A Certain Slant of Light

Merry Christmas! I thought I might break tradition and post Wednesday Reading Meme on Thursday on account of Christmas, but no, here I am.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves, which is not technically a Christmas book, but I feel that all Jeeves and Wooster stories are Christmas-adjacent in that they are very jolly.

Also Annie Fellows Johnston’s Miss Santa Claus of the Pullman, which is about two small children (Libby and William, seven and four) who are riding a Pullman car to be reunited with their father and meet their new stepmother… and while on the car, they meet a girl who they are convinced is Santa Claus’s daughter! She tells them a story that helps them bond into a real family. A sweet Christmas story.

And Sara Crewe; or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s original serialized story that she later expanded into A Little Princess. No Becky, no Lottie, a good deal less Ermengarde, but the bit about the starving beggar girl outside the bun shop to whom Sara gives five of her six buns is still the same, and the ending where the bun shop lady has adopted the beggar girl.

What I’m Reading Now

In The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte has just begun attending Roe Head school, where Mary Taylor just told her that she was very ugly which somehow cemented their friendship for life.

What I Plan to Read Next

Alas, I did NOT manage to read Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal in time for Christmas. However I have decided that I would rather read it relatively close to when I read The Appeal rather than wait for next Christmas, so as soon as it returns to the library I’ll check it out this winter.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A week of mildly disappointing reading. First, Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Ghosts of Rathburn Park, which is entertaining enough but doesn't really come together. There’s a big creepy house that we don’t spend nearly enough time exploring, a swamp that we cross but don’t explore at all, and a burnt-out church with a hut inside that gets a little bit of exploration but, again, not nearly enough. Also one of the ghosts is definitely not a ghost and the other ghost is only maybe a ghost, and I just feel that the ghost quotient in a book called The Ghosts of Rathburn Park should be higher.

Second, one of this year’s Newbery Honor books, Daniel Nayeri’s The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams. The Silk Road setting was fun, but unfortunately the book didn’t sell me on the idea that anyone would want to assassinate Samir, let alone want him assassinated so badly that they would hire half a dozen murderers of various nationalities simultaneously in order to give it a try. What a waste of capital, you know? At least wait for one to fail before you outlay the cash for another!

And finally (please don’t throw rocks at me), P. G. Wodehouse’s Mike and Psmith. I’ve been really enjoying the Jeeves and Wooster email readalong so I thought I’d give Psmith another go, and I do enjoy Psmith himself (in a “but I can see why people would like to slightly strange you” kind of way), but not the Mike and Psmith books as a whole. Maybe the problem is Mike? Sorry Mike. You just care about cricket too much, kid.

What I’m Reading Now

Houston, we have a Shirley! I don’t remember a whole lot about this book, but I did remember almost word for word the bit where Shirley Keeldar first meets Caroline Helstone and instantly - before even speaking to her - presents her with a nosegay, and “put her hands behind her, and stood bending slightly towards her guest, still regarding [Caroline], in the attitude and with something of the aspect of a grave but gallant little cavalier.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Traipsing onward through the Newbery books of 2024! I’d really like to read Mexikid next, and… it looks like it’s actually been turned back in, finally, after being checked out for about two months! So maybe indeed that will be next.

After my joyous experiences with Dracula Daily and Dickens Daily (an Advent-calendar style read-through of A Christmas Carol, in 2023 I signed up for a smorgasbord of email reading adventures: Whale Weekly (Moby-Dick), Divine Comedy Weekly, and Letters from Watson (the Sherlock Holmes short stories).

Whale Weekly and Divine Comedy Weekly both quickly fell by the wayside. As it turns out, I still dislike Moby-Dick just as much as I did in high school, and although I do still hope to read Dante’s Inferno someday, Longfellow’s translation is not the one I would pick. (The substack editor had to choose one in the public domain, of course, but on my own I would not be hampered by this restriction.)

But I did keep on trucking with Letters from Watson! Indeed, I even supplemented the short stories by reading the novels, as well. And although the project didn’t convert me to a fully-blown Sherlock Holmes fan, as I rather hoped it might, I did enjoy the stories, and also enjoyed experiencing them serially, just as the original audience would have experienced them as they came out in magazines. (I don’t think the emails followed the exact same divisions as the original serialization, but nonetheless the spirit of serialization was there.)

It was also interesting, on a sort of meta level, to realize that all the famous Sherlock Holmes stories are early stories, both in terms of internal chronology and publication date. Maybe Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a point when he killed Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls!

(Exeunt, pursued by enraged Sherlock Holmes fans bearing pitchforks.)

But no. Killing Sherlock Holmes in the 1890s would have done us out of the final bit of Sherlockiana with which Letters from Watson rounded out the year. Sherlock Holmes goes undercover (!) for two years (!!!) posing as an Irish-American spy, passing British secrets to a German spymaster (!!!!!!) only to blow the German’s entire spy operation on the eve of the Great War (!!!!!!!!! a thousand exclamation points!!!!!!). It’s just so… I don’t even know the word that I want… It’s like Jack Kirby inventing Captain America so that he can go punch Hitler in the face. Everything has gone terrible wrong, and isn’t it nice to pretend for a bit that Sherlock Holmes is on the case, and will help us sort everything out?

***

Even though the project didn’t convert me to a Holmes fan, I enjoyed reading the experience so much that I’ve signed up for two more such projects this year. Letters Regarding Jeeves includes the public domain Jeeves and Wooster stories, which shockingly I’ve never read! It starts officially on Valentine’s Day, although on New Year’s Day it sent out an early Reggie Pepper story, a forerunner of Bertie Wooster, so if you sign up do make sure to check that out.

The other is Letters from Bunny, a readalong of the Raffles short stories. I’ve read these, but years ago, so it’s a good time for a reread. This one starts on the Ides of March (“The Ides of March” being the title of the first Raffles story).

I am a little concerned that I may have bitten off more than I can chew in signing up for two of these, in the same year that I start a new job… but after all each email is quite short, and if one of them ends up falling by the wayside, what of it? I’ll keep going as long as it’s fun.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, which I thought was going to be all about horses and friendship and going to a school that is kind of like a year round summer camp - God, the book I thought it was going to be was so awesome, let me pause to mourn its nonexistence.

Okay. Pause over. Yonahlossee is in fact a train wreck. Our heroine Thea had disturbing love affairs in both the “adolescence in Florida” and “later adolescence at Yonahlossee” storylines.

In the flashbacks to her Floridian youth, she’s having a romance with her cousin. Cousin romances qua cousin romances don’t bother me - I love Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins books, where the basic plot is “Which of her cousins will Rose marry?”

But The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls has this dirty/bad/wrong Flowers in the Attic feeling to it, which I find unpleasant to the point of actually repulsive. No, really, Thea, it’s kind of gross that your cousin is feeling you up under the dining room table at Thanksgiving dinner. It would be gross even if he were a non-blood-related boyfriend, but the fact that he’s your cousin who was almost like your brother makes it even grosser.

And in the Yonahlossee portions, Thea boinks her married headmaster. I’m not sure if I find the “married” or the “headmaster” part more disturbing. Possibly they feed off each other for maximum disturbingness?

( But all this pales in comparison to the novel’s Theme )

Remind me never to read a mainstream novel with a blurb describing it as “sexy” ever again.

What I’m Reading Now

Psmith in the City! I decided that I needed something light to reward me for slogging through The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. And indeed, Psmith is delightful! I find the cricket bits completely incomprehensible, but that’s all right, they’re rather short and most of the book revolves around Psmith being hilarious. Thanks for the recommendation, surexit!

What I Plan to Read Next

Between The Language of Flowers and The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, I’ve lost most of my enthusiasm for the whole “grown-up books for grown-ups” project, but nonetheless I’m going to give it one last try with Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child. The main couple lives a bazillion miles from anyone, so unless there’s a super sexy werefox stalking the wilderness there is no way they can have any affairs.