A Certain Slant of Light

What I Just Finished Reading

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which I nearly gave up on twice because November was not a great month for reading a harrowing book about wartime, death, dark humor and hopeless moral quandaries, but I persevered and I’m glad I did. It’s well-written and thought-provoking (and emotion-provoking) book, and worth reading.

Also, now that I’ve read it I never have to read it again. Also a good feeling.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m allllllmost done with Pamela Dean’s The Whim of the Dragon, the final book in the Secret Country trilogy. I really wanted to finish it last night, but there is only so much Pamela Dean I can read at once before my brain becomes saturated and ceases to take in any more information, so I didn’t. But maybe today!

I intend to do a longer post about the trilogy once I’m done reading. Has anyone else read these books?

I’m also reading a couple of books from Netgalley. One is about Canadian cuisine, about which more anon, although I wish to note right now that doughnuts are at least as American as they are Canadian, I am just saying, they are so American that we sometimes use them as hamburger buns like the culinary monsters that we are.

The other one is a book about DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy), which I picked up because one of my friends has been thinking about trying it out. I wanted to be supportive and also I wanted to know the difference between DBT and CBT, because they seemed (from reading the Wikipedia page) pretty similar except that it’s a hell of a lot harder to find a DBT practitioner.

I’m halfway through the book, and philosophically they do seem pretty similar. My impression is that the main difference is that the difference is that DBT is a more back-to-the-basics version of CBT - that it assumes a lower starting level of emotional skills. It’s like CBT is an emotional high school equivalency degree, whereas DBT is like, “Okay, we’ll go back to the alphabet if that’s what you need.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Pam Munoz Ryan’s Echo, which is the last of the 2016 Newbery Honor books, and which will I think conclude all of the reading that I planned to get done this year. Possibly I set myself a few too many reading goals this year? But then I don’t regret any of them, so maybe not.

In lieu of the Wednesday reading meme (because I accomplished basically no reading this past week, except a reread of Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary), I'm going to answer lycoris's December meme question: Tell me about your favourite book that you think I might not have heard of.

I actually have a tag that is partially devoted to this question: one of the things I used the 100 books tag for is to write reviews of tragically overlooked books that no one else knows even though I love them. Past reviews in this category include The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, Nekomah Creek, Mummy, and Becoming Rosemary.

But this time I'm going to write about Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, because I did just reread it and because I think it's an absolute tragedy that I didn't hear about it to read it earlier. I don't know that I would have loved it more - I don't think it's a book you need to read at a certain age to love - but I would have loved having it as part of the leafmold of my mind when I was a teenager.

What I love about this book - one of the things I love about this book - is that it's so wide-ranging in its interests. The main characters talk about science and religion (and how science and religion fit together, or don't), feminism, philosophy, vocations, the meaning of friendship and the permutations of friendship, and the way that families work or don't work, and books and literature. This takes up a huge amount of the book: it's all urgently important to Gentian and her friends, and therefore provides the main plot of the book.

For instance, there are couple sections where the narrative absolutely stops while Gentian reads an act of Julius Caesar with her family. I feel like this is doing some sort of thematic work, the way that the Hamlet performance does thematic work in Dean's Tam Lin, but I'm not sure what it is and it's possible that Dean was just like "I feel like talking about Shakespeare."

This is not, suffice it to say, a book with a strongly propulsive plot. In fact, calling the story meandering doesn't really do justice to the way that their conversations loop back on themselves, covering the same ground from different angles, and then shooting off in new and strange directions.

I have heard Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary criticized because Gentian and her friends seem unrealistically precocious, and there is perhaps something to this - they're not only very bright, but also extraordinarily well read and capable of having precise and philosophically sophisticated arguments - but IMO it misses the point. That's not something that would have bothered me if I had read the book as a teenager, any more than it bothered me in Tamora Pierce's First Test that fifteen-year-old Neal apparently found a bunch of ten-year-olds completely suitable companions.

The other problem with the book is that the ending doesn't really come together (I wrote about this at greater length in my original review); endings don't generally seem to be Dean's strong suit - Tam Lin's ending seemed quite abrupt to me. But the book is a dialogue as much as a novel; it's interesting because of the explorations it takes through issues, and those explorations are not discounted because none of them tie up nicely at the end.

***

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary has also led to some musing on my part about friendship novels - that is, novels where the friendship is the force that pushes the narrative, the way a romance pushes a romance novel, rather than novels where the friendship is important but the actual plot comes from something else (like The Eagle of the Ninth, say, where Marcus and Esca's friendship is absolutely integral but the story comes from the search for the eagle).

I think it's rather hard to structure a book around a friendship, because unlike a romance,
a friendship doesn't usually have an arc: there isn't a moment of consummation. It chugs along steadily unless things go south, and even the going south is often not dramatic. Drift kills friendship as much as anything else.

Perhaps having a non-standard structure is an important part of telling friendship stories? Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling, my touchstone book about friendship, also has a distinctive structure. I must think about this.

I've finished Pamela Dean’s Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, which I loved loved loved even though it went off at the end. Possibly this is just something Dean’s books do? I thought Tam Lin ended quite abruptly too, although not quite as much as Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary.

But it’s not the kind of unsatisfying ending that spoils everything that came before. It doesn't retroactively invalidate Gentian's lovely friend group or her interesting family or anything else that happens in the book; it's just not very conclusive.

If anything, it’s unsatisfying because I wanted more. What’s going to happen to Gentian ( Spoilers )

I wanted at least another chapter - not least because then we would get to see Gentian’s friends again, and I wanted to spend as much time with the lot of them as possible. We do get another lovely sonnet from her best friend Becky, but I wanted more.

But in a way, that wanting more is a recommendation in itself: the book is such a pleasure to read, the characters such a pleasure to interact with, that I never wanted it to end. Despite the conclusion or lack thereof, I highly, highly recommend Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Barbara Hambly’s Fever Season, the second of the Benjamin January books.

What I’m Reading Now

Lots of things! Notably Pamela Dean’s Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, which I’m loving so far. I like Gentian and her passion for astronomy; I like her group of friends, who are all good at different things but support each other in their goals and push each other to be better. They are possibly the first group in the history of fiction to have even a passing resemblance to my high school friends.

One of the things Dean is really good at, I think, is showing all the permutations of friendship. The friends you madly adore, the friends you adore but find exasperating, the friends you would never have sought out on your own but have grown to love as a part of the friend group, and the people in the friend group that you tolerate because everyone else seems to like them.

So far my feeling is that Dominic is super creepy. Also possibly an automaton. I know Dean likes quotes, but so far Dominic talks in nothing but quotes. It’s like he inputs the things other people say, processes the key words through a database of literary quotations, and spits out a couple lines of poetry that are vaguely related.

I’m also reading Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Cracks in the Kingdom, which I feel dubious about at present. However, I felt dubious about the first hundred pages or so of A Corner of White, too, so hopefully The Cracks in the Kingdom will pull together in the end in the same manner.

I’m nearly done with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. I have the strong impression that Sewell read Uncle Tom’s Cabin fifteen times, then said, “I want to write something like this, BUT FOR HORSES.” They have the compulsively readable quality, despite being about as subtle as jackhammers. Sewell hasn’t managed to make me cry yet, but perhaps she’s saving the tear-wringing scenes at the knacker’s for the end of the book.

And finally Frances M. Wood’s When Molly Was a Harvey Girl. I will forever grieve the fact that Wood’s writing career never really took off, because When Molly Was a Harvey Girl shows that Becoming Rosemary was not a fluke. I like Wood’s heroines, in all their stubborn and occasionally bratty glory; I like their older sisters, with their various but always vibrant personalities; and I like Wood’s light hand with historical fiction.

What I Plan to Read Next

Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor. Also, Eva Ibbotson’s A Countess Below Stairs has finally (finally!) come in at the library, so at last I’ll get to read it.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Flora’s Fury, the third (and most recent, although likely not the last) Flora Segunda book. This book is charming in much the way the first two books were charming, but I do feel that in a series books ought to build on each other, and that in this case, that’s not really happening. I’ll probably still read the fourth book when it comes out, though.

Also, Bianca Turetsky’s The Time-Traveling Fashionista on Board the Titanic and The Time-Traveling Fashionista at the Palace of Marie Antoinette, because the covers are lovely and eye-catching and the books are shot through with illustrations of the same style. These are immensely, immensely fluffy reads: our heroine, Louise, travels back in time through the power of vintage clothes and has brisk and amusing adventures. Sometimes you just need something totally fluffy to read.

What I’m Reading Now

Still Ben Hur. This book is infinitely long, you guys. The movie is four hours long, and they still cut out tons of stuff, like the part where Ben Hur trains an army in Galilee and then follows Jesus around with it in order to be on hand when Jesus starts revolting against the Romans. Ben Hur is clearly destined for disappointment.

Also Tam Lin. The end is nigh! I'm getting the impression that Thomas knows all about his impending sacrifice to the lords of fairy and is casting about for a girlfriend to accidentally-on-purpose impregnate, which seems like a skeevy plan. Although I guess he couldn't just explain about the "sacrifice to the lords of fairy" thing, because who would believe him?

What I Plan to Read Next

Kate diCamillo’s Flora and Ulysses, the 2014 Newbery award winner.

And probably The Time-Traveling Fashionista and Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile. If only to discover how Louise got her hands on one of Cleopatra’s dresses! (I’m hoping for museum heist.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ysabeau S. Wilce’s Flora Segunda, which is a bit messy in both its plot and its worldbuilding, but worth it because of Flora’s voice. Flora is on the eve of her Catorcena, which she is dreading because, in between taking care of her giant magical house and her father, who was driven insane by his stint as a POW in the Huitzil empire, she doesn’t have her dress or her speech or her tamales ready, but even more so because after her Catorcena Flora, like all members of the Fyrdraaca clan since time immemorial, will have to join the army.

Flora’s mother, who is the general of the Califan army and also responsible for banishing the magical butler who ought to be taking care of the giant magical house, is very strict about this. But what Flora really wants to do is be a Ranger: a scout and a spy. And when she hears that one of the last Rangers has been captured and is slated to be executed, she decides it's up to her to save him...

What I’m Reading Now

Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is indeed better than her book Agnes Grey (I will never get over Agnes’s complaint that she wasn’t allowed to beat her charges as they clearly deserved). But there’s a reason why her sister Charlotte is better remembered.

Also Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, which I’m listening to on CD. I tried to read this once before and bombed out, but it turns out that it works way better when you hear it read aloud. I am now envisioning nineteenth century families gathering around the kerosene lamp, Ma knitting, Pa whittling, and the younger children gazing into the lamp flame as the oldest sister reads to the whole family.

Oh, oh! And I’ve picked up Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin again: I’ve gotten to the chapter where Thomas is all “Hamlet is alien and alone and nobody understands him! And when I say Hamlet, I mean me,” and his buddy is like, “But he has Horatio! By whom I mean me.” Janet, who does not yet realize that Thomas is her romantic endgame, is not yet fretting about her possible Ophelian tendencies.

What I Plan to Read Next

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