A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Perhaps surprisingly, given my lack of enthusiasm for Phyllis Ann Karr’s Frostflower and Thorn, I actually quite enjoyed Frostflower and Windbourne. I enjoyed Frostflower and Thorn’s established friendship and I liked the further fleshing out of the worldbuilding, which I had thought was rather thin in book one, but it came together elegantly here. I particularly liked the solution to the mystery ( spoilers )

I knew from the start that there are only two books in this series, but having finished the second one, I wonder if Karr didn’t originally plan to write more. The conclusion is satisfying, but it leaves a lot of open ends loose in a way that suggests she was planting hooks for a possible sequel.

I also read Elizabeth Goudge’s The Lost Angel, a set of short stories, some Christmas-themed. Uneven as short story collections are wont to be. My favorite was the title story, about a little boy who is supposed to play an angel in the Nativity play but escapes from dress rehearsal and wanders around London dressed as an angel.

And I read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s short story “Seth.” A homely and retiring young man arrives at a mine in Tennessee, hoping for employment, as the mine is owned by a native of his hometown. The handsome young mine owner indeed hires him, and Seth is in return devoted to him. Meanwhile, Bess the landlord’s sharp-tongued daughter seems softer on Seth than she has ever seemed to a young man before, so people tease her she’s sweet on him, to which she responds “Happen I am.”

( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve reached the tragic part in The Life of Charlotte Bronte, where everyone starts dying. First Branwell, and that’s tragic because he never accomplished anything and was in fact a misery to everyone who knew him for the last three years of his life. Then Emily, whose death is differently tragic, because Emily refuses to ask for help or even admit she’s sick till her dying day, when she finally acquiesces to see a doctor mere hours before she dies. And now Anne, who is willing to let Charlotte and the doctors try to help, but nonetheless is fading, fading…

What I Plan to Read Next

Contemplating which Rumer Godden book to read next. The ones I have easy access to are Four Dolls, The Dark Horse, and The River. I’m leaning toward Four Dolls because I usually like Godden’s children’s books better than her adult books, but then again there is In This House of Brede batting one thousand for the adult books... so I thought I’d see if anyone has a strong opinion about the other two.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last, another Newbery Honor book! I guessed that Anne Dempster Kyle’s Apprentice of Florence would be about an apprentice artist during the Renaissance, and I was mostly wrong. There is a secondary character who becomes an apprentice to Ghirlandiao! But our hero Neno is an apprentice to a silk merchant, who gets sent to manage the merchant’s affairs in Constantinople just in time to be on the scene when the city falls! Fortunately for Neno, Neno’s father once saved the Grand Vizier’s son from drowning (which is why the Grand Vizier freed Neno’s father from slavery, thus enabling him to return to Italy and father Neno), and now the Grand Vizier returns the favor by saving Neno.

When we first meet Neno, his father has been missing for years, and near the end of the book we discover it’s because he went on a voyage, got marooned by mutineers, and accidentally discovered America. After returning to Europe (crossing a portion of the Atlantic in a dugout canoe, which ruined his health), he dies in Neno’s arms, but not before telling Neno his story and presenting him with a disk bearing a feathered serpent as proof of its veracity. Neno tells Cosimo de Medici of this fantastic potential new trade route. Cosimo de Medici politely scoffs.

Also Mary Stolz’s A Wonderful, Terrible Time, a secondhand acquisition from my beloved Von’s. Best friends Mady and Sue Ellen are enjoying a quiet but happy summer in their relatively poor Black urban neighborhood, having tea parties with their dolls, stringing beads, visiting the local dime store and deciding what they’d buy if they had money. But then, by a wonderful chance, they have the opportunity to spend two weeks at a summer camp.

The book description puzzlingly does not mention the summer camp aspect, which seems like one of the main selling points of the book to me! Delightful summer camp descriptions. There is a three-legged raccoon who became the camp pet after being rescued from a trap who is an absolute delight. I also enjoyed the contrast between the two girls, who in some ways are more like sisters than best friends: constantly thrown together because they grew up in adjoining apartments, they love each other and enjoy playing together, but they are also radically different people. Dreamy, animal-loving Mady adores summer camp, while Sue Ellen can’t wait to get back home.

I enjoyed this book, but I don’t feel a need to keep it. Would another Mary Stolz fan like a crack at it? I’d be happy to pop it in the mail.

What I’m Reading Now

Not a lot of forward motion in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes this week. Otherwise, I think I’m actually only working on a few books right now? Two buddy reads, plus Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor, which I’ve almost finished. Oh, and I started Phyllis Ann Karr’s Frostflower and Thorn... will this become Book that Travels through the Dreamwidth Circle, a la At Amberleaf Fair?

What I Plan to Read Next

My hold on Ellis Peters’ Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Heart just came in at the library!

I am returned from Massachusetts! As I was busy visiting Louisa May Alcott’s house, eating lobster rolls, plundering the bookstore at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art etc., I didn’t do a whole lot of reading on the trip, but I thought I would go ahead and post about what reading I did.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Delighted to inform you that in Concord (at Barrow Books, a delightful bookshop) I did indeed find one of Jane Langton’s Hall Family Chronicles - moreover, one I’ve never gotten my hands on before, The Swing in the Summerhouse! Happily I informed the bookseller that I had just that morning recreated Georgie’s walk from her house (based on an actual ornate Victorian house in Concord, 148 Walden Street!) to Walden Pond, (actually I did it backward, starting at Walden Pond and working my way in), and she gave me $10 off the purchase price and also a cup of tea.

This series is so variable. As a kid I loved and reread over and over The Diamond in the Window and The Fledgling, and although I didn’t find The Fragile Flag till after college, I remember it very well. Yet twice I’ve read books in this series and then entirely forgotten them: The Time Bike and The Astonishing Stereoscope (the book I was so pleased to find a few weeks ago!) completely slipped out of my head.

I suspect that The Swing in the Summerhouse might fall into this category, although on the other hand I may remember it because of the unforgettable tale of its acquisition.

I also listened to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu on audiobook! I understand that the main pairing in this book is controversial, but as littlerhymes can attest, I started calling Ged “dungeon boyfriend” the moment he showed up in The Tombs of Atuan, so all in all I was delighted by this turn of events.

Last but assuredly not least! My long Dracula journey is over, as Dracula Daily has come to an end. (It turns out that the ending is a trifle anticlimactic when you stretch it out over a week, but IIRC I found the ending abrupt in high school too, so perhaps it’s just like that always.) I am pining slightly, but I’ve signed up for Whale Weekly (a three-year odyssey through Moby-Dick) AND regular installments of Sherlock Holmes in 2023, so perhaps those will fill the Dracula Daily hole in my heart.

What I’m Reading Now

skygiants gave me Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair, and I’ve gotten just a few chapters into it, so I’m still sorting out the quirkily elaborate worldbuilding. Our hero has just had a chat with a toy that he accidentally brought to life, an incident that seems to encapsulate the atmosphere of the book in miniature.

And at Commonwealth Books, genarti recommended Ruth Goodman’s The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything, one of those fascinating nonfiction books with a subtitle completely at odds with the book’s actual thesis! Goodman is in fact writing about the introduction of coal into homes in Elizabethan London, and her argument is that Londoners’ familiarity with coal as a domestic product helped kickstart the Industrial Revolution; coal did of course eventually reach the rest of England (and thence the world), but the part that changed everything is way before the Victorian era. I suppose the publishers couldn’t stand to put the word “Elizabethan” in the title of a book about coal.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve figured out how to get my paws on the final two books in the Hall Family Chronicles, The Mysterious Circus and The Dragon Tree, and I’ve decided I owe it to myself to finish up the series.

troisoiseaux kindly consented to join in my Arthurian quest by reading Phyllis Ann Karr’s The Idylls of the Queen with me (companion review over here), which turns out to be an amazing book to read in conjunction with T. H. White’s Once and Future King. In some ways the two books are doing the same thing, rewriting Malory as a modern novel while keeping the action basically the same, but they’re approaching that task from totally different angles.

Karr focuses on a single incident, when a knight dies from eating a poisoned apple at Queen Guenevere’s banquet, and the queen is accused of the murder. Kay, the seneschal, sets out ostensibly in hopes of finding Lancelot to fight as the queen’s champion, but actually in hopes of finding out who really poisoned the apples and therefore saving the queen himself.

Kay, you see, is madly in love with the queen, a choice that puzzled me at first, but actually I think it works really well: this love gives him a streak of idealism which leavens the biting, sardonic sarcasm with which he approaches almost everyone else, apparently on the theory that no one can reject you if you reject them first. He is, as he informs us with a warped sort of pride, the most churlish knight of the Round Table.

Because no one else wants to ride with Kay, he rides out on this quest with Mordred, ALSO one of the least-liked knights of the Round Table. Actually, insofar as he likes anyone (aside from his beloved queen, of course), Kay seems to like Mordred, and even to be sort of happy that they’re going on this quest together, even if Mordred DOES like to rile him up by suggesting the queen might be guilty, apparently for no better reason than Kay gets mad as a hornet every single time.

Mordred, as we discover, is acting out because it is prophesied that he will destroy Camelot, and he’s kind of sort of hoping that one of the other knights will kill him before he does. This shouldn’t be too hard, because the knights are very murdery! incredibly easily riled! just killing each other all the time! and yet they just won’t kill him.

Just as in Elizabeth Wein’s The Winter Prince, Mordred is described as having light hair, but unfortunately in both cases I am incapable of envisioning him with anything but shaggy dark emo hair that falls in his eyes in a perfectly cut slanting bang. He is also supposedly almost forty(!) and has a son (!!) but troisoiseaux and I agreed that it’s impossible to see him as older than about 27; he has SUCH strong Hamlet vibes.

In between The Winter Prince and Idylls of the Queen I have now developed Mordred feelings and I’m KIND of bitter about it, but what are you going to do? Anyway, he came along on this quest because he hoped that Kay thought Mordred had killed the queen and was therefore going to murder Mordred and thus save Camelot, and he’s most put out when Kay is like “What the fuck my dude, of course you didn’t poison the apple, you are the least unbearable of all of Arthur’s unbearable murdery knights.”

I suspect Karr is drawing the murdery knights directly from Malory and also suspect that it has a very different emotional valence there. In Idylls of the Queen you get the feeling that Kay’s sarcasm is a sort of defense mechanism against the fact that he’s living in the midst of a slow-moving atrocity: his king (who is also his foster brother and former best friend) killed a whole boat full of babies, his fellow knights are just murdering people all the time, and the murders just serve to further blood feuds that go on and on and on…

This could be unbearably depressing if you just looked at it straight on, but Kay’s bitterness holds it at a kind of remove, both for himself and the readers. When he describes the incident of the May Babies he’s actually funny: “Arthur had been bestowing his kingly body as generously as he could upon the ladies of his realm, to the point where he could not be sure how many lords’ children were really bastards of the high king,” he notes sardonically, and so when it is prophesied that one of these children born in May will destroy Camelot, he has to put all to lordly babies on a boat to drown.

It’s such an interesting contrast with The Once and Future King. White’s heroes are essentially the heroic characters in Malory, Arthur and Lancelot and Merlin, although sometimes it pains him to reconcile their heroism to incidents like the May Babies. (He just sort of skips over that incident till the final book, when he can no longer avoid it, and it clearly pains him that Arthur who he has so lovingly painted could do such a thing.)

Karr in contrast offers a jaundiced view of these heroes, especially Merlin, whom Kay sees as an evil mastermind undermining Camelot: otherwise why not tell Arthur that Morgause is his half-sister till after the incest, hmmmm? He also loathes Lancelot, but that’s at least three-quarters jealousy for Lancelot’s relationship with the queen, and the other quarter arises from jealousy for the fact that everyone else loves Lancelot too, not least Arthur, who used to like Kay best, not that anyone remembers that now. Not that Kay cares.

Kay insists that he doesn’t give a damn about anything except the queen (possibly because the queen is one of the few people in Camelot who is nice to him, churl or not), while in fact giving so many damns about so many things that he might actually die if he ever once allowed himself to consider just how much he cares, and how little he is cared about in return.