A Certain Slant of Light

What I've Just Finished Reading

Mary Stewart's Rose Cottage, which I enjoyed very much. It's a sweet, gentle book, set in a charming English village in 1947; World War II is a shadow in the background, but everyone is moving on. A good comfort read.

I also finished Sarah Rees Brennan's Unmade (FINALLY). This book is kind of a mess, starting with the fact that the heroine is magically bound to a guy, and they can exchange thoughts and emotions and it is, we are told, intrusive and unpleasant. So intrusive that the only time he ever intrudes on the narrative is when we're being told that the mind-bond is intrusive. Otherwise he disappears for chapters at a time, to the extent that I was always vaguely surprised when he popped up again.

The other characters are a bit more well-realized - I'm particularly partial to Kami's friend Angela - but a lot of that is holdover from the first book, which seemed much more solid. In fact, I think the first book in The Demon's Lexicon trilogy is the strongest, too.

I think Brennan would write more solid books generally focused instead on slice of life stuff, maybe with some magical realism as garnish. What she's really interested in and best at is the relationships between the characters and fun magical visuals, like the Goblin Market in The Demon's Lexicon. Her epic magical conflicts, in contrast, never feel quite real.

What I'm Reading Now

Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia.

What I Plan to Read Next

Some more Mary Stewart, probably. The library has The Ivy Tree and The Stormy Petrel. Oh! And I got Eva Ibbotson's Madensky Square for my birthday.

I also have a bunch more gulag books that I've been planning to read, so I'll probably dip into those soon.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Who has two thumbs and has finished reading The Gulag Archipelago? That's right, me! I think that most of the meat of the trilogy is contained within the first volume - not that the second and third books aren't worth reading, because they are, but they are in a sense supplemental material to Solzhenitsyn's thesis, which he expounds in volume one, "that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil."

And therefore any and all attempts to clean or perfect humanity by killing the portion of it that you deem evil are not only evil in themselves, but useless at the outset. If you want to kill the evil portion of humanity, then you'd have to kill all humans.

There is this one quote, though, from the third volume, which I've been turning over like a stone in my hand - about forgiveness. It's a long one, so ( behind the cut: )

I also read Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which I really enjoyed. It's a series of case studies about unusual neurological disorders that have come through Sacks' office over the years, some of which are a bit nightmarish (I suspect which cases one finds most upsetting will change from person to person; the one about the woman who lost her proprioception, her sense of her own body - who now feels literally disembodied, like a ghost - really got to me), but all of which are thought-provoking. Some of his terminology is a bit dated - the book was published in 1984; I don't believe anyone uses "moron" as a diagnostic term anymore - but Sacks is nonetheless a thoughtful, compassionate writer.

I also finished Annie Jacobsen's Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, which is a book that is interesting more for its subject matter than for its treatment of it. Jacobsen lays out a convincing case that the US Department of Defense willfully turned a blind eye to the Nazi pasts of many German scientists it brought to the US - up to and including scientists who committed human experimentation at concentration camps - but somehow all the details slipped through my mind like water through a sieve. The subject is clearly worth exploring, but I can't quite recommend this particular book.

In less heavy (both in size and in subject matter) reading material, I read the latest Penderwick book, The Penderwicks in Spring, which I enjoyed but not as much as the earlier books in the series.

What I'm Reading Now

I've returned to Sarah Rees Brennan's Unmade. I am determined to finish this book, but my progress is dragging because of two seemingly contradictory reasons. First, because I've heard that a character (I don't know which character, but apparently someone everyone likes, because all the reviews I've seen were annoyed) is going to die; and secondly, because the supposedly wicked murderous sorcerer now in charge of Sorry-in-the-Vale has failed to kill any of the characters we like, which makes it hard to take his wicked murderousness seriously.

Possibly when I get to the death, that will make him seem like a slightly more formidable antagonist, but so many characters have escaped certain death already, I suspect that it's going to make the authorial intervention when someone finally bites the dust seem very obvious. You've taken care of everyone else so far, so why didn't so-and-so deserve your protection too, Brennan?

What I Plan to Read Next

Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia.