A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I have finished Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and thereby COMPLETED the Newbery Honor books of the 1980s! I’m sorry to say that the book never grew on me (I’ve always been very hit or miss with McKinley’s work), but it is DONE.

Last week I said that once I finished The Blue Sword I would take a break from Newbery books, but in fact I went on instantly to Bernard Marshall’s Cedric the Forester, a Newbery Honor book from the 1920s, notable for the fact that it delivers the least slashy possible rendition of an extremely slashy premise. Our hero, Dickon of Mountjoy, makes the humble yeoman Cedric his squire after Cedric saves his life, and the two become inseparable friends who fight many battles, and neither of them ever get a love interest, and Dickon occasionally pauses to muse admiringly on Cedric’s broad shoulders and sinewy thighs… and STILL they feel completely unshippable. It’s quite impressive really.

What the book does deliver is a picaresque series of medieval adventures - castles besieged, attacks from robbers in the woods, etc. - culminating in our heroes helping to write the Magna Carta. (This is the only book I’ve ever read set during the reign of Prince John in which Robin Hood does not appear even once.) Cedric is the one who insists that the document should guarantee not merely the rights of barons but all free men of England. I checked to see if this has any basis in fact, but as far as I can tell it’s all made up: Marshall just thought the Magna Carta would be a better story if it wasn’t all barons, all the time. Indeed, who among us would NOT like a doughty yeoman to have been involved?

I also finished Spike Carlsen’s A Walk around the Block: Stoplight Secrets, Mischievous Squirrels, Manhole Mysteries & Other Stuff You See Every Day (and Know Nothing About). asakiyume, this book includes a chapter about graffiti! The author does some graffiti with a Parisian graffiti artist, which sounds… pretty illegal actually so I am not suggesting that you try it out… but on the other hand, there’s nothing like on the spot research!

What I’m Reading Now

Back on track with Alex Beam! I’ve set the Joseph Smith book aside for now (might pick it up again later? Might not, though) and taken up Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight over a Modernist Masterpiece, which is much lighter and therefore much more my speed. You will be shocked - shocked, I’m sure! - to hear that a mid-twentieth century architectural genius was also a complete asshole.

At sovay’s behest, I’ve begun Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s Sawdust in His Shoes. We got one (1) chapter of good circus action, but then Joe’s father the lion tamer died (exactly how you’d expect a lion tamer to die) and now Joe has been sent to an industrial training school, which he has ESCAPED, intent on rejoining the circus! Will there be more circus action?? Right now he has been taken in by a kindly farm family who have received far too much characterization to be a mere short sojourn in this book.

What I Plan to Read Next

Contemplating whether to read Beam’s Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital. I like Beam’s work, and this book about McLean Hospital will provide a star-studded history of American mental health treatment from the early nineteenth century up through the twentieth century… But do I feel like tackling a history of American mental health treatment right at this moment? Eeeeeh.

What I’ve Finished Reading

I finished this year’s Newbery winner, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which on paper sounds like exactly the sort of thing I should have like - there’s a dash of dystopia and a bit of magic and a little natural history and a very small dragon - but the thing glueing it all together was soppy sentimentality (did you know love is what makes the world go ‘round? Unless of course it’s hope!) and I just wasn’t feeling it.

However, I often prefer the Newbery Honor books to the winners themselves, so I’m excited about reading those over the course of the year.

Progress on the Unread Book Club: I finished Robin McKinley’s A Knot in the Grain, which I remained lukewarm about until the final story, which I quite liked. The first four stories in the collection take place in vaguely fairy-talish fantasy worlds, whereas the final story takes place in the real world, with just a subtle dollop of magic - chocolate sauce on the ice cream of the story, as it were.

And I felt a pleasant frisson of identification with the heroine, Annabelle, who copes with the stress of having her parents move her to a new town by rereading all her old fantasy favorites from childhood. This is exactly the sort of vaguely counterproductive thing I would have done had my parents uprooted me when I was sixteen. And I, like Annabelle, would absolutely have decided that a fellow teenager was worth befriending upon learning that one of her favorite books was The Borrowers.

What I’m Reading Now

I started Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, on the grounds that I liked his Alice in Wonderland, only to swiftly discover that this is emphatically the wrong reason to read Sylvie and Bruno. The introduction informs me that Carroll labored for decades to ensure Sylvie and Bruno was not much like Alice at all; it attempts mightily to insist that this was all for the best and not an artistic failure at all, but I am not so sure.

What I Plan to Read Next

Mockingjay!

And the library is not going to get me The Origins of Totalitarianism swiftly enough for it to serve for my March reading challenge (“a book over 600 pages”), so I was going to fall back on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but then I realized that I have the final Obernewtyn book sitting there staring at me right on my shelf and it’s over a thousand pages long and I really need to read that, so. Sorry, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I will read you someday!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Robin McKinley’s Rose Daughter, which I enjoyed even more than Beauty - I think you can really see how much she grew as a writer between the two retellings, because Rose Daughter is much more airy and at the same time far more gothic. The characterization is stronger, too: Beauty’s two sisters are much more strongly differentiated, as is the Beast. And the ending doesn’t feel as rushed.

H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, which is super fun in the same “Victorian thought experiment” way that The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is super fun. They, along with Frankenstein, teach an important lesson: Friends don’t let friends do science alone. It always ends badly.

And finally - I’ve totally been procrastinating this week, can you tell? - P. G. Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City, which is delightful to the end. Although I suspect having a friend pay for your education with the goal of making you a factotum on his estate would be a bit more awkward than Mike seems to feel about it, even if Psmith is his bestest best friend ever.

What I’m Reading Now

Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child. The first two thirds are delightful: it tells the story of a middle-aged couple, recently moved to Alaska (in 1920), who meet a strange little girl who lives in the wilderness with lichen and birch bark tangled in her hair. It’s a mixture of darkness - literal darkness; a lot of the book takes place during the Alaskan winter, and kicks off with the heroine walking out on the ice in a half-hearted attempt at suicide - and this eerie half-fairy tale feeling. Odd but effective.

The last third, which I’ve just started, bids fair to be a tale of Young Love, which - judging by the epigraph - will end with the wild girl becoming far less wild. I may decide that the last third never actually happened...

Also The Wind in the Willows, although I’m going to have to find a non-annotated edition, because the annotations are terribly distracting and often not very to the point. No, I don’t really care to know that the annotator thinks Otter is a member of the nobility and the rabbits are the teeming lower classes and the whole thing is an allegory for the English social structure. Even if Graham meant it that way I don’t want to know, because it rather detracts from it as a story.

In the meantime, I’ve laid The Wind in the Willows aside to start Selma Lagerlof’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, which I’ve been meaning to read since I was approximately eight. If there has been a theme to this year’s reading, it has been “finally getting around to all those books I’ve been meaning to read for ages.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. ladyherenya has said so many nice things about the miniseries, clearly I need to get around to seeing it, which of course means I must read the book.

I’m also thinking about reading more McKinley. I’ve already read Sunshine (this seems to be everyone’s go-to McKinley rec), and I’ve heard that I have to read Pegasus. How do people like her other fairytale retellings? I’m intrigued by Spindle’s End but feel dubious about Deerskin, which looks pretty hardcore.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Gennifer Choldenko’s Al Capone Does My Shirts, because I needed something light after Rose Under Fire. And it is indeed light: I don’t have anything much to say about it.

What I’m Reading Now

Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist. It was going to be Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but...someone had checked it out! Most vexing. Though I suppose I should be pleased by this evidence of Bronte love.

Anyway, I’ve only gotten to chapter 3 of Oliver Twist, and I’m already pretty sure that nothing good is going to happen in this book ever until maybe the very end. The governors of the workhouse already hate Oliver so much that they tried to pay a chimney sweep to take him off their hands. I may need another light book to recover.

I’ve also been reading Robin McKinley’s Rose Daughter a chapter at a time at bedtime. It’s a very restful book.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have the audiobook of Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child on hold at the library, because 1) the author’s name is Eowyn, how could that go wrong?, 2) the cover suggests that the Snow Child might secretly be a fox, which I’m 99% certain is not how the book will pan out, but you never know, and 3) there are people requesting it for Yuletide, which surely means it must have something going for it.

Reason 3 has me thinking of reading The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, too. It's set in Florida, a state almost as interesting as Alaska - The Snow Child is set in Alaska - and! it has horses.

Also I’ve been thinking I should dip my toe - perhaps even my whole foot! - into the waters of adult fiction.

Reading: Sense and Sensibility. I have a bad feeling about Willoughby.

Also reading: At Large and at Small, a collection of essays by Anne Fadiman. I have discovered that I have a weakness for familiar essays. I should try to write one. Hmm.

Planning to Read: Twice Upon a Marigold, by Jean Ferris. It's the sequel to Once Upon a Marigold, which is a funny book, so hopefully this will be too.

I can't decide if I think the title is cute or silly, but it's not as bad as the title to the sequel of I Know What You Did Last Summer, which is I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That may have come all the way around bad and into good again.

Reviewing: Book Review: Sunshine

I like this book. I like the characters, both as characters and as people; I like the coffee shop, which deserves special mention for being awesome; and I very much like the worldbuilding.

( Read more )

How long does a post need to be before it gets an lj-cut, anyway?