A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Maeve Binchy’s The Lilac Bus, a short story collection which also includes the stories from Dublin 4. Binchy is always a pleasure to read, but the short story format doesn’t give her the space to build up the intricate character dynamics which are the best part of her novels.

I also read Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays, which I’m almost sure I read a few years ago, although I can’t find any post about it… Anyway, at the time I must have hated joy, because I wasn’t too impressed by the book and didn’t continue the series. In this book, the four Melendy children agree to pool their allowances every Saturday, so that each week one child can use the money to fulfill some long-held dream: going to the picture gallery or the opera or the circus. As they go, they make new friends, adopt a dog, fall in the lake at Central Park, and are invited to spend the summer at a lighthouse!

And I finished Capt. W. E. Johns’ Biggles Defies the Swastika, in which Biggles and co. end up trapped in Norway when the Nazis invade! Biggles rushes to an aerodrome, hoping to steal a plane so he can escape… only to run into a Norwegian acquaintance, who assumes that Biggles is also a fifth columnist and fits him out with a Gestapo pass.

Then Biggles sets out on a series of desperate switchbacks across Norway as Biggles attempts to find an escape route, dig up some dirt to help the British invasion, evade Von Stalhein (who is of course on his trail), and gather Ginger and Algy in one place so they can all escape together.

All of Johns’ books are action-packed, but the plotting here is particularly impressive: he’s always finding new and exciting ways to get Biggles and his friends into deeper trouble!

What I’m Reading Now

James Baldwin’s Another Country, although I may not finish it, because it’s so grueling to read about such unpleasant people. I should have been forewarned, because David the narrator of Giovanni’s Room is also a horrible person, but there’s a big difference between “the first-person narrator of this story is awful” and “Baldwin’s theory seems to be that all humans are awful, as evidenced by every single character who gets a slice of the rotating third-person POV and also all their friends.”

Do any of them develop any redeeming qualities as the book goes on? If the point is simply that people suck, I don’t need to read the rest of the book to grasp that.

What I Plan to Read Next

I will continue with the Melendy Quartet! Next up is The Four-Story Mistake.

Also delighted to inform you that there is another Worrals story available on fadedpage: Worrals in the Wilds: The First Post-War Worrals Story. Less delighted to tell you that it takes place in Africa, as nothing in my experience of Johns suggests that he will handle this well, but such is life.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished D. K. Broster’s The Yellow Poppy! ( Spoilers )

littlerhymes and I finished Alan Garner’s Elidor, a portal fantasy in which the children are only in the fantasy world for, like, four chapters. They spend the rest of the book home in Manchester trying to protect the magical Treasures that their liaison in Elidor entrusted to them. Garner never does quite what you expect! Although he is very predictable in the sense that the endings always seem to cut off abruptly about two sentences after the climax.

I also read Carol Ryrie Brink’s The Highly Trained Dogs of Professor Petit, which is about a showman whose troop of highly trained dogs are under threat from an unscrupulous competitor who lures in the crowds with his tiger act! Short and cute.

And I read Jennie D. Lindquist’s The Little Silver House, a sequel to her exquisite The Golden Name Day, and just as good as the first book. These books are about happy Swedish-American children having good times and enjoying the fun traditions of their Swedish heritage, like having a picnic at dawn to sing and watch the sun come up.

What I’m Reading Now

My St. Patrick Day reads have been derailed slightly by illness, but I am nonetheless traipsing ahead. In R. A. MacAvoy’s The Grey Horse, Ruairi just rescued the runaway son of the local landowner, and also murdered the Crown agent that said landowner had called in to investigate local Nationalist unrest.

Meanwhile, in Maeve Binchy’s Circle of Friends.... Oh gosh so much is happening in this book. DELIGHTED that Benny finally managed to run the Uriah-Heepish Sean Walsh out of her father’s clothing store. LESS delighted that Sean Walsh proposed marriage to the rich widow who owns the hotel across the street and was immediately accepted, not despite but because of the fact that Mrs. Healy knows all about his crimes. “This will make it easy to keep him under my thumb!” Mrs. Healy thinks. WILL IT, MRS. HEALY? I mean, maybe it will. Mrs. Healy certainly has a spine of steel and a heart to match, so really she and Sean are made for each other.

What I Plan to Read Next

Jennie D. Lindquist’s The Crystal Tree, the third and last book in her trilogy. These appear to be the only books she ever wrote, but WHAT a set of books.

Also, I want to add a Maeve Binchy to my St. Patrick’s Day list for next year. Any suggestions?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Mabel Leigh Hunt’s Better Known as Johnny Appleseed a Newbery Honor winning biography of Johnny Appleseed from 1950, a time when half the book could be short stories featuring Johnny Appleseed in a bit part and they would still call it a biography. (I quite enjoyed the short stories, but I’m not convinced biography is the right word for it.)

The short stories are all named after old apple varieties, and I gathered these names like so many fallen jewels: I gathered up the names of the antique apples like so many fallen jewels: Fall Wines and Fallawaters, Russets and Rambos, Gillyflowers and Golden Pippins, Sweet Boughs and Seek-No-Furthers.

I finished Marisa G. Franco’s Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends as an Adult a week ago, and I’ve already forgotten most of it, (self-help books are perhaps chewing gum for the brain?), but I liked this quote from W. H. Auden: “We’d rather be ruined than be changed.”

What I’m Reading Now

No Yellow Poppy this week, as I went a bit mad and started ALL my Irish books at one time. I’m working on R. A. MacAvoy’s The Grey Horse, Maeve Binchy’s Circle of Friends, Seamus O’Reilly’s Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, AND an audiobook of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. In The Grey Horse, the horse has just turned into a man! Meanwhile, Circle of Friends is giving me some Neapolitan Quartet vibes.

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? includes an early chapter about What Not to Say to the Bereaved, which appears to include every possible thing that you could say to the bereaved, including saying nothing at all. A lot of memoirs about grief include this chapter, and there never seems to be a companion chapter about What You Can Say to the Bereaved Without Scarring Them For Life Or At Least Till They Get It Off Their Chest in a Memoir. However I powered through, and we are now on the more promising ground on the retail foibles of various shops in Derry.

What I Plan to Read Next

I will probably not finish all my Irish books in time, but IF I finish all my Irish books in time, troisoiseaux recommended Sarah Tolmie’s novella The Fourth Island, set off the coast of Ireland.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“...perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted; all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words.”

Shirley Jackson’s Come Along with Me: Classic Short Stories and an Unfinished Novel also includes two essays about the craft of writing fiction. The above quote comes from one of those essays and it’s just so true.

I’ve also gotten a start on the 2021 Newbery award winners. Often I quibble with the Newbery committee’s decisions (I still haven’t gotten over their choice of Hello, Universe), so I’m pleased to report that I enjoyed this year’s winner, Tae Keller’s When You Trap a Tiger, which weaves together magical happenings drawn from the Korean folktales that Keller’s grandmother used to tell with an engaging contemporary story about… well, okay, a girl whose beloved story-telling grandmother is dying. Would I have enjoyed the dying-grandmother part of the book as a child? As an adult it’s very touching and made me cry, but little!me might have wanted More Magic and Less Death.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Armadale! (Perhaps I will make faster progress in this book now that I’m not dividing my online reading time with Battle Cry of Freedom.) The two Allan Armadales’ friendship has been TORN ASUNDER by Lydia Gwilt, who is… perhaps in love with Allan Armadale #2, alias Ozias Midwinter? Possibly appalled to discover herself still capable of the emotion of love?

I’m fairly sure that this is going to end with Allan Armadale #1 married to Miss Milton, but Very Concerned about how the book will wrangle a happy ending for Ozias Midwinter and Lydia Gwilt, given that Midwinter is penniless and Miss Gwilt an adventuress who came to Thorpe Ambrose specifically planning to marry into a large fortune. I JUST WANT OZIAS MIDWINTER TO BE HAPPY, WILKIE COLLINS, is that too much to ask???

I almost gave up on Maeve Binchy’s Evening Class a couple of chapters in; I couldn’t get over the forty-five-year old who had just fallen in love with a twenty-one-year old… who does that?. But I kept going, and although I continue to question almost all of the characters’ romantic choices (Bill, for instance, should really consider breaking up with the girlfriend who locked up her visiting mother, threw away the key, and then called Bill hysterically for help), I’ve become just as invested in their lives as they have grown invested in each other through their Italian class.

What I Plan to Read Next

Continuing my journey through Jacqueline Woodson’s oeuvre with Before the Ever After.