A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished William Heyliger’s Captain of the Nine, in which that PERFIDIOUS TRAITOR Mellen becomes so filled with loathing of the team captain, Bartley, that Mellen tries to throw the final game of the season by sending a fake telegram telling one of the players that his father’s sick and he has to go home. THAT DIRTY RAT. I thought nothing could be lower than Kennedy’s blackmail trick in Bartley, Freshman Pitcher BUT I WAS WRONG.

Fortunately Mellen’s trick is caught in time, the other player is retrieved, and Mellen is kicked off the team - although they decide to allow him to graduate so as not to hurt his mother. ONLY HIS MOTHER FINDS OUT ABOUT HIS DISGRACEFUL BEHAVIOR and drags Mellen away, presumably by his ear, and she is going to be disappointed with him for the rest of his misbegotten life and I would be delighted by this poetic justice except that his poor mother was so looking forward to watching him graduate and instead all she gets to witness is his bitter shame.

I also finished listening to Roald Dahl’s memoir Going Solo, about his time working for Shell in east Africa just before World War II and his time in the RAF in North Africa and Greece during the war, which is fascinating and sometimes quite funny even as it is horrifying (as you would expect from Dahl). Possibly something that would interest my fellow Code Name Verity fans, although of course it is a very different thing.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m listening to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I’m not in love with the audiobook narrator, but the book has drawn me in so effectively that it doesn’t really matter. Leopold has been sawing down a lightning-blighted oak and drifting back in time tree ring by tree ring, noting ecological milestones as he goes. This is the year Wisconsin decided to drain all its wetlands, or the last major passenger pigeon hunt in the area, or so forth.

Possibly this sounds grim (Leopold is writing against the majority opinion of his society vis-a-vis conservation and he knows it), but even with a subpar audiobook reader it’s actually quite soothing to listen to. Yes, Leopold! You follow those skunk tracks through the melting snow and muse upon the life cycle of the meadow mouse!

This is much more enlivening than Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. The book is basically a series of philosophical memoranda that Marcus wrote to himself, and therefore pretty repetitive. There are countless meditations that follow the same basic outline as this one: “On death: If the universe is composed only of diverse atoms, death is dispersion; if the universe is really one unified whole, death is extinction or transfiguration.”

The fact that Marcus repeats it so many times make me doubt its efficacy at making him dread death less.

Having said this, this isn’t really a book that you’re meant to read right through, and it probably works better if you just open to a random page and dip into it. Although it’s hard to imagine a day where the wisdom you really need is “Just as circus games and other popular entertainments offer the same tedious scenes over and over, so it is with life - an appalling sameness, a tiresome round of cause and effect. When will it ever end?” Thanks, I guess!

I’m also - good God am I reading a lot this week - reading Caroline Dale Snedeker’s Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community, which I took some time to get into, but now the book has introduced a bright-eyed young woman from Europe with Ideals about women’s rights and the abolition of slavery and the glory of democratic government, and everyone who meets her either loves her or despises her and the book has become ten times more interesting to me.

I think historical fiction often fails in depicting forward thinking outspoken people by failing to grapple with how disruptive that can be - what’s forward-thinking in the past is often just common sense in the present and therefore no longer feels disruptive - but Seth Way is really going for it and it gives me a good feeling about how the book may eventually deal with the collapse of New Harmony.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m finally going to read Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler! This has been on my to-read list since I was in college and finally I’m going to read it.

I’ve also decided that now is the time to read the rest of Edward Eager’s books, so I’m starting in on The Time Garden as soon as the library brings it to me.