A Certain Slant of Light

I finished Eleanor and Park, which I really liked right up until the ending, which I really, really hated. ( Spoilers )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Mary Downing Hahn’s Stepping on the Cracks, and ultimately I did mellow about Elizabeth, The Meanest Best Friend Ever, although I’m not sure if it’s because Elizabeth grew as a person or because Hahn didn’t actually intend her to be that mean in the first place and didn’t quite notice she’d written her that way. But in the end I think Hahn’s ghost stories are better: Wait Till Helen Comes still haunts me.

I also mellowed on Kathleen Norris as I went along in The Cloister Walk, not least because she has a few good and thoughtful chapters about the virgin martyrs, whom no one ever properly appreciates even though they are the most badass saints.

I think the idea that they’re dying for their virginity trips people up (and “it’s better to die than be raped” is certainly the spin the patriarchy often gives their stories), but there’s more to them than that: they’re not dying just for virginity or even just for bodily autonomy but for autonomy, full stop, for the right to live their lives according to their own beliefs rather than bowing to the rules of society. The virgin martyrs are the ultimate nonconformists. They’re suppose to get married and have children whom they will raise to die for the glory of Rome, and they say, “Nah, fuck that.”

Like action heroes cracking wise as the bad guys beat them up, the virgin martyrs remain smart and sarcastic right up until they get their their heads cut off - and sometimes even decapitation doesn’t stop them. In fact, in a wider sense decapitation never stops them, because the virgin martyrs always win the ultimate victory both in the sense that they ascend to heaven and because their torments generally win dozens of converts within the story itself.

In fact, sometimes they convert the first bad guy, who is duly martyred too by the next round of bad guys.

But also sometimes the virgin martyrs just keep talking post-beheading. As a true badass does.

However, I still found Norris tiresome whenever she started talking about poetry. There’s something about the way she talks about the importance and majesty of poetry and the sacred calling of the poet that reminds me of Plato’s decision to have his perfect republic ruled by philosophers, just like him. Yes, of course people just like you are the most important and also the most intelligent and spiritually evolved people in society. Of course.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m listening to Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park on audiobook and YOU GUYS, why did I deprive myself of this book for so many years? It’s been on my reading list forever! And it’s so good! And I only just now got to it! But on the other hand this means that I have cleverly saved myself a treat to help ease myself into my new job, so that was awfully nice of past me, now wasn’t it.

I’m also reading Aunt Dimity and the Duke, which like all Aunt Dimity books is delicious popcorn (possibly I should substitute something more British for popcorn. It’s a delicious chocolate-dipped digestive biscuit?), and also What Katy Did Next, in which Katy Carr of What Katy Did fame goes to Europe. It’s a bit too much of a travelogue for my tastes but we’ll see where it goes.

What I Plan to Read Next

carmarthen sent me Rosemary Sutcliff’s Simon! I AM PRETTY EXCITED.

I finished Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, which I very much enjoyed! It starts off a bit slowly - not in that it’s boring; it’s interesting all the way through, but in that the plot slowly gathers propulsive force until it takes off about halfway through (I think about the time that Simon goes to Baz’s house for Christmas), and I was reading along and reading along and the big confrontation was coming AND THEN I HAD TO GO TO WORK NOOOOOOOOO. I wanted so much to finish that I almost convinced myself to go in late, but I couldn’t quite manage it.

Anyway, I liked the book a lot. I’m particularly partial to the world-building - and I think upon reflection that it is mostly criticisms of Harry Potter’s world-building that Carry On is building on, not specifically criticisms of the seventh book; it’s just that I saw many of these criticisms after book seven came out, I think because the release of the final book made it clear that, say, the Problem of Slytherin was not going to be addressed in the text.

I think it’s doing something different with it’s world-building than Harry Potter is, so it’s not quite fair to say one is better than the other. Rather, they’re going to appeal to different people (or to the same people but for different reasons; I love the first few Harry Potter books, after all).

Harry Potter is much heavier on whimsy and sense of wonder: the magical world is clearly very dangerous, but it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone wanting to opt out on that basis, because the magical world is just so awesome and the danger, generally speaking, feels like boys’ own adventure danger: more exciting than scary. It may be deadly, but it’s not traumatizing. (This is the general tendency in the worldbuilding, not an absolute, because there are moments of genuine pathos: the scene when Harry sees Neville’s parents in St. Mungo’s comes to mind.)

Incidentally, I think this is the reason why the “but he’s a trauma victim! Of course he’s cranky!” defense of Capslock!Harry in book 5 has always fallen flat to me. Previously Harry bounced back from everything like a rubber ball, and just in general, realistic trauma reactions aren’t a high priority in Hogwarts world-building.

They are a priority in Carry On (at least in comparison to Harry Potter). Simon Snow and his friends Penelope and Agatha (and his nemesis Baz) are starting their final year at Watford, and after nearly a decade of magical brushes with death, they’re all fraying and frazzled, bitterly aware that they’re not likely to survive to the end of their schooling.

And the darkness is much closer to the surface than it is in Harry Potter - although the darkness is definitely there is Harry Potter once you start looking. Carry On simply makes it explicit. The tensions between mages and magical creatures are obvious from the beginning; the fact that the political system is corrupt to the core is obvious, if not from the first pages, then quite quickly as soon as we get out of Simon’s POV. (Simon is almost tragically naive, but it’s fairly clear that this is the result of careening from one crisis to another so swiftly that he doesn’t really have a chance to think through the larger situation.)

The magical world doesn’t feel as insular as Harry Potter’s: the students are aware of and use modern technology - and this despite the fact that, except for Simon Snow, all the mages in this world are to the magic born.

(I think one of my favorite examples of this is the time that Agatha starts complaining about people making up a spell to make stuff stick to the walls. “This is exactly the sort of thing I’m sick of,” she complains to herself. “Like, just use some tape. Why come up with a spell for sticking paper to the wall. Tape. Exists.”)

I did not expect to like Agatha as much as I did. She’s the character who would really rather not be having adventures at all, thank you very much, and usually I don’t like that character at all (they tend to gum up the narrative). But with Agatha I could totally feel it; their adventures did not sound fun and if I were Agatha I too would probably be gloomily moping about the magical ramparts thinking about how I’m probably going to have to fight yet another fucking dragon when really I’d rather be reading. (Or riding horses, in Agatha’s case.)

And I think one of the things that I find most interesting about the world-building in Carry On is that the narrative allows space for this reaction - the rejection of the magical world - without trying to force it on you. It just presents its world and presents different characters having different reactions to it and lets the characters have their feelings without signposting any particular reaction as right, and I think that’s really nice.

***

And I also think that Carry On is a sign that I should start that Harry Potter reread I've been thinking about for a while. Perhaps once I've finished the Betsy-Tacy books? I think that a reread of Harry Potter could fill a similar bedtime reading space in my life.

I have split feelings about Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl. As a novel about starting college, I think it's excellent. I loved the heroine, Cath, who is anxious, intensely introverted, and rather terrified to be leaving home.

It captures both the promise of college - that this is a new environment with new people, and you don't have to remain trapped in your high school self - but also that this is also incredibly hard. People don't open out like butterflies naturally, they have to put a lot of effort into it, and it sometimes hurts.

I think sometimes people use college as a sort of replacement for high school as "the best years of our lives" - which is a problem for people who don't experience it that way, or at least take a year or two before they settle in and make friends. There seems to be an assumption that things automatically get better when you get older, which I don't think is necessarily true: very often, you have to make them better. But the "best years of our lives" scenario can make it feel like, if you have to work at it, you're doing it wrong.

Fangirl shows that college is hard, if ultimately also rewarding; and I appreciate that.

As a novel about fandom, however, it left something to be desired. I think it does fic-writing well - Cath's reasons for writing are not everybody's, but then, no one writes for the same reason - but there's no sense of fandom community; Cath doesn't even have any fandom friends.

If Cath were a lurker, this would make perfect sense. But she's not: since she was thirteen, she's been posting actively on Simon Snow forums. (Simon Snow is of alternative Harry Potter, if the books had a lot more Harry & Malfoy interaction. IIRC, someone may have nominated Simon Snow for Yuletide. OH FANDOM.) Since she was fourteen, she's been writing fic fairly prolifically and become an incredibly popular author.

I just don't buy that in five years of fandom activity, she hasn't made any online friends. And the lack of community makes the picture of fandom rather hollow.

That being said, I wouldn't know how to approach a story where the main relationships (or at least some of them) were online. The conventions of epistolary novels might be a guide, but online friendships can be so much more diffuse than letters - spread across LJs, forums, emails, chatrooms...

There would inevitably need to be trimming. But novels often trim their characters' social worlds anyway - there are only so many friends-but-only-in-orchestra or cousins-I-see-twice-a-year that you can introduce without making things too complicated...

Still. It would require some innovation to make it work.