A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ben MacIntyre’s The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. I intended to get some other things done on Sunday, but instead I spent the afternoon reading this book and eating cookies and it was a good life choice. MacIntyre is one of those nonfiction writers with an irresistibly readable style, augmented in his case by an irresistibly readable choice of subject matter: spies!

In this book, MacIntyre is telling the story of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB man who became a spy for MI6 out of genuine ideological conversion (always a more interesting story than someone who becomes a spy for money, like Aldrich Ames, who becomes a subplot in this book because his story intersected with Gordievsky’s).

I was particularly fascinated by the internal KGB politics - in particular, by the way the whole agency became infected with the paranoid conviction that the US was going to launch a nuclear first strike any day now once the paranoiac-in-chief, Andropov (first leader of the KGB and then of the Soviet Union in general), became obsessed with the idea. It’s kind of hilarious - all these big tough guys quaking in their boots over literally nothing! - but also sort of sad, and perhaps Gordievsky’s greatest accomplishment was to convince Reagan and Thatcher that no, this wasn’t just bluster, the KGB truly feared a first strike, and both of them became less belligerent toward the USSR in response.

On a whim I read Sara Zarr and Tara Altebrando’s Roomies, because it was on a list of books about female friendship and I needed a new book on Overdrive. It’s a YA novel, structured around the emails that two future roommates exchange the summer before they go to college. I didn’t think it would have space to do all the plotlines justice: both girls have their best-friend-from-high-school plotlines, boyfriend plotlines, and family plotlines, and there’s the getting-to-know-your-potential-roommate plotline that ties them together - but actually I thought the book did most of them justice, although I wanted a little bit more from EB’s difficult relationship with her mom: it turns around a little too fast for me in the end.

And I finished the final Billabong book, Billabong Riders, and it feels like the end of an era: littlerhymes and I have been reading these books for over two years now. What shall we doooo now that it’s over? (Actually we’ve already discussed reading the Anne of Green Gables series next, so I think we shall be fine.)

In some ways it doesn’t feel like the last book in the series - there’s no big series-ending event (Norah’s already gotten married and had her first child, both of which books often use as convenient stopping points) and no particular push to get in at least a cameo appearance from all the best-beloved side characters. But on the other hand it is a very typical Billabong book, with all the old gang (plus Tommy) going off on a cattle-herding adventure, so in that way it’s a satisfying cap to the series.

What I’m Reading Now

Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons goes along at a fairly even domestic family memoir keel until you get to the part where Jackson writes about Bennington College - and then even the restraints of the genre can’t hold back her rage: fury positively smokes out of her as she writes about the life of the faculty wife and the adoring students who crowd around her husband.

What I Plan to Read Next

The newest Lisa See book, The Island of Sea Women! There are very few contemporary authors whose work I keep up with, but I do snap up new Lisa See books, because I like that she writes about women’s friendships and I have not yet given up hope that eventually she’ll write a book where the friends remain friends for the whole story.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The long voyage, with its comparative peace, was behind them: ahead was only war, and all that it might mean to the boys. The whole world suddenly centred round the boys. London was nothing; England, nothing, except for what it stood for; the heart of Empire. And the Empire had called the boys.

A quote from Mary Grant Bruce’s From Billabong to London. I don’t even believe in the Empire and this gave me goosebumps; I can only imagine the effect it must have had on readers in 1914 for whom the Empire seemed a great and glorious thing.

I also finished The Chestry Oak, which really was not that harrowing after all. Of course it’s not a walk in the park either - it is set during World War II - but Seredy skips over most of the really harrowing bits. In fact I was disappointed, which is really quite unfair of me given that I put off reading the book on account of the harrowing possibilities - but it does seem a bit like cheating to simply skip from Michael’s birth family to his adoptive family and leave out his year as a displaced child almost entirely.

And also The Motor Girls On Crystal Bay. The most exciting thing about the book was finding a long-forgotten piece of graph paper - left there no doubt by one of my ancestors - containing a string of nonsense words. What do they mean?

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Edna Ferber’s Great Son, which is going on tiresomely about spinsters - which is especially irritating as Ferber was a spinster herself. For goodness sake, Ferber, show some solidarity.

The book starts just before the beginning of World War II (and was written in 1945), and has already set up a quartet of Japanese characters (the family servants and their two children, who are studying at the University of Washington) and a German Jewish refugee girl who I’m pretty sure the son of the house has just fallen for - so I’m curious to see how that develops. Total trainwreck or actually pretty good? We’ll see!

What I Plan to Read Next

Two books arrived from evelyn_b! Ngaio Marsh’s Final Curtain and Death in a White Tie. My next day off will be dedicated to at least one of these beauties.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’ve finished another book from the Unread Book Club: Patricia Clapp’s Constance: A Story of Early Plymouth. On paper sounds like something I ought to like, a sort of Catherine, Called Birdy, but with Puritans, if you will.

But Constance lacks Catherine’s endearing prickliness and she spends a wearing amount of time gazing up at men through her lashes just to see them sputter and turn red. C’mon, Constance, if you’re going to flirt with someone for entertainment, at least pick someone who knows it’s a game.

What I’m Reading Now

littlerhymes sent me the next Billabong book, From Billabong to London! The Great War has begun, and because of Plot Contrivances not only Jim & Wally but also Norah and Mr. Linton will all be going to London. Hooray! I am excited to see England through their eyes.

It may not be for a while yet, though; I only just finished chapter three and they have not yet left Billabong, let alone Australia.

And I’m working on another Unread Book Club novel: G. Clifton Weaver’s Red Cap, which I’ve adopted as my new bedtime story, although it is becoming increasingly clear that it is a Horrors of War novel rather than a War Is an Adventure novel (children’s novels can go either way). This is not perhaps the best thing to go to sleep on. We shall see.

What I Plan to Read Next

Unread Book Club progress so far: I’ve read 28 books, and have ten left to go (including Red Cap. There are still five months left till the end of the year, so this seems quite doable!

I’m rather looking forward to Duncan Wall’s The Ordinary Acrobat: A Journey into the Wondrous World of the CIRCUS, Past and Present, which is a memoir of Wall’s own acrobat training as well as a circus history. If the memoir part doesn’t grow like kudzu and choke out the history, I think it should offer an interesting insider’s point of view.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I spent most of Monday afternoon sitting in my chaise in my sunny room, drinking a cup of tea as I read Charles Finch’s latest Charles Lenox book, The Inheritance, and this is just about the best use of an afternoon that I can think of. This series is a gift that keeps on giving: I love Charles Lenox and his ever-so-slowly expanding group of family and friends and their affection for each other and even the infodumps, God bless Finch’s enthusiasm for weird bits of historical trivia. Obviously what this book needed was a page-long digression about why American drive on the right while the British drive on the left.

This book also includes lengthy flashbacks of Lenox’s schooldays at Harrow during the early Victorian era. YESSSSSS, this is everything I never knew I wanted from a Charles Lenox book! (Also I love that Charles’ older brother Edmund was kind of obnoxious and full of himself when they were at Harrow together. People grow and change!)

Also: DALLINGTON D: D: D:

In other news, littlerhymes and I read Mary Grant Bruce’s A Little Bush Maid, the first book in the classic Australian Billabong series, which has all characteristic strengths of early twentieth century children’s fiction - breathless adventure! entertainingly unlikely coincidences! delicious food description! delightful landscape description! modern fiction could really stand to include more descriptive passages - and also the characteristic weaknesses, which is to say racism.

In this case, it’s not only racist but actually at the more racist end of the “how racist is this book?” spectrum of its time period, and the spectrum is pretty racist to begin with.

We’re still going to read the next book, though, just to see how many more ways our heroine Norah will save the day. In book one alone she saved a) an entire flock of sheep from a bushfire, b) a lion tamer from his lion, and c) a mysterious hermit from typhoid or typhus, I can never remember which is which. Is Norah the first Australian superheroine? Stay tuned to find out!

What I’m Reading Now

I’m allllmost done with Rob Dunn’s Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future, which is terrifically interesting in “World-wide famine indirectly caused by agribusiness is not an apocalyptic scenario I had previously considered” kind of way, although unfortunately not quite so interesting on a page by page level.

What I Plan to Read Next

I still need to read The Things They Carried.