A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

We Get It: Voices of Grieving College Students and Young Adults, a collection of personal essays about the experience of grief as a college student edited by Heather L. Servaty-Seib and David C. Fajgenbaum. This is for work, obviously. I was struck by how many students wrote, unprompted, about how absolutely agonizing it was to go away to school while a parent was dying - how bad they felt for abandoning their family in this hour of need, even though the parent usually adamantly insisted on their going.

And of course the parents are acting out of love, because this is what they’ve been told is the right thing to tell their children, not to let even a family tragedy interfere with their education. But my main takeaway is this is basically a diseased cultural message: that, in fact, our closest personal relationships are more important than education or career, and we would be a better society if we encouraged people to prioritize their family tragedy, as so many of these students reported that they yearned to do. Transfer to a school closer to home! Hell, take a semester off! College will still be there, and your dying loved one won’t.

I also finished Jill Benton’s Naomi Mitchison: A Biography, on which genarti and skygiants have called dibs, although if any other Mitchison fans want a crack on it, they might be amenable to negotiations. The author lived in Mitchison’s flat for a few months while completing her dissertation on The Corn King and the Spring Queen, and Mitchison returned the favor with a month-long visit to the author in southern California a few years later. The book really is much more a biography than a memoir, but I found the author’s personal memories of Mitchison often the most interesting parts.

What I’m Reading Now

Still Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which is a hoot. “I mean I always seem to think that when a girl really enjoys being with a gentleman, it puts her to quite a disadvantage and no real good can come of it,” sighs Lorelei, tragically aware that handsome young men rarely have the money to buy you a diamond tiara, and even if they did, it’s harder to maneuver them into actually laying out the cash if you actually give a damn about them. She’s always scolding her friend Dorothy for getting involved with men who have nothing going for them but good looks, charm, and scintillating conversation!

What I Plan to Read Next

I don’t quite know. Susan Fletcher’s Journey of the Pale Bear, perhaps?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Chronicles of Robin Hood. This was Sutcliff’s first published book, so she hasn’t fully developed her characteristic style yet (although you will be glad to hear that at one point Little John looks at Robin Hood like a faithful hound!), but this is nonetheless a cracking good read. Very pacy! Lots of Robin Hood stories that I wasn’t previously familiar with! I’ve never delved as deep into the Robin Hood mythology as King Arthur, but both story cycles seem to have stories on stories on stories.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun reading a Naomi Mitchison biography, and also reading Mitchison’s 1920s collection of short stories, When the Bough Breaks, which is mostly stories set around Vercingetorix’s Gaulish rebellion against Rome. All very good; the one that sticks with me right now is the story of a Greek artist who went to sketch Vercingetorix for a coin after Vercingetorix had been years in prison (I guess Rome was striking memorial coins for the Triumph in which Vercingetorix was to be killed?), and just, you know, as a member of one conquered people to another, and their very different relationships with Rome…

I’ve been talking to skygiants and genarti a bit about Mitchison and Sutcliff and Mary Renault as a cluster of writers who are all in different ways concerned with slavery and Empire (Renault more in her historical novels than her contemporaries, of course), and Megan Whalen Turner as perhaps the chief modern exponent of this tradition. There’d be a good Ph.D. thesis in it for someone, maybe.

What I Plan to Read Next

Lisa See’s Lady Tan’s Circle of Women. I’ve been meaning to read this since it came out, and it is at last time!

I have been away these last few days on a camping trip to the Indiana Dunes with my father, during which it rained a good deal, so much reading has occurred!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

W. E. Johns’s Biggles of 266, a set of short stories set in World War I. My favorite was the story where Biggles realizes that the higher-ups have sent them no turkey Christmas dinner, and decides that the obvious thing to do is to fly behind enemy lines and steal a turkey. This just seems peak Biggles.

Also E. W. Hornung’s Witching Hill, a series of interconnected short stories about odd happenings on the housing estate of Witching Hill! Our narrator Gillon works at the estate office; he befriends (or perhaps rather is befriended by) one of the tenants, Uvo Delavoye, a young man of lively imagination who believes or at least pretends to believe that his wicked ancestor, who once owned all the lands around, now haunts the residents and presses them to live out his own debaucheries.

Gillon is in the unenviable position of skeptic who refuses to believe Uvo’s theories even after the elderly spinster sister of the vicar somehow writes a story that reproduces exactly the wicked ancestor’s abduction of a virtuous milliner, despite never having heard the tale in her life. I might have become a bit less skeptical then! But nonetheless these are pleasant entertaining stories. Uvo and Gillon are not shippable like Raffles and Bunny but I did enjoy that the book ends with the two of them going away on holiday together, Uvo’s brief flirtation with heterosexuality routed (and perhaps only inspired by the Wicked Ancestor anyway).

Also Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light, which I was looking forward to and then didn’t really enjoy. I think (perhaps led astray by the title) that I was expecting a lighter fantasy than it turned out to be, but fairly early on in the book our heroine Halla rushes out to protect her dragon guardian from a horde of evil heroes (Halla always uses the word “hero” as a negative descriptor: a nice touch), only to be summarily defeated and tied to a post by a hero who clearly intends to rape her, only she’s saved just in the nick of time by a dragon…

I mean I do enjoy the hero/dragon reversal. I just went into it expecting something light enough to have no attempted rape at all, whereas actually the book is a downbeat musing on the evils of empire and the unfortunate tendency of men to become dragonish and horde their gold.

Finally, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore. In which young Arren falls in love with the Archmage Ged (literally this is how it is described) and follows him to the ends of Earthsea to discover the source of the malaise that is stealing the wizards’ spells and the singers’ songs and the dragons’ speech! Delightful. Still not Tenar though.

What I’m Reading Now

In D. K. Broster’s The Wounded Name, I’ve just finished the part where Aymar tells Laurent about the misadventure that ended with Aymar branded a traitor. Even though I went into this knowing the basic details about what happened (after Aymar’s men were routed in a battle, Aymar was somehow branded the traitor who gave away their position to the enemy), it was surprisingly painful to read about poor Aymar rushing as fast as he could to try to warn his men… I knew already that he would be too late! Yet even so I hoped against hope that he might make it just in time.

In Dracula, we are in the lull before the storm. Our intrepid heroes have set out to Varna in hopes of vanquishing their foe, and we will perhaps hear naught of them until they arrive!

What I Plan to Read Next

Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood. I meant to read this on my trip (where better to read it than in the wood, am I right?) but somehow failed to actually fully download it. Well, this error has been CORRECTED, and I stand prepared to read this book during the appropriate autumn season!

Naomi Mitchison’s To the Chapel Perilous is a delightful and extremely odd book. Our heroes are Lienor Blanchmains and Dalyn, correspondents from the Camelot Chronicle and the Northern Pict respectively. (Do they fall in love? Yes. Did I like it? Surprisingly, yes!) Though they come from rival papers, they have both been assigned to cover the Grail quest… which, at the beginning of the book, is just coming to its end, as knight after knight emerges from the Chapel Perilous with grails in their hands.

What makes the book so odd and interesting is that it’s not an Arthurian modern AU. There are modern elements, chiefly the newspapers - Lienor in particular is a hardboiled newsgirl straight out of a 1930s movie and I love her. (So is her boss, Ygraine. I love all their chats.) But Lienor’s photographer is a dwarf , and Dalyn’s is a “Chad” which is referred to as if it’s a mythological creature I ought to know (possibly I should! I am not as up on my Arthuriana as I should be). Between the current slang meaning and the descriptions of the Chad oozing, I ended up envisioning a dudebro who degenerates into a sort of floating jellyfish creature somewhere around the waist, which was VERY entertaining.

Sometimes they travel the old-fashioned way, by horse, which takes weeks; but there’s also the option of the “Low Road,” a magical way that will get you where you’re going much faster. And the knights, of course, are straight out of legend, wearing armor and waving swords and worrying over the crop yields on their demesne.

Okay, Sir Bors is worrying about his crop yields. Sir Lancelot is too busy pining for Guinevere to worry about any such earthly thing. Lienor SUPER ships it, which is endearing, and made me care about Lancelot and Guinevere for probably the first time in my entire life. She loves them both so much! And she loves their love story! And she’s so crushed when the Queen is cross with her because she doesn’t like Lienor’s coverage of Lancelot’s Grail, even though Lienor told the story as well as she could and it all got chewed up by the subs… who are some other kind of unearthly magical creature and may literally chew on stories.

(I sometimes wished for more detailed description of the magical creatures in this world but it does make a more numinous and ominous atmosphere if all you know is that the subs who edit/censor the stories were maybe human once?? But now are… something else.)

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here about the distinction between “what the reporters see” and “what the reporters can actually report given the political slant of their newspapers” and “what the newspapers will then cherrypick from their reports to actually print.” And it was interesting, too, to see Lienor and Dalyn’s attitude toward this change: at the beginning they accept it, not exactly cheerfully but with resignation, as the price of playing the game, and actually seem to regard it as an interesting challenge to see how well they can game the system.

I strongly suspect that there’s a lot of interesting stuff about Arthuriana, too, but as above-mentioned I am not deeply embedded in the Arthurian mythos, so I know a lot of it flew right over my head. (Embarrassing but true: I still get all the G knights confused. Gareth, Galahad, Gaheris… I can tell Gawain apart because of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is not one of the stories Mitchison is remixing here, but at least it means I know which one he is.) skygiants wrote an excellent review that deals with this side of the story in more depth.

Overall an excellent, odd, thought-provoking book. Definitely planning to read more Mitchison.