A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I did loads of reading this week! So much so that I wish I’d waited to post last Wednesday’s reading meme till I’d finished Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, just to make this week’s a little less cluttered. Sayers has a real gift for coming up with uniquely chilling methods of murder - not gruesome, but chilling - in this book and Unnatural Death as well.

Usually I don’t include short stories in these round-ups, but I thought I’d mention Marie Brennan’s “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review,” just in case there are any fellow fans of her Lady Trent books on here who haven’t heard of it. Lady Trent exchanges increasingly sharp letters with a scientist who claims he has discovered a cockatrice.

I finally finished Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter! I’m afraid the book and I never clicked: it’s pretty much 200 straight pages of pure nature writing, and I can do about two paragraphs of nature writing before my mind starts to wander, but if nature writing is your jam then this book seems like exactly the sort of thing that you might like.

And, prompted by the 25 Must-Read Books for Women list, I read Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye, which is crushing - crushing - crushing - and I want to read more of her books - possibly once I’ve had some time to recover from this one, though, because did I mention it is crushing.

AND ALSO (deep breath) I finished Maria Thompson Daviess’ The Road to Providence, which is a piece of early 20th century fluff about a singer (often referred to as “the singer lady”) who is referred to a doctor in the idyllic small Kentucky town of Providence after her vocal cords were “frizzled” when she drank a glass of ice water right after a performance. Do they fall in love? Is the sky blue?

One thing that struck me: everyone in town expects the doctor to provide them with updates on his patients as a matter of course. (“How’s ol’ Miz Bostick doing today?” and questions of that sort.) I imagine if some rando asked he might not comply, but everyone in town knows everyone else, so in a sense they all have an interest, although obviously not one that would entitle a doctor to breach patient confidentiality today. When did that norm change?

What I’m Reading Now

Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons, Jackson’s second of her two cheerful memoirs of minor domestic chaos. The more I learn about Jackson’s life the more these memoirs seem more fictional than her actual novels: her husband comes across as such an absent-mindedly benign figure, when in real life he cheated on her constantly and insisted on telling her about it. Why can’t you at least pretend to hide your cheating like a normal cad, Stanley?

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m starting another book on my list of 25 Must-Read Books for Women: Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place.

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 am so excited about all my free Kindle books from the days of yore that I could not restrain myself and made a whole post about them. I did my undergrad thesis project about girls’ books from 1890-1915, and I’ve simply had marvellous luck finding books I like in that time period. Recently I even branched out and read a boys’ book from the time period, William Heyliger’s Don Strong, Patrol Leader, which I all but live-blogged at sineala as I read it.

IT IS SO EARNEST. SO EARNEST. It is about boy scouts and it shimmers and shines with earnest, upright scoutliness. “The patrol leader, [Don] thought, should be a fellow who was heart and soul in scouting - a fellow who could encourage, and urge, and lend a willing hand; not a fellow who wanted to drive and show authority.” It’s as if Steve Rogers committed mitosis and became an entire boy scout troop.

Except! Except there is one bad scout, Tim, who is always destroying unit cohesion because he yearns to impress his authority on everyone rather than working as part of the team. Obviously it is Don’s duty as patrol leader to help Tim get in touch with his best self, so he can contribute to the troop! Naturally it ends with a treasure hunt in the woods where they beat each other up and then finally begin to work together.

None of Heyliger’s other books are on Kindle for free. I am so sad about this.

But it’s not like I’m going to run out of reading material. I’ve got like fifteen books stocked, and I have particularly high hopes for these three:

1. Rose of Old Harpeth, by Maria Thompson Daviess. I loved her book Phyllis (you have to scroll down past the Lost Prince review to get to Phyllis), and all Daviess' books, evidently, are set in the same imaginary southern town - a precursor to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpa County, except infinitely kinder and gentler and with much more emphasis on female friendship and lovely nature descriptions.

2. Georgina’s Service Stars, by Annie Fellows Johnston. I keep meaning to write something about Johnston’s Little Colonel books - suffice it to say that I am sufficiently invested that my mom and I got into a shipping debate about the Little Colonel’s romantic prospects - so I have high hopes for Johnston’s later Georgina duology. Especially because I am pretty sure that Georgina’s Service Stars is a World War I book, and I am so curious to see how Johnson will handle it.

And by curious, I mean that I hope Georgina has ridiculous adventures being a nurse on the Western Front or something like that. In the Little Colonel books Johnston made a twelve-year-old a captain in the American army in the Philippines during the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, otherwise known as pretty much the worst war for a twelve-year-old to join the American army ever. Mostly he spends the books standing around silently. I think Johnson meant his silence to show how manly and stoic he was, but in fact I’m pretty sure he was just way too traumatized to speak ever again.

(The Little Colonel herself, I feel compelled to add, is not actually colonel of anything. Her nickname comes from the fact that she’s just as stubborn and temperamental as her grandfather, a crotchety Confederate colonel who lost an arm in the Civil War. They make friends when she hurls mud on his suit.)

3. I’ve also acquired a couple of Margaret Vandercook’s Red Cross Girls books, although sadly not the direct sequel to The Red Cross Girls on the French Firing Line, so probably I will still be unable to fulfill my desire to learn about the further adventures of Eugenia and the dashing young French captain Castaigne. Eugenia saved his life when they got stuck behind enemy lines together because of his dire wounds.

This book was like crack, crack for me. The hurt/comfort! The delirium! The scene where Eugenia hides Captain Castaigne under a pile of clothes when showing the German troopers through the house. (Captain Castaigne is kind of shrimpy. This is one of his many charms.)

They get rescued! He reveals that he is in love with her! She is all, “What you really feel is gratitude, you’ll get over it and realize you never really loved me, I totally love you but I will never never say it because I don’t believe you really love me back, because how could you when you are so awesome in every way and I am me?”

WILL THESE CRAZY KIDS WORK OUT THEIR FEELINGS? Of course they will, it is that kind of book. BUT I WANT TO SEE IT HAPPEN. I WANT THE GLORIOUS MOMENT WHEN EUGENIA REALIZES CAPTAIN CASTAIGNE’S FEELINGS ARE TRUE.

...Anyway. Vandercook also wrote series about the Camp Fire Girls, the Girl Scouts, and the Ranch Girls, all of which sound like things I need to check out. I can only hope her girl scouts are half as earnest as Heyliger’s boy scouts!