A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Finished Reading

Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Tudor, which I ended up purchasing - in hardcover, no less! - because I enjoyed her book How to Be a Victorian so much. Again, full of fascinating (and potentially useful for writing) tidbits about everyday life in history; Goodman is particularly good at teasing out the way that practices that seem bizarre now actually worked: brushing your hair a hundred times a night with a natural bristle brush will keep your hair clean and shiny even if you never wash it, for instance.

She’s also good at taking apart the givens of modern thought, if you will, and showing how societies can be organized differently. She notes, for instance, that most modern people assume that reading and writing will be taught concurrently, but in Tudor times they were viewed as separate skills, so there were quite a lot of people who could read but nonetheless signed with a mark because writing classes were quite a bit more expensive than reading.

I also read Maud Hart Lovelace’s Emily of Deep Valley, which I enjoyed very much! It’s loosely connected to the Betsy-Tacy stories, but I think that was a marketing decision as much as anything, because that could easily be cut out; Emily is a few years younger than Betsy and Tacy and thus her social world is quite separate from theirs.

At the beginning of the book, Emily is graduating from high school; she would like very much to go to college, but she’s an orphan living with her kindly but increasingly frail grandfather, who needs her care, and can’t leave, and the book is about her finding a way to move forward and pursue her goals even though she is in a sense stuck.

I’ve been thinking about taking a trip to Minnesota this summer, partly to see my aunt and also partly to visit Maud Hart Lovelace’s house in Mankato, and this might be the book to buy while I’m there. And also perhaps a box set of the first four Betsy-Tacy books? Or maybe I should splurge for the whole set of ten...

I also finished Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Gypsy’s Cousin Joy. Following Joy’s mother’s death, Joy comes to live with Gypsy’s family; the two girls are initially at loggerheads, but slowly learn how to get along with each other and see each other’s good points. Lots of fun if you like mid-nineteenth century children’s books (I recognize this is perhaps an obscure taste) - somewhat moralistic but of course that comes with the territory. There are two more in the series, but Amazon doesn’t have them. :(

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Anne, from the list of Eight Classic Female Bildungromane You Should Know about If You Don’t Already. I’m enjoying Anne, I’m enjoying the immensely atmospheric island which used to be a fur-trading post, and has dwindled from its former glory (I am all about dwindling from former glory), and I already have grim forbodings (and not the good kind) about where the subplot with Anne’s little one-eight Chippewa, three-eighths French half-sister Tita.

Aside from Anne, whose loyalty to her half-sister is presented as a part of her charming naivete, pretty much everyone in the narrative muses grimly about Tita’s flaws: she’s small and dark and sly and self-dramatizing and (no one spells this out, but I’m conjecting) is undoubtedly going to either kill someone sneaky-like or possibly run off with a deeply unsuitable man before long. They all ascribe her manipulative secretiveness to her mixed-race heritage; I think it’s because ever since she was a wee babe literally every adult in her life has been murmuring that she’s doomed to go wrong. Why should she be open with them if they interpret everything she does in the worst way possible?

But we’ll see. Maybe the story will surprise me.

I’ve also been reading Peter Carlson’s Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, mostly because Carlson wrote K Blows Top, a hilarious yet poignant book about Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States. Roughneck isn’t quite in the same league (then again, what is?), but it’s an interesting exploration about the history of unionization in the United States, which previously I hadn’t known much about.

What I Plan to Read Next

In the Labyrinth of Drakes, the fourth of Marie Brennan’s Lady Trent books, is coming out! Or did come out yesterday, or something. Actually I probably won’t be reading it for a while, because I’ll be waiting till the library gets it, but I’m so excited about its existence that I had to mention it here!

Just read Peter Carlson's K Blows Top, about Khrushchev's visit to America in 1959. Best. Book. Ever!

Even the subtitle is full of awesome: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist. How could any book live up to that? So I opened it with trepidation -

Reader, the book is even better than its title.

You follow Khrushchev as he gambols through the States. He pets turkeys and mugging for the camera. He causes a riot in a supermarket, and drifts seraphically through the piles of fallen canned goods and crushed potato chips. He throws a temper tantrum during a speech in California because he had been denied entrance to Disneyland.

This is comedy gold, and Carlson milks it dry.

It's a terribly entertaining book - I kept promising myself I'd make dinner at the end of the next section, and yeah, dinner never happened - but also a thoughtful one: a compelling character study of Khrushchev, who contained irreconcilable multitudes.

There's Khrushchev, a ham with perfect comic timing who couldn't resist mugging for the press; and Khrushchev, a flesh-pressing politician; and Khrushchev, dictator with a flashpoint temper and a nuclear arsenal. Jovial, cruel, gleefullly irreverent, haunted by Stalin, pugnacious and insecure -

Carlson captures the hilarity, pathos, and terror of Khrushchev's overblown personality, and with space left over to provide delightful sketches of the people Khrushchev ran into on the way, too.

It's a fantastic book. I can't recommend it enough.