A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Paula Byrne’s Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, which I already wrote a bit about last week and which is very much of a piece with what I wrote. If you’re interested in either interwar Britain or Evelyn Waugh it’s interesting, but it’s probably not going to blow your mind. (It did give me a vague yen to read Waugh’s book Put Out More Flags so that’s something.)

And...that’s it. I haven’t gotten much reading done this week. :(

What I’m Reading Now

A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which is interesting but slow. The writing style is very dense, so it takes me a long time to read, although so far it’s been worth it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have Barbara Hambly’s Crimson Angel! I’m pretty excited about that.

And I’ve also gotten my paws on a copy of Isabella Holland’s Trelawny, which IIRC was one of the books that spawned Modern Gothic, so it should be an interesting read.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, with which I was ultimately quite disenchanted. I felt (as I felt when I watched the movie) that the ending is simultaneously too neat - all the young characters carefully paired up - but also leaves the old lady out: even if she didn’t find love, I wanted her to reconnect with her old friend Kate Lumley, or find a son who was thought long ago lost at sea, or something.

Also Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen, which starts each chapter with some object from Austen’s life or her fiction - a family silhouette portrait or a cashmere shawl - and from there ranges out over some aspect of Austen’s life and English society. It reminds me Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun, although Byrne lacks Ulrich’s virtuoso ability to start with a basket and end up encompassing the entire history of colonial America without ever losing sight of the basket weaver: Byrne is apt to get a bit lost along the way.

But nonetheless I enjoyed the book very much, because I’m very partial to the method. I have an idea for a book based around an advent calendar, where the object in the advent calendar becomes the nucleus for the chapter each day… I’m not sure quite how to write it; I think the danger (even more than the danger for most Christmas books) would be that it would become too obvious or twee.

I also read Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, which I found even more engrossing than I expected, and as it’s three things I enjoy very much (a childhood memoir, about a childhood spent among an unusually intense religious sect, set in the Victorian era), I expected to find it pretty engrossing in the first place.

Gosse was the only son of two devout members of the strictly Calvinist Plymouth Brethren sect. His mother wrote exceedingly popular religious pamphlets and his father was a naturalist, and a quite highly regarded one until The Origin of Species came out and the elder Goss rejected it decisively. The younger Gosse is at his best describing this incident: he’s sympathetic to the titanic difficulty this presented his father, who hitherto saw no conflict between his work as a naturalist and his faith in a literal reading of the Bible, and does an excellent job delineating the turn of mind that led his father to ultimately cast his lot with Genesis rather than Darwin.

I would have liked a bit more detail about what the Plymouth Brethren believed, but I suspect that Gosse’s audience when the book was first published in 1907 would have been able to reconstruct a fairly accurate picture based on his allusions, so I can’t really hold that against him.

What I’m Reading Now

Marie Brennan’s The Tropic of Serpents, which alas strikes me as almost as slow to get started as A Natural History of Dragons. However, I very much enjoyed A Natural History of Dragons by the end, so hopefully I’ll have the same experience with The Tropic of Serpents.

What I Plan to Read Next

J. B. Priestly’s The Good Companions, once the library has fetched it for me through the magic of interlibrary loan. Interlibrary loan, where have you been all my life? I think we should consider a torrid affair.