A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day, an early (1908) example of the “how to productively use your time” manual, and charmingly modest in its goals. Bennet takes it as a given that you don’t want to be more productive at the office: your office is boring! He knows it, you know it! And that’s part of why you want to develop your intellectual life in your time off, for which purpose Bennett suggests devoting one and a half hours three evenings a week to a course of reading you find interesting. Music theory, philosophy, the history of street cries, follow your heart.

The edition on Gutenberg also includes a preface in which Bennett addresses the weirdo who does put his all into his office work, but nonetheless wants to develop his mind even though he’s worn out by the evening. Get up early in the morning, before the servants, make yourself a cup of tea, and do your reading then.

What I’m Reading Now

Annie Fellows Johnston’s Cicely and Other Stories, a short story collection. I just finished “Alida’s Homeliness,” in which a homely girl is saved from a life of sulky self-consciousness… by taking up the study of medicine! She apprentices herself to Doctor Agnes Mayne, the local woman doctor, saves a child’s life, and incidentally wins the heart of the child’s doting young uncle.

What I Plan to Read Next

The recent IMLS cuts have put the fear of God into me re: my ability to get the rest of the 1930s Newbery books via ILL, so I intend to read the last twelve as swiftly as is compatible with actually getting the meat out of the books.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Onward in the Newbery Honors! I read Julia L. Sauer’s The Light at Tern Rock, a very short book about an older woman and her nephew who end up spending Christmas tending the lighthouse on Tern Rock. Lots of fun if you are into lighthouses (I am into lighthouses). Also interesting in that it has strong religious themes, which show up intermittently in Newbery Honor books in the 1950s, but not really thereafter. What’s curious is that you also don’t see these themes in the 1920s Newbery Honors; I’m interested to see if this is a 1950s aberration (the 1950s being the era of God and Country) or if it will show up in the 1930s and 40s too.

I also finished Jennie D. Lindquist’s The Crystal Tree, the final book in her charming trilogy about Nancy, who is sent to live with her Swedish-American not-actually-grandparents (they’re friends of the family, but, like, emotionally they are grandparents) and has all sorts of good times. In this book, the good times revolve around discovering the history of the little silver house which Nancy’s parents intend to rent; Nancy and her friends start interviewing everyone in town on the topic and hear lots of delightful stories, not only about the house but about all sorts of other things too. Just really enjoyable all around. Someone ought to consider reprinting these.

And I read Annie Fellows Johnston’s Mary Ware’s Promised Land, which is the LAST of the thirteen (!) Little Colonel books, and ends with Mary Ware settled down in wedded bliss with her beloved Phil Tremont, right across the road from her idol Lloyd Sherman (a.k.a. the Little Colonel). What more could a girl want? A career, you say? Well, I am thrilled to tell you that Mary Ware is ALSO going to be pursuing her passion for housing reform, lobbying for legislation to force greedy landlords to update their dwellings so the poor no longer live in windowless rooms with one single spigot for the whole building!

What I’m Reading Now

Mrs. Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock, simply because it was mentioned in Jennie D. Lindquist’s The Golden Name Day. (It’s the book the main character is reading on the stairs when the light slants through the stained glass window just right to cast colored shapes on the page.) Delighted to discover that it’s a children’s fantasy book! The cuckoo in the clock is taking our heroine Griselda on magical adventures, starting with a visit to the little room in the cuckoo clock where the cuckoo lives, with the walls all lined in red velvet and two little red velvet chairs. (The edition on Gutenberg has gorgeous illustrations.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Not sure yet... following my whim!

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Annie Fellows Johnston wrote the wildly popular ten-book Little Colonel series, which feature the adventures of Lloyd Sherman, a Kentucky girl with a fiery temper, and her many (many) (MANY) friends and beaux.

One of those friends is Joyce Ware, a budding young artist whose family is in straitened circumstances due to the death of her father and her mother’s ill health. Joyce has a younger sister named Mary, a freckle-faced girl fascinated by natural history, and The Little Colonel’s Chum: Mary Ware is the beginning of a spin-off trilogy centered on Mary but also liberally bedecked with updates on the life of all of the Little Colonel’s friends.

In college I read the ten books of the Little Colonel series for my American girl’s literature thesis, but I ran out of time on the Mary Ware books, and since then they’ve just languished. But I decided it was time to get rid of the series (I inherited a complete set, which successive generations had loved to death - literally these books are falling apart), and I thought, well, as a last hurrah I’ll read the Mary Ware books in my great-great aunt Ruth Montgomery’s original copies.

When her trilogy starts, Mary Ware is a girl of sixteen, just starting at boarding school. She is, in fact, starting at the boarding school that Lloyd Sherman herself attended, and goes into raptures of delight when she discovers she’s been assigned Lloyd’s former room, because she just adores the Little Colonel.

Mary hangs a photograph of Lloyd on the wall and has little chats with it. This is a book full of Significant Photographs: one of Lloyd’s other friends, Betty Lewis, is now a teacher at the boarding school, and one of Mary’s classmates keeps Betty’s photo on her wall: “She was my crush all my Freshman year,” she explains.

As well as the girl crushes, we have boarding school hijinks, Mary’s visit to her sister Joyce and Joyce’s three artist roommates (one of whom calls herself a “bachelor maid”), Mary’s crush on a boy (partly because she knows that he also likes Lloyd! Oh child)...

And then Mary’s good times are cut short by a development that shocked and appalled me! ( Spoilers )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I treated myself to Sherwood Smith’s The Poignant Sting last weekend - I always enjoy her Austen books (silverusagi, do you do ebooks? If you do, you might want to give Sherwood Smith’s Austen books a try) and I was particularly smitten with the idea of an Emma book, as that’s one of my favorite Austens. And this one has a gentle fantastical element, too! Miss Bates (yes, Miss Bates who never stops talking) has a touch of telepathy in her blood.

Also I thought Frank Churchill’s decision to hire the most! moddish! physician! to oversee Jane’s lying-in was the most Frank Churchill thing to do, good Lord man maybe next time you shouldn’t hire a guy whose favorite medicine is calomel? JUST A THOUGHT.

I also finished John Cacioppo’s Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, which I read because I’ve seen it referenced in a bunch of books. Sometimes when you go back and read the book all the other books are based on, you find out that the source book is so rich and dense that the other books have not been able to tell you half its glories; other times you go back and you discover that the source book was an important first step but considerably more steps have risen since then. This falls more in the second category.

And I read Evelyn Snead Barnett’s Jerry’s Reward, because Barnett was one of the founding members of the Louisville Authors’ Club which produced such bestsellers as The Lady of the Decoration, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, and the Little Colonel series… all of which were written by authors other than Barnett, who was one of the least successful members, probably because (judging by Jerry’s Reward) she just wasn’t that good of a writer. Maybe she had a better head for editing/business? Because her club certainly did midwife (as it were) a lot of writers.

What I’m Reading Now

Winifred Holtby’s South Riding, which I found unexpectedly absorbing. The title is extremely apt: the book is the story of a place, the fictional South Riding of Yorkshire in 1933, and a great cross-section of the people in it. Sometimes books with an enormous cast feel baggy to me - like I’m reading two or three different books that have been poorly stitched together - but in South Riding the local government provides the delicate web of connection that binds characters as disparate as an overwhelmed science teacher at the girls’ high school and a struggling insurance salesman whom bad times have forced on the dole.

Holtby’s mother was one of the first female alderman (maybe, in fact, the first?) in Yorkshire, so she writes from inside knowledge. Indeed the character of Mrs. Beddows is based on her own mother, and is one of the most vivid and interesting characters in a book positively bursting with clear individual portraits. You feel that you could meet these people - perhaps not today, because they are so very much of their time and place, but if a time machine took you to Yorkshire between the wars, you’d meet them.

What I Plan to Read Next

Oh, God, I have so many books. I think I’d better push Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to the top of the pile to make sure I get to it in February.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Emmy-Lou: Her Book and Heart, which ends when Emmy-Lou (who has reached the exalted state of a high school student) quits the school literary society in favor of a new dancing society that has started up. Now normally I am not in favor of characters forgoing intellectual development in favor of romance, but this is probably the only early twentieth century children’s book I’ve read that puts a positive spin on flirting, so that’s interesting, at least.

I also finished up the Odyssey, which ended quite abruptly: the father of one of the suitors Odysseus killed leads a crowd of townsfolk against him, but Athena intervenes and tells both sides to stand down, and bang, that’s it. I guess it’s nice to know that people have been struggling with endings almost as long as they’ve been telling stories.

In more exciting news, I’ve discovered that my alma mater - actually, let me back up a minute here. My alma mater owns a retreat on the shores of Lake Michigan in Door County, where they give weeklong seminar classes over the summer which alumni (indeed, presumably anyone who can pay the fee?) can attend. Next fall, they’re holding one about Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, which I could pay for using the proceeds of Briarley (provided I stop spending all the proceeds of Briarley on stationary), and… I’m tempted.

What I’m Reading Now

Beryl Markham’s West with the Night, which is reminding me strongly of Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series, even though the first is a memoir set in British East Africa and the second is a series of children’s books set in Australia. But both books are set in British colonial possessions in the first half of the twentieth century, and both involve children (en entire section of Markham’s memoir is devoted to her childhood) on remote farms pluckily facing the perils of the local wildlife. Young Markham got mauled by a supposedly-tame lion.

They’ve also both got the same sudden pops of racism, which I suppose it to be expected but nonetheless is jarring.

I’ve also begun Shaun Tan’s Tales of the Inner City, which is actually tales - often very short tales, the perfect size to read while you wait for your tea to steep - of magical or surrealist animals in the city.

What I Plan to Read Next

The 2019 Newbery Awards have been announced! There are only two honor books this year, Veera Hiranandani’s The Night Diary and Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s The Book of Boy, and the big winner is Meg Medina’s Merci Suarez Changes Gears.

Reading Girl Talk did lead to one positive development: it reminded me that I wanted to read Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney’s A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, which I subsequently zoomed through and adored so much that I popped over to the authors’ blog, Something Rhymed.

There, I discovered that they’re taking guest posts about female literary friendships. And, well, I have a list of such friendships that I have collected over the years. Unfortunately I didn’t take notes on most of it, so I’ll need to track down the information again. (But they’re asking for posts of 500-800 words, so I don’t need to go too nuts. NO SELF you do not need to go to Massachusetts to check out the Josephine Preston Peabody papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard to read all 142 letters she exchanged with Abby Farwell Brown.)

A few possibilities:

The aforementioned Josephine Preston Peabody and Abigail Farwell Brown. There are many charming references it Brown in Peabody’s collected diary and letters (I’ve ILLed the volume, because I no longer have access to the North American Women’s Letters and Diaries database), and I once found a laudatory review wrote of a performance of one of Peabody’s verse dramas, The Piper, although like a fool I didn’t print it out and I no longer have access to that database either.

Jean Webster (who wrote Daddy-Long-Legs) and Adelaide Crapsey (who invented the cinquain). They met at Vassar and remained close friends until Crapsey’s death of tuberculosis: Webster was at the deathbed. I think I read about this in Karen Alkalay-Gut’s biography of Crapsey, but I didn’t take notes. Why didn’t I take notes? You never know when notes will be useful.

Susan Coolidge (author of What Katy Did) and Helen Hunt Jackson. I found an edition of Jackson’s novel Ramona with a lengthy preface/eulogy for Jackson written by Coolidge, when she recounts many incidents in their friendship. The book is probably still in that Half-Price Books. I should fetch it.

Annie Fellows Johnston and her Louisville writing group, many of whom achieved great commercial success and had their books adapted into movies: Johnston’s own Little Colonel became a Shirley Temple feature, while Alice Hegan Rice’s Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch has been adapted to film four times. Rice’s aunt, Frances Little (nee Fannie Caldwell), was also a member of the group and wrote The Lady of the Decoration, which was the best-selling novel in the US in 1907. My main source for this one is Johnston’s memoir - which I actually possess!

Yes. I really ought to try to do those guest posts, don’t you think? I mean all this information is just sitting here, waiting to be shared.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, the second Peter Wimsey book, which is jolly interesting though tragically lacking in Harriet Vane. Should I start swooping through all the rest of the Wimsey novels, or should I ration them out and make them last? A quandary.

I also finished Frances Little’s Camp Jolly, in which three young boys camp in the Grand Canyon and have even grander adventures. The book ends with a hook for a sequel - next they’re going to have adventures in the Great War! - but as far as I can tell the sequel never materialized. Possibly contemporary reaction to this novel was as lukewarm as my own.

I also finished A. A. Milne’s Once on a Time, which I wasn’t sure about at first because it’s so very light that it practically floats - but sometimes you need something very light and in the end its winsome charm did indeed win me. It’s a… I’m not sure what genre to call it exactly. A gentle fairy tale parody?

What I’m Reading Now

Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women, a book set in a girl’s school in the early twentieth century, focusing more on the teachers than on the girls. evelyn_b, I recommended this to you in a letter, and I feel that I ought to qualify this recommendation now that I am farther into it with the note that this book causes SO MANY EMOTIONS, there are moments when it’s like death by a thousand pinpricks.

And also one of the characters has done something so vile - particularly vile in its absolute pettiness - that I have begun to root for her to be utterly routed and destroyed, because here is a person who ought not to have power over anyone, ever, even the diffuse kind of power that comes from any particularly strong friendship.

Fortunately Alwynne has temporarily escaped her sway and gone to visit relations in the country, which also incidentally turns into a visit to one of those peculiar new coeducational boarding schools with socialist leanings: you can tell because they let the children go on rambles unsupervised rather than marching sedately two by two, with a teacher patrolling to ensure they don’t link arms.

I found the school stuff really interesting, but unfortunately it has been supplanted by A Man. He and Alwynne are clearly going to end up together, which will at least save Alwynne from her seemingly nice but secretly vile Machiavellian friend, but as much as I deprecate vile human beings in real life, their Machiavellian machinations do make for far more interesting reading than “Alwynne just compared this dude to Mr. Darcy. Clearly wedding bells are on the horizon.”

What I Plan to Read Next

We met our Summer Reading sign-up goal at work, so all of us staff members got to pick a summer reading prize, and naturally I got a book: Nancy Farmer’s House of the Scorpion. It looks - potentially scarring honestly; this is why I never read any of Farmer’s books in my youth, when they were a big deal (I remember seeing A Girl Named Disaster everywhere), they all looked potentially scarring. Possibly they are so good that it’s worth it. But still.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Because I liked Frances Little’s The Lady of the Decoration so much, I decided to read another one of her books, Little Sister Snow - and discovered on the very first page that it was illustrated by a fellow named Genjiro Kataoka, an early twentieth-century Japanese-American illustrator who was tremendously popular for Japanese-themed books, including Yone Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, which I have marked down for further reading.

It’s fortunate that I got so much enjoyment out of Genjiro Kataoka’s existence (and his lovely illustrations), because the book itself is a bit of a wash. I was pleasantly surprised that The Lady of the Decoration was so refreshingly low on stereotypes, but evidently Little was saving them all up to use in Little Sister Snow. The book is in the POV of a Japanese maiden who attends an American missionary school, and even with the missionary school connection, it seems that was just a bridge too far from her own experience for Little to grapple with successfully.

However, the award for “most racist book read this week” definitely goes to Jean Webster’s The Four-Pools Mystery. I really had no reason to expect better of Jean Webster, but I love Daddy-Long-Legs so much that I did. The book was published in 1908 and takes place on a post-bellum Virginia plantation and is steeped in the racial attitudes of the time, although at the end it struck me that Webster intended the book to be anti-racist.

Or, as her New York reporter detective explains to the Virginians at the end, his ability to solve the crime that baffled them “proves another thing… which is a thing that you people don’t seem to have grasped; and that is that negroes are human beings and have feelings like the rest of us. Poor old Colonel Gaylord paid a terrible price for not having learned it earlier in life.”

You see, a black vagrant murdered Colonel Gaylord because he was mad that the Colonel had given him a thrashing. The Virginians couldn’t imagine that a black man might hold a grudge about getting thrashed (“it comes natural to niggers to be whipped and they don’t mind it,” the sheriff informs the skeptical reporter) so they didn’t consider the vagrant as a suspect.

Now I realize that racists have believed a lot of weird things, but I just don’t believe that racism has ever rendered anyone incapable of pinning a crime on a convenient black vagrant.

To add insult to injury, the mystery itself is poorly done, too. The narrator is clearly intended to play Watson to the reporter-detective’s Holmes, but a Watson needs to be at least as smart as the reader, not a total bozo who can’t figure out the most obvious things.

I also read D. E. Stevenson’s Celia’s House, which I really liked (it turns out that it’s a stealth retelling of Mansfield Park, and this version actually has enough time for the Fanny & Edmund characters to fall in love at the end. Also, no one is against plays qua plays), but I’m too worn out from writing about the others to write about it properly. Maybe I should do a separate weekly Obscure Old Books post to space things out a little.

What I’m Reading Now

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Short stories are generally not my thing, but I’ve been enjoying these, in a “I would probably like any one of these more if it were a novel and I had more time to get to know the characters” sort of way. So far my favorite is “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.”

I’ve also begun listening to Kevin Henkes’ Junonia, which is not bad. Olive’s Ocean wasn’t bad either. I was going to say that this would be my last Kevin Henkes book, because there’s not enough time in the world to waste it on “not bad,” but it turns out he got a Newbery Honor for The Year of Billy Miller, so there’s at least one more in my future.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Year of Billy Miller, probably. (I’ve decided to get cracking on my Newbery Honor project.) Should I read it on paper, or listen to it as an audiobook? An important question.

In fact it looks like most of the recent Newbery Honor books are available as audiobooks. I’ll need to give this some thought.

I must confess, I got Frances Little’s 1906 bestseller The Lady of the Decoration because I suspected it would be a racist trainwreck - it’s a novel by an American author! set in Japan! written in 1906! - and I could get a delightfully cutting review out of it.

Rarely have I been so pleased to have my expectations dashed. It isn’t perfect (and the moments of racism that really rocked me back were all against black people, and not the Japanese, which is quite a feat given that there aren’t any black characters in the novel) but neither is it a trainwreck, and in fact I liked it a lot. The descriptions of the Japanese landscape are gorgeous, and reminded me in a slantwise way of Natsume’s Book of Friends, which also has long loving landscape shots. And both stories have the same sense of the protagonist finding at last some precariously balanced happiness, after long difficult years.

The narrator in this case - I’m not sure she ever does get a name! This only just struck me. The novel is told as a one-sided stream of letters home, so it feels perfectly natural that her name never comes up. She’s a young widow, who lost an unlamented husband who made her life a misery - we get no details (presumably her correspondent knows all about it already), but he left her in a state of nervous exhaustion, and she went to Japan to teach at a missionary kindergarten (despite having no missionary leanings and little religious feeling) on the hope that a change of air and scenery combined with useful work might help her put herself back together.

And it does help, although it is also a struggle, right up to the end of the book. “The whole truth is I’m worsted! The fight has been too much. Days, weeks, months of homesickness have piled up on top of me until all my courage and my control, all my will seem paralysed. Night after night I lie awake and stare into the dark, and staring back at me is the one word ‘alone.’”

Then she heads out to mail the letter in a raging storm, after which she walks recklessly onto the sea wall, climbs the stone lantern, and lets the rain beat on her face and the thunder roar above her and the waves rush against the sea wall until the storm dies away, and the sun rises above the sea, and through some sort of meteorological transference, feels her own spirits rise within her as well.

I am continually astounded by how often characters in nineteenth & early twentieth century novels fall prey to their nerves - it might of course be selection bias, but then I usually select these books on the basis of “I know nothing about this book but it’s on Kindle for free!” which I think would rather mitigate against that. In any case it’s super useful: I’m working again on the book set after the Civil War, where the heroine has suffered what we would call depression (and they might also call it depression, but they would also call it “nerves”), and I definitely highlighted some stuff in here for reference.

This makes it sound super grim, which it is not. The “blue devils” (as the heroine calls these attacks of depression) are not always after her, and there are plenty of fun times, too: visits to Nagasaki, Kyoto, Vladivostok (which she does not like; this book was published fresh on the end of the Russo-Japanese War and America was solidly on Japan’s side). Even Shanghai! And she’s very funny, sometimes even when she’s in the depths of despair: she reminded me of a more worldly version of Judy from Daddy-Long-Legs in her gleeful but good-hearted irreverence. Witness this exchange she reports between a tract-bearing missionary and a seasick passenger:

“Brother, are you a Christian?”

“No, no,” he muttered impatiently. “I’m a Norwegian.

Now what that man needed was a cocktail, but it was not for me to suggest it.

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a series of posts about the Little Colonel books. I’ve read so many books from the era, it could all go to such good use contextualizing everything that’s going on in the Little Colonel - the good and the "why the hell did you just write that???"

And also there’s all this pent-up squee about the Lloyd/Ida possibilities that just needs to go somewhere.

Would anyone be interested?