totalizing workplace that their subdivided selves never get to leave.

Oh, and we made an apple pie! I made the crust and it turned out pretty nicely if I do say so myself.

And then back on the road, with a stop in Ithaca after all, as my friend’s son had recovered from his indisposition and it was safe for me to come! I took along the picture books Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Anatole as presents and said son (two years old; obsessed with trains; “Can’t he get to his dinosaur phase yet?” my friend sighed) requested each one read at least twice, so overall successful presents.

And then home again! And then right back to work yesterday, and now I am weary. Today perhaps will be a quiet day to rest, but I do want to get back to writing soon… I rattled off the first chapter of The Princess and the Communist (working title; had to set aside The Flying Princess) while on the road but of course one needs all the subsequent chapters too!

I’ve finished my journey through Hollywood adaptations of Little Women with Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation, which I first saw in theaters when it came out, but rewatched with fresh eyes after spending the spring generally immersed in Little Women and related works.

Without ever feeling rushed, this adaptation includes an enormous amount of material from the original book. Gerwig hits almost every major scene (RIP Meg’s currant jelly that refuses to set), plus almost all of the most famous lines, in part by letting the sisters talk over each other in the way that people in movies - perhaps particularly in period pieces - are rarely allowed to do.

This swirling chatter gives the March family a wonderfully intimate feel. Even when the girls are cross with each other - and like the 1994 version, this adaptation gives the full weight to the scene where Amy burns Jo’s book for revenge - you can feel that they know each other very, very well.

But by telling the story out of chronological order, Gerwig ends up drawing out themes that are present but less emphasized in the book. In particular, this adaptation is unique in the amount of time that it devotes to the March sisters after they’ve grown up. Often the second half of the book feels like the unloved stepsister, crammed in at the end because the filmmaker can’t avoid it, but here I’m almost certain that it takes up the majority of the movie’s running time: we both start and end with the March sisters all grown up.

The movie is also very interested in Little Women as an ensemble piece. This is the only adaptation, I think, where Meg doesn’t more or less drop out of the story after her marriage: her quarrel with John over spending an extravagant sum on the silk for a dress are part of Gerwig’s consideration of the question of marriage as a business proposition for a woman, most fully developed in Amy’s chat with Laurie in the Parisian atelier. (The scene is in the book, but this particular dialogue is an addition.)

Most of all, however, this adaptation is interested in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, and offers two full portraits and one poignant hint at an artist manque: near the beginning of the movie, a shot of Beth alone at the piano dissolves into a round of applause at the New York theater that Jo is attending. The sound of clapping starts before the image changes, suggesting that Beth is imagining the applause, which she never sought because of her shyness, and now can’t seek because she’s dying.

However, our main artists are Amy and Jo, who approach this somewhat gender-inappropriate calling in diametrically different ways. In all other ways, Amy presents herself as a very feminine young woman, while Jo approaches her artistic ambitions with the same bulldozer ferocity that she brings to everything else in her life. The movie begins with Jo shouting at Professor Bhaer after he clumsily criticizes her writing (it is clear that Bhaer has almost as little experience giving criticism as Jo does receiving it), and ends with her publishing her smash hit Little Women, and also maybe getting together with Professor Bhaer, but that’s ambiguous and really not the point.

I must admit that I saw this movie with two friends, both of whom were sure that Jo did end up with Professor Bhaer, and rather aghast when I suggested the whole kissing-in-the-rain sequence was a fantasy Jo made up to appease her publisher, who assured her that she couldn’t end her book with her self-insert heroine a spinster. So you certainly can read it either way… and it seems a shame not to have Jo end up with Professor Bhaer when Gerwig cast someone so young and hot…

(In an interview Gerwig noted that casting directors constantly cast smoking hot twenty-something women to play characters who really ought to be older, so why not do the same with Professor Bhaer? The logic is impeccable.)

But making the get-together ambiguous also leaves open the possibility that Jo is a lesbian, or asexual, or what have you. The movie doesn’t commit to any definite reading of Jo’s gender and sexuality, but it DOES commit to the idea that something is up with Jo’s gender and sexuality, and Jo is aware of this without quite understanding it.

This comes through especially clearly in the scene where Jo turns down Laurie’s proposal. She knows that she’s terribly fond of him, and she also knows that she just doesn’t love him the way she is supposed to love him in order to marry him, and it confuses and frustrates her because she just doesn’t know why she can’t. And yet she can’t.

Near the end of the movie, desperately lonely after Beth dies, Jo suggests that she might have changed her mind about accepting Laurie’s proposal - not because she loves him now, but because “I care more to be loved” than she did when he first proposed. This line comes directly from the book, but in the book it takes place in context of the letter announcing Laurie and Amy’s marriage: Jo is saying, essentially, “Phew, if Laurie had asked again I might have married him for all the wrong reasons, but now that he and Amy are married, I’m safe.”

In the 2019 version, as in the 1994 version, Laurie and Amy don’t tell the Marches they’re married till they're back in the States. Jo makes this comment in a discussion with her mother about her loneliness, and follows it up (as Jo does in the 1994 version) with a letter to Laurie, suggesting that she’s changed her mind.

In the 1994 version, this is a straightforward two-ships-passing-in-the-night tragedy: Laurie fell in love with Jo when she didn’t want him, and Jo fell in love with Laurie just as he was moving on. In the 2019 version, the tragedy is that Jo may be trying to commit herself to a life she doesn’t want, because she sees no other escape from her loneliness.

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Men because the real-life Meg needed money after her husband died (an event that also occurs in Little Men, although unlike the real husband, John Brooke leaves enough to keep Meg!), and this absolutely shows in the writing: you really feel that Alcott gave maybe two-thirds of a fuck about the book, at most.

Of course, two-thirds of a fuck from Louisa May Alcott is worth more than a whole garden of fucks from most of the rest of us. As always, Alcott is drawn to the “bad” children, the ones who don’t fit the mold. There’s sharp-tongued tomboy Nan, a romping child who discovers a passion for medicine and decides to become a doctor; talented musician Nat, so gentle and sensitive that Professor Bhaer calls him “daughter,” a sweet boy who sometimes lies because he’s afraid of the consequences of the truth. (In nineteenth-century novels, lying tends to be considered a feminine vice.)

And of course there’s Dan, Nat’s friend from his time on the streets, a rough, short-tempered boy who smokes and drinks and swears and just in general bears the rules of a school poorly, because he’s not used to any restraint at all. But he has a soft spot for animals and a great loyalty to his friends: when Nat is suspected of a grievous lie, Dan takes the blame onto himself. When Nat realizes what a sacrifice Dan has made for him, he feels “a strong desire to hug his friend and cry. Two girlish performances, which would have scandalized Dan to the last degree.”

However, there are also parts where Alcott clearly decided to plump up the word count with the nineteenth-century equivalent of Tumblr imagines. As “there is no particular plan for this story, except to describe a few scenes in the life at Plumfield,” Alcott spends a chapter describing a bunch of games that the Plumfield students play. Later on she devotes a whole chapter to the harvest of every single one of the twelve little student garden plots which are, of course, metaphors for the garden of Character that each child is cultivating.

Alcott herself clearly got tired of cultivating the gardens of Character: about half the twelve students get at least a stab at characterization, while the other half get one single defining trait. Jack is obsessed with money, Stuffy is fat, Dick is hunchbacked, Dolly is boring. No, really, that’s his characterization: he’s “a good little lad, quite uninteresting and ordinary.” Honestly I respect the sheer chutzpah.

But speaking of chutzpah! Let’s hear it for the fact that Jo named her second son Teddy after Theodore Laurence, her best friend who repeatedly proposed to her! Fascinated to know what Amy thinks of this development, but Amy (indeed the whole March family) is Sir Not Appearing in This Book, so we never know.

Professor Bhaer, on the other hand, is in this book quite a lot (bearing an ever more eerie resemblance to Mr. March), and he is apparently fine with it when Laurie shows up at Plumfield and flirts up a storm with Jo. In turn, Jo “stroked the curly black head at her knee as affectionately as ever, for, in spite of every thing Teddy was her boy still.”

I cannot tell if Alcott was tossing Jo/Laurie shippers a bonbon or amusing herself by twisting the knife one last time. It may have been both at the same time. I have the strong impression that she got a kick out of trolling her readers.

I’ve heard that the 1949 Little Women is the weakest of the four major Hollywood adaptations of the book, so I approached this movie with a contrarian hope in my heart: I wanted to tell you all that it is GREAT, actually. But alas! Sometimes the consensus is right. This IS the weakest of the four major Hollywood adaptations of Little Women

In many ways it mimics the choices made in the 1930s Katherine Hepburn version, but without the anchoring strength of Hepburn’s performance. June Allyson is an adorable Jo - there’s a great scene where she stumbles in jumping a fence, and then goes back to take another go at it - but she doesn’t carry the film the way Hepburn does, which means that the other weaknesses of the adaptation stand out more.

Like the Hepburn version, the 1949 version cuts the book-burning/falling through the ice sequence. Unlike the Hepburn version, this version REALLY wants to establish that Amy is a horrible person, which you might imagine would be difficult when you’ve cut her iconic horrible scene; but never fear! The filmmakers found a way.

When the March sisters go down to their Christmas breakfast, Amy instantly stuffs a popover in her mouth; votes (it is heavily implied) against taking Christmas breakfast down to the poverty-striking Hummels; eats another popover on the road to the Hummels, till Jo forces her to fork over the entire popover basket; and then eats popovers in front of the starving Hummel children. “A bite for you, and a bite for you, and a bite for me!” she crows, feeding herself every third bite of popover as the starving children gaze on.

This is quite different than femme fatale Amy in the 2017 BBC miniseries, but like femme fatale Amy it certainly is a Choice. And, like Femme Fatale Amy, it is a choice that is heightened by the filmmakers’ decision to style Amy as if she’s 25 or so: she doesn’t read as a bratty child who might grow out of it, but as a selfish full-grown woman.

(The 1949 version makes Beth the youngest March sister, presumably because if you’ve got the chance to cast Margaret O’Brien you take it… although it would have been interesting to see what Margaret O’Brien could have made of Amy, given her druthers.)

It also makes some curious pacing decisions. The second half of the book is squashed into the final third of the movie, but the filmmakers don’t, at first, seem to have realized that they’re running short on time. There’s a reasonable amount of space devoted to Laurie’s proposal and Jo’s growing friendship with Professor Bhaer (who initially appears with a bearskin over his head, amazing), but then suddenly! There are ten minutes left, and we’ve still got to kill Beth and marry off both Amy and Jo!

No seaside scene with Beth! She and Jo have a good cry in the attic, and then Beth’s gone. No courtship for Amy and Laurie! Indeed, no scenes set in Europe at all. (1949 Amy has no artistic interests anyway.) Jo and Amy meet in New York before Amy goes to Europe, and Amy (clearly already intending to eat that boy like a popover) is all, “Would you mind if Laurie fell for someone else?” Jo assures Amy that she would not. Not that it would have stopped the Popover Snatcher if Jo said yes, but it’s certainly easier if Amy can claim a clear conscience!

Jo finishes her book and sends it off to Professor Bhaer! Amy and Laurie return! Professor Bhaer shows up in the rain with Jo’s book, which he has thoughtfully had published for her, as you do. He proposes! She accepts! They don’t kiss in the rain, because the filmmakers are determined to waste Hot Young Professor Bhaer. We pan up to a rainbow painted on the backdrop, because this film is in Technicolor and don’t you forget it. Happy end! THANK GOD WE GOT THROUGH ALL THAT.

We’re rushing in Little Women, because I want to finish it before I leave for NYC. Therefore I’ve got a lot of chapters to cover, so today I’ll talk about Meg and Jo and Amy, and tomorrow will post In Memoriam Beth March, Requiscat in Pace.

In Meg’s chapter, Meg has gotten so wrapped up in her twins that she’s started neglecting her husband, and Marmee tells Meg that she needs to get out more - leave the babies with a babysitter and go on date nights with your husband, hon! - but also let John take part in rearing the children. Co-parenting their children will make them stronger as a couple and also knit them together as a family! I would say, “That’s so modern!”, but in fact nineteenth century children’s literature is littered with involved and loving fathers. I think often we call things “modern” when in fact we mean “this is the part of the past that we like.”

Meanwhile, Jo has stumbled into one of literature’s more bizarre love triangles. Last time I read this book I had no strong feelings re: the shipping question; this time, I have joined legions of readers in shrieking “LOUISA, HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO US?” Alcott admitted that she “made a funny match for Jo” on purpose to annoy the readers who inundated her with letters begging for Jo and Laurie to get together, and the juxtaposition of these chapters seems designed to rub in the contrast between middle-aged censorious Bhaer and young passionate Laurie…

Who, yes, certainly has a lot of growing up to do, based on his reaction to Jo’s rejection. But they’re both so young! They could both do with some time and life experience to grow them up before they settle down.

At the beginning of this sequence, Jo, in search of life experience, and also hoping to leave the field free for Beth (whom she believes is in love with Laurie, although in fact Beth is preoccupied with her impending death), goes to New York City. She makes a pile of money from sensation stories, and then given up scribbling after a scolding from Professor Bhaer.

In the book - I had forgotten this - Bhaer never actually reads any of her stories. In movie adaptations she often gives him her work for criticism; here, he’s simply inveighing against sensation stories as a category, because they lead readers astray, presumably by offering a false and misleading view of human character, although neither he nor Alcott spell it out. Anyway, Jo is so abashed that she gives up not only sensation stories but writing altogether.

Then in the very next chapter Laurie confesses his love to her, and proposes, and Jo turns him down, and tells him (among other things), “You’d hate my scribbling.” But we never see Laurie say a word against Jo’s scribbling. It’s Professor Bhaer who is “satisfied” to see that “she had given up writing.” Louisa, are you having a jolly time thumbing your nose at us all?

Anyway, Laurie is SO crushed by Jo’s rejection that he runs away to Europe, where he begins to spend a lot of time hanging out with Amy. There’s an Extremely Symbolic exchange where he tries to pick a red rose and gets scratched on the thorns, and Amy tells him “Try lower down, and pick those that have no thorns.”

AMY IS THE LOWER ROSE WITHOUT ANY THORNS. DO YOU GET IT? DO YOU GET IT? Alcott spends the next few paragraphs expanding the analogy just in case you don’t.

I really wonder how Alcott’s real life youngest sister May felt about the portrayal of Amy. Fortunately this love triangle is not drawn from a real-life incident, but May really did have artistic ambitions, and she must have felt some kind of way about Louisa making Amy say, “talent isn’t genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing. I won’t be a common-place dauber, so I don’t intend to try any more.”

(Admittedly, Amy is saying this while in process of sketching Laurie, so what she really means is “I’ve laid aside my professional ambitions,” not “I will never draw again!” But still.)

I suppose the real-life Meg might also have objected to her portrayal in the books, but she didn’t have generations of readers baying for her blood after her character broke up their OTP. I really wonder if May sometimes thought, oh God, Louisa is truly the Bad Art Sister.

We've finished book one of Little Women! Beth nearly died of scarlet fever, Amy spent AGES at Aunt March's house putting up with a cranky old lady and her even crankier parrot, Laurie played a weird Cyrano de Bergerac prank on Meg where he wrote her a love letter purporting to come from John Brooke -

Last entry kore and I discussed the possibility of Laurie/Meg, as that appears to be the only Laurie/March sister pairing that doesn't exist on AO3 (there's even some Laurie/Beth!). Certainly you could work up an argument that Laurie has a crush, in between the fake love letters and also the pantomime lover's pleading with which he teases Meg. It's a very pigtail-pulling dynamic.

On a more prosaic note, WHAT was he going to do if Meg answered "John's" love letter with a sincere love letter of her own? Laurie, my boy, you did not think this THROUGH.

I also love Jo's reaction to Meg's impending engagement (or doom, as Jo might put it): she's just SO mad about it. She glares at Mr. Brooke every time he's in the room, she begs Marmee to help her spoil the match, she wails, "I wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family!"

The narrative continues, "This odd arrangement made Mrs. March smile..." which more or less sums up the response to Jo's ongoing temper tantrum about Meg's love affair. Everyone else thinks the engagement is a fine thing! and so romantic! but when Jo goes off they're just like "Oh Jo," and although Marmee does, gently, try to convince Jo of the advantages to Meg, no one tries to stop her from glowering at Mr. Brooke over the dining room table or otherwise force her to behave in a courteous manner. She feels how she feels and they just roll with it.

Jo also gripes, "I'm disappointed about Meg, for I'd planned to have her marry Teddy by-and-by and sit in the lap of luxury all her days." Although if it came to it, I expect she'd be just as mad about that match! In the end the effect is the same: Meg will go away and live somewhere else, and no longer be around every day. "You can't know how hard it is for me to give up Meg," Jo tells Laurie (with "a little quiver in her voice" - from Jo who always tries so hard not to cry!).

Laurie consoles her that she isn't giving up Meg - "You only go halves" - but Jo refuses the consolation: "It can never be the same again. I've lost my dearest friend." She's being a little bit melodramatic, as sixteen-year-olds will, but she's also hit on a certain truth: her relationship with Meg will inevitably change when they're no longer living in the same house; they'll lose all the little daily things that made up their life together. And Jo has very little faith that she'll find a loving bond with someone else to take the place of her bond with Meg.

For all that, the ending of this book (the first half of Little Women was originally published as a standalone book, and I believe in some countries still is) is one of the most perfectly happy moments in literature. We have another tableau, like the one at the beginning of the book where the girls gather round Marmee to hear Mr. March's letter. This time they are coupled off, in pairs of friends or lovers: Mr. and Mrs. March, Meg and John Brooke, Jo and Laurie, Beth and Mr. Laurence, and Amy with her sketchbook.

littlerhymes and I have been rereading Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and I thought that other people might enjoy chatting about the book too so I'm going to do a weekly post just about wherever we've gotten up to in the book, comparisons to the movies etc., just whatever comes to mind.

Today seemed like a good time to start because we just got through the MOST DRAMATIC chapter in the book, by which of course I mean the chapter where Amy BURNS JO'S BOOK and Jo in retaliation doesn't tell Amy about the weak ice in the river, and Amy falls through it and ALMOST DIES.

Critics give nineteenth century novels a lot of guff for their focus on teaching their heroines to control their tempers, but honestly I think it's much more noteworthy just how much temper these heroines get to display in the first place. How many novelists today would have the guts to have a girl burn her older sister's prized possession in a fit of temper? Or to have said older sister retaliate in a way that might have got her little sister killed? (Or an Anne of Green Gables style "breaking a slate over that obnoxious boy's head," for that matter.)

I think a lot of modern day people are theoretically in favor of "women's anger," but not actually in favor of the real fruits of losing one's temper, or prepared to think particularly deeply about the fact that women (just like men) sometimes get angry for reasons that are neither just nor righteous. (Ask anyone working retail.)

Anyway! I just recently watched the 1934 Katherine Hepburn adaptation, which cuts this scene entirely. (I still haven't seen the 1949 adaptation, but it's on the docket.) In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Amy Boyd Rioux complains that the Hepburn adaptation shortchanges Jo's writing career, which I don't agree with - we actually see quite a lot of that, including Jo's entire melodramatic Christmas play that she and her sisters put on for the neighbors. What the movie ends up cutting are scenes like Amy's burning of Jo's book, which focus on the more complicated aspects of relationships between the sisters.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

When I read all the Newbery Medal winners years ago: I left two off my list: the 1922 winner Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, and the 1940 winner James Daugherty’s Daniel Boone, on the grounds that nonfiction books that old were surely outdated and probably racist.

But as I’ve been reading all the Newbery Honor books, it’s been nagging me that I really ought to complete the project, and as Daniel Boone is a svelte 90 pages I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, it’s actually really good! Given the time period, it’s surprisingly respectful and culturally sensitive…

HA HA HA, sorry, I just can’t keep it up any longer. In actual fact, Daniel Boone is somehow even worse than I expected, never mind that I thought my expectations were rock bottom. The back cover depicts what Daugherty repeatedly calls an “Indian varmint,” a distortedly muscular figure in a style reminiscent of Thomas Hart Benton. (Daugherty did his own illustrations for this book). Similar figures adorn the endpapers (where they are, of course, wrassling with backwoodsman) and the illustrations within, which accompany a text which is exactly what you would expect given the illustrations.

At troisoiseaux’s recommendation, I read Anne Boyd Rioux’s Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, an eminently readable book that I zipped through in two days and occasionally disagreed with vehemently. In particular, I thought her final chapter about The State of Girls’ Books today takes too dim a view of things (and also seemed outdated even for its own time of publication; the book came out in 2018, but the books it discusses are mainly 2000-2010). Yes, Little Women is great, but it doesn’t need to be better than everything else to be great, you know? It can be one of many fine books now available.

I did absolutely agree with Rioux’s assessment of the discourse about "Boys won't read books about girls," though. American culture has somehow managed to become more sexist on this topic than it was in the 1870s, when boys and men eagerly devoured Little Women (including our buddy William Dean Howells, by the way). It’s ridiculous.

What I’m Reading Now

Continuing my Alex Beam journey with American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church. Joseph Smith had just declared himself a candidate for president because of course he has.

Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese has arrived through interlibrary loan! It has TWO introductions, one by Pearl S. Buck, who hopes that this book will convince American housewives to stop rinsing their rice after they cook it. I don’t know if Chao’s book was personally responsible, but the idea of rinsing cooked rice shocked my roommate and me TO OUR VERY SOULS, so someone must have gotten through to the American public.

What I Plan to Read Next

I am distressed to inform you that, despite my trials with Daniel Boone, I still feel that in the interest of completeness I ought to read The Story of Mankind. The library, conveniently but unhelpfully, has the original text - all six hundred odd pages of it! - in ebook form. Lord preserve us.

However, I will resist as long as possible! My hold on Amor Towles’ new book, The Lincoln Highway, has come in at last. (Still waiting with baited breath to see if Rosamunde Pilcher’s Winter Solstice makes it to me before Christmas.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a quiet yet absorbing SF novel about a little coffee shop in an alley in Tokyo where one of the seats can transport a patron through time. But there are rules: nothing the time traveler does will change the present; once they’re in the past, they must stay in the seat; and they have to finish their visit before their coffee grows cold, or they will remain in the seat as a ghost.

If the book had placed more weight on that last rule it could have turned toward horror, but the author instead focuses on the intimate, emotional aspects of these journeys. Although time travelers can’t change anything that happened - if someone died, they will stay dead - their trips through time can change their attitude toward what has happened and their behavior in the future.

I also read Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, in which May argues that our current cultural expectation (May is writing from England, but this is true in America too; possibly this is an Anglophone thing?) that constant happiness is possible is not only false but fundamentally damaging, because it makes people feel alone and broken when they meet with life’s inevitable sadnesses, when really what they are going through is as inevitable as the winter in temperate climes.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I agree with this thesis whole-heartedly. I thought the book would have been improved if May cut down on the excursions into memoir by about two-thirds, though. This is my perennial complaint about modern nonfiction. If the book isn’t actually meant to be a memoir, then adding memoir very rarely adds anything.

Here is a quote that I liked, though, from one of the non-memoir portions, when May muses about the widespread human tendency to project the qualities about ourselves that we like least onto wolves: “In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again.”

What I’m Reading Now

“Why didn’t anyone tell me about Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow?” I was going to complain, but actually I am glad no one did, as I think I’m reading this book at exactly the right time. It’s a slow-moving (yet absorbing) book about a Russian count whom a Bolshevik court sentences to life imprisonment in the Metropol Hotel, and how he finds meaning and interest in his life within those confines. A good read for pandemic times, when many of us are finding ourselves living (at least for the moment) more confined lives than we anticipated.

I also started reading Louisa May Alcott’s Work, because it was in the same collection as Diana and Persis and I did not realize that the collection only included the first six chapters, plus the concluding chapter. Why! Why would you print only a part of the book like that? Fortunately ebooks exist, but I cannot IMAGINE how frustrating it would be to have read this in the pre-ebook days of 1988, when the collection was published, and discover that there are THIRTEEN CHAPTERS MISSING.

Last but not least, I’m continuing on in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. Allan Armadale (1) has just become fast friends with a mysterious stranger who (as Collins gleefully points out) MIGHT be Allan Armadale (2).Would Collins really have the face to lampshade the possibility if the mysterious stranger really IS Allan Armadale (2)? MAYBE. I certainly wouldn’t put it past him.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m finally getting Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game!!!! And Micah Nemerever’s These Violent Delights will be arriving around the same time. WHAT DO. I feel the library could have staggered the book’s arrival more effectively…

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last I’ve read Dylan Thomas’s memoir/short story/prose poem, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, in a beautiful edition illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman (illustrator of Caldecott winner St. George and the Dragon and Caldecott runner-up Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins, among many others).

I’m glad I waited till now for this book. The writing is beautiful, and I don’t think I would have appreciated it fully as a child.

Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards.

Continuing the Christmas theme, I read a collection of Louisa May Alcott’s Christmas short stories, A Merry Christmas, and Other Stories. This is about as saccharine as you would expect (read: VERY), but for whatever reason I find that much more tolerable in nineteenth century authors. In Alcott’s case particularly, I think it’s partly because her own family was so poor when she was a child: when she writes about sad waifs who are transported when a charitable neighbor gives them a Christmas tree, you sort of feel young Louisa beyond it, yearning for SOMEONE to give her and her sisters the tree laden with mittens and gilded nuts that her feckless father will never provide.

I also finished G. Neri’s Tru & Nelle, which is a somewhat odd book. It sort of gestures at being a mystery without, in fact, fully developing its mystery. However, I enjoyed it enough that I am reading the sequel, which is actually why I read the first book in the first place, because the sequel is a Christmas story and I wanted to read it this December.

And finally, I read Iona Datt Sharma’s Division Bells, because skygiants reviewed it as a romance deeply grounded in the minutia of UK House of Lords procedure. This is not something that I knew I wanted until I read the review and my traitorous heart, determined to lengthen my ever-lengthening to-read list, said “YES.”

It’s very sweet! I did wish it was a little longer so the relationship had more time to develop, but on the other hand the Parliamentary procedure was everything I hoped and dreamed - in fact, considerably more; my knowledge of the House of Lords is so slight that I didn’t even know what to hope and dream for.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun G. Neri’s Tru & Nelle: A Christmas Tale. So far, Truman Capote has escaped from military school and run away to Alabama, where he almost doesn’t knock on Nelle Harper Lee’s window because she has been forced to wear a dress and so he is not sure that he has the right window.

What I Plan to Read Next

Christmas with Anne, and Other Holiday Stories, a collection of stories by L. M. Montgomery. I’ve never read Montgomery’s short stories before, so I am intrigued to make their acquaintance.