A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Four Dolls, by Rumer Godden, with illustrations by Pauline Baynes (whom you may be familiar with as the illustrator of The Chronicles of Narnia). This is actually a collection of four doll stories: Impunity Jane, The Fairy Doll, The Story of Holly and Ivy (which I’ve read before but apparently forgot in its entirety), and Candy Floss. I particularly enjoyed The Fairy Doll, which is one of those Godden stories where a Child Makes a Thing (in this case a fairy house for the fairy doll out of a bicycle basket that becomes a cave), and Candy Floss, about a doll who lives in a coconut shy at a fair.

Also Rosemary Sutcliff’s short story “Shifting Sands,” which excited me immensely by beginning with a reference to 1850 - surely the most recent date of any Rosemary Sutcliff story! But 1850 is simply a reference to the year that the shifting dunes revealed the ruins of Skara Brae, and the story itself is about the last days before the village was buried beneath the sand. ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’m in the middle of my next Le Carre, Smiley’s People, in which we learn that Connie has retired to the countryside with five hundred pets and a girlfriend. Someone surely has written their thesis about Queerness in Le Carre.

What I Plan to Read Next

Before I move on from the Brontes, I’d like to read one more biography, preferably something more or less recent. I’ve had a rec for Juliet Barker’s The Brontes. Any other contenders?

An unusual bulletin of What I’ve Given Up Reading: I stalled out on Rumer Godden’s childhood memoir A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep a couple months ago, and have at last admitted to myself that I have no desire to finish it. I usually love childhood memoirs! But Godden seems to be going through her childhood and recollecting which incidents later gave rise to books, and it’s like she already got the pith out of them in making up the stories and there’s just not a lot left.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Château Saint Barnabé, a short memoir about a month that Brink’s family spent at a dilapidated chateau-turned-boarding-house outside Marseilles in the 1920s. The book is structured around the tale of an American woman they met there, who had married a French sea captain forty years before and remained in Marseilles even after his death, though she longed to return to America – and yet when Brink offers to help her return to America, she refuses. “I am afraid…” she says; “afraid it might not be in America as I had dreamed it. I would rather keep the dream.”

Full of interesting details about daily life, and also interesting in that it confirms Family Sabbatical is indeed drawing on actual sabbaticals the Brink family spent in France. In fact, IIRC the novels includes a similar story about a woman who wants to return to America, I believe with a happier ending, although my memory is not too clear on this point.

Also Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, which alas cannot quite live up to its fabulous title, which seems to promise that here we are going to examine the works of Roman women writers. We no longer have enough of their works to support a whole book, it seems. But the book is strongest when we do examine women’s own words: an early Christian martyr’s jail diary, a sequence of four poems carved on an Egyptian statue by a court poetess during Hadrian’s reign (one of them, endearingly, is about how beautiful Hadrian’s wife is, presumably to cheer her up while he’s weeping about the recently deceased Antinous), and—this is my favorite—some letters written by the wife of one military commander in Britain to the wife of the commander of a nearby fort, including an invitation to an upcoming birthday party. It’s so incredibly Mrs. Tim of the Regiment! The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Another Newbery Honor winner! Jeanette Eaton’s A Daughter of the Seine: The Life of Madame Roland. Embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know who Madame Roland was until I read this book.

And I finished Barbara Leonie Picard’s The Lady of the Linden Tree. All in all an undistinguished collection of original fairy tales, but all the same I’m glad I gave it a try.

What I’m Reading Now

Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds, and Other Stories, which begins with “The Birds” (still one of the scariest stories in existence; imagine if the birds ever did decide they wanted to kill all humans), and continues with “Monte Verità,” which is best enjoyed unspoiled but concerns an unearthly mountain. You will be unsurprised to learn that Du Maurier is just as good at suspense in short stories as in novel form.

What I Plan to Read Next

My favorite Purdue library is closing for renovation over the summer! I have a bad feeling they are going to purge the children’s section, so I’ve checked out the books on my list: a couple of Sorche Nic Leodhas’s collections of Scottish ghost stories, two books by Susan Fletcher of Dragon’s Milk fame, Susan Cooper’s Victory, and a children’s history of Thermopylae by Mary Renault.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The Mousewife, by Rumer Godden, a retelling of a story by Dorothy Wordsworth, about a mouse who befriends a dove in a cage. A lovely story, made lovelier by William Pène du Bois’s naturalistic black-and-white illustrations. I particularly loved the series of mouse portraits (ending with a Cubist mouse) and the two-page spread that shows the dove’s memories of its sweet days flying free.

Also The Romantic Friendship Reader: Love Stories Between Men in Victorian America, an anthology collected by Axel Nissen. I escaped with less damage to my reading list than I feared, just Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme and perhaps Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend, although I’m not sure I could stand the prose styling of the latter at novel length. Also happy to report that this anthology includes the complete text of Frederick W. Loring’s Two College Friends, so if anyone wishes for a paper copy of this whumpy trainwreck of a Civil War friendship, look no further!

What I’m Reading Now

In Sir Isumbras at the Ford, we have AT LONG LAST learned of the Chevalier de la Vireville’s TRAGIC PAST! ( spoilers )

In One Man’s Meat, I’ve just reached E. B. White’s chapter “Dog Training,” which is a fascinating look at change in dog- training methods over time. White observes, “at the turn of the century… one’s dog was fed on mashed potatoes and brown gravy and lived in a doghouse with an arched portal. Today a dog is fed on scraped beef and Vitamin B, and lives in bed with you.”

(Although my mother, growing up on a farm in the 1950s & 60s, remembers that the farm dogs were never let in the house. So this may have been regional, and maybe also a result of the fact that underneath his crusty exterior, White was a big old softie!)

What I Plan to Read Next

Good things come to those who wait! At long last Further Chronicles of Avonlea has arrived at the library!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Black Narcissus was Rumer Godden’s first book and it is, therefore, perhaps unfair to compare it to her later nun book, In This House of Brede, but inevitably I did and just as inevitably it fell short. In Black Narcissus, a small group of nuns try to plant a new chapter of their order in a house hard by the Himalayas in India, and are defeated by the mountains or the unceasing wind or something in the very soil that is inimical to their presence.

I also read Jen Wang’s The Prince and the Dressmaker, a graphic novel set in nineteenth century Paris about Prince Sebastian, who hires a dressmaker, Frances, to make him dresses so he can shine out in the Parisian nightlife as the fabulous Lady Crystallia. (Also Prince Sebastian and Frances fall in love, as you do. I didn't realize characters named Sebastian were allowed to fall in love with girls, but of course the book IS about breaking rules that don't work for you.)

And also Margery Williams’s 1937 Newbery Honor book, Winterbound. Yes, this is the Margery Williams of Velveteen Rabbit fame! I went into this book hoping for Long Winter-type hardship, but in actual fact this is a generally cozy tale about a family of four city children (aged eight to nineteen) looking after themselves in a farmhouse over the winter. (Their father is on an archaeological dig in South America and Mom is escorting a tubercular cousin to New Mexico.) Pleasant enough but not memorable; I never did fully differentiate the two younger children from the two neighbor children across the way.

What I’m Reading Now

I intended to continue Elizabeth Wein’s The Winter Prince, but then my hold on Nicola Griffiths’ Spear came in, and as there are five holds on Spear I thought I had better prioritize it… I’m about a quarter of the way through and finding the prose self-consciously artistic (is Hild written in the same style?), but perhaps it will grow on me. (The book is not very long so I will probably finish it whether it grows on me or not.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Have decided that Phyllis Ann Karr’s The Idylls of the Queen will be the next stop on my Arthurian journey! (I will of course be finishing The Winter Prince and reading the rest of the series, but my understanding is that the rest of the books have only the most tenuous of connections to King Arthur.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Many things! Not least among them, Barbara Michaels’ The Sea-King’s Daughter, a deliciously tropey modern gothic set in Greece. Young Ariadne, the scuba-diver, goes to Greece for the summer to help her eccentrically awful archaeologist father search for an ancient Minoan fleet that he believes lies off the shore of Santorini. Naturally there are earthquakes, volcanoes, ex-Nazis and old Resistance fighters, ruins, romances, and a scene that I was almost certain was about to become canonical aliens cultists-made-them-do-it (not with Ariadne and her father, thank God).

I am digging this whole modern gothic thing. Bring me your tired, your poor, your ridiculous tropes yearning to breathe free!

I also read Rumer Godden’s Pippa Passes, which I expected to be like A Company of Swans - young English ballet dancer goes on tour and finds herself and also possibly true love! But in fact Pippa Passes is not like that at all; it’s really more a tale of disillusionment, and I am not fond of disillusionment as a literary theme.

( Spoilers, TW for sexual assault )

I think I may take a break from Rumer Godden’s books for a bit.

What I’m Reading Now

Eva Ibbotson’s A Song for Summer, still. I just keeping having holds coming in and interrupting! But I like what I’ve read so far.

What I Plan to Read Next

Tove Jannson’s The Summer Book. I’m pretty excited for this!

What I’ve Finished Reading

Charles Finch’s An Old Betrayal, the latest of his Charles Lenox Victorian-era London mysteries, to which I am quietly devoted. This is one of the good ones: Finch wove all his subplots together nicely, and the mystery was beautifully twisty without ever feeling unnecessarily so. (I realize that mystery writers need twists, but sometimes I end up thinking “No one plots a murder this complicated, this is getting ridiculous.”)

Also Rumer Godden’s Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, about a little girl who makes a dollhouse for two Japanese dolls she receives. Or, actually, her cousin does most of the actual making, because he knows how to work wood; she just makes some pillows and things.

It’s a somewhat disappointing book, because most of the details of the actual making were moved to endnotes, as has most of the cultural information about Japan. It’s as if the book itself is simply a brisk summary, and all the meat of the story has been shuffled off to the back.

What I’m Reading Now

Still drifting through Eva Rice’s The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp. I’m really enjoying it so far; right now we’re still in Tara’s childhood in the English country, where Tara sings in the church choir and Tara’s sister Lucy has fallen in love with the great country houses of England.

Also Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927, which is about aviation, Calvin Coolidge, botched murders, Babe Ruth, Prohibition, Henry Ford, and all the other strange and fascinating things that were going on in America in the summer of 1927.

I think Bryson’s writing was fresher and funnier in his earlier books, but I should add that this is partly because he set himself a high bar in those earlier books: even with the drop-off in quality, this book has made me laugh out loud a number of times. And I find the organization interesting, too: it’s easy to follow and immensely readable, even though it’s basically just a hodgepodge of disparate things that happened around the same time. There’s a sense of how big the world is.

What I Plan to Read Next

Charles Finch has written his first non-Charles Lenox book, The Last Enchantments, which I have decided to read. It’s about, uh - maybe I should have checked what it was about before deciding to read it… it’s about a passionate love affair during a year’s study abroad at Oxford. Well, this could be awesome, as long as it’s not too painfully autobiographical. (We are talking about the man who gave his detective his own first name, after all.)

Also Jo Baker’s Longbourn, because ladyherenya wrote such a great review of it. I am way, way down on the holds list for this one, though.

I’m also contemplating whether I should try Ibbotson’s adult novels, particularly A Countess Below Stairs or A Song for Summer or A Morning Gift. Does anyone have an opinion about them?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rumer Godden’s The Greengage Summer, which is about a group of children who spend a few weeks in a French hotel, alone because their mother has fallen ill and is in the hospital. Nothing much happens for most of the book: it’s a slow exploration of the hotel, and the routine of the hotel and the routine the children make for themselves while they’re there, and the complicated intersecting relationships of the people who run the hotel.

And then, having set up so many dominoes, Godden gently flicks them down. It’s rather fascinating to watch.

This is an adult book about children rather than a children’s book. This isn't so much about content as about, how shall I put it - underlying worldview. The first word that came to mind is bleak or possibly jaded, but that's not quite right. The book is not jaded, but many of the characters are, and their actions are driven by pettiness in a way that is uncommon in children's books.

I think perhaps in children's books, evil usually has a cause deeper than shallowness? I'll have to think about this more.

What I’m Reading Now

Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races, which is amazingly awesome. I like the main characters a lot, particularly Puck (Sean took more time to grow on me, because he doesn’t like anyone except his stallion), but I love, love, love the island setting. I love the way its customs unfold as we, through Puck, learn more about the titular Scorpio Races. Every year, humans capture, train (not tame. Water horses are never tame), and race the deadly water horses which rise from the sea and occasionally eat people.

Because obviously if your island is beset by deadly flesh-eating horses of dooooom, the thing to do is to capture them and race them. Obviously.

And I love also that, although the deadly doom horses of the deeps are clearly the most important thing, Stiefvater remembers to flesh out other aspects of the islands as well. I would really, really like to eat a November cake.

Oh, oh! And I love the sibling relationships in this book, particularly Puck's friendship with her little brother Finn. Basically I like this book a lot.

What I Plan to Read Next

Sutcliff’s Mark of the Horse Lord is next, but after that I’m not sure. You guys, I have so many books that I’m planning to read over break, I don’t even know where to start.

But I've finished all my course work, so now I have time to read AS MUCH AS I WANT!

I actually wrote these reviews before I headed off into the wilderness, and it’s interesting looking back on them. I tend to write my book reviews soon after I’ve finished reading, which has obvious advantages, but also means that I don’t usually know how the book is going to sit with me: there are books that grow on me over time, like Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me, and books that I enjoyed immensely but remember poorly, like Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls series.

I liked all these books when I first read them, but the only one that stayed in my mind rather than drifting away is Sherri L. Smith’s Flygirl. And the one book that I read before the trip that really stuck with me, Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows, I didn’t even write a review for - because I didn’t realize it would. I suppose I ought to rectify that...

( Robin McKinley’s Beauty )

( Frances Temple’s The Ramsay Scallop )

( Sherri L. Smith’s Flygirl )