A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last I’ve finished Bruce Catton’s Never Call Retreat! This is the final book in his Centennial History of the Civil War, and of course covers the end of the war. I hadn’t realized just how little territory the South had left by the end of 1864: at that point they’ve got Virginia and the Carolinas and some outlying bits of Texas and Florida, but basically the rest of the Confederacy is under Federal control. There’s no possible way they could win! And yet they keep going for three more months!

This seems to happen a lot in war history. Long wars really do end like a game of Risk: the winning side becomes clear long before the actual end, but the war nonetheless grinds on and on till the loser is totally defeated.

Also at long last (this was a week for finishing books I’ve been working on for ages), I finished Katharine Hull & Pamela Whitlock’s Crowns! This is the final book that Hull and Whitlock wrote together, their only collaboration not part of the Far-Distant Oxus trilogy, and, alas, not quite up to par with their other books. It’s a fantasy novel, but a fantasy constructed in a frame story: four cousins are going about their daily lives in London, then meet up at the yearly Christmas party, where they either have a magical adventure or perhaps just imagine a magical adventure in a land where they’re all kings and queens… I’ve read books that use this sort of ambiguity to good effect, but here it contributes to the general feeling that the book is underbaked.

I’ve been meaning to read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo for quite some time, and this week I finally got around to it! And I quite enjoyed it, although I must admit that I lost faith in the book when I realized that some of the quotes (many of the chapters are compilations for quotes describing, say, a White House soiree, or Abe Lincoln’s face, or what have you) are completely made up. They have citations and everything! And some of them are certainly ascribed to real people who really wrote about Lincoln (Elizabeth Keckley, William Herndon), and presumably those quotes are in fact quotes, but it bugs me that I don’t know for sure. The book would have really benefited from a history note.

Finally, I continued my Newbery journey with Walter and Marion Havighurst’s Song of the Pines: A Story of Norwegian Lumbering in Wisconsin, which is not only about Norwegian lumbering but Norwegian immigration in the mid-19th century more generally. Immigrant stories seem to have been quite popular in the 1950s (also pioneer stories), and this one also leans hard on the theme of What It Means to Be an American.

What I’m Reading Now

Still working on The Warmth of Other Suns. I’ve finished the first section, detailing life in the Jim Crow South; now the book has moved on to the migration, which met with enormous opposition in many southern communities, as the white landowners were determined not to lose their captive labor force.

Wilkerson draws a parallel between the South and the Soviet Union, which pleased me, as I extrapolated such a parallel from Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer, then wondered if it’s just that I have the Soviet Union on the brain… but if Wilkerson sees it too, presumably there’s something to it. It is curious that white Southerners tended to be the most vociferously anti-Soviet people in America while also living in the most Soviet system.

As a lighter counterpoint, I’ve begun Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm. Jones wrote this not long after the Tough Guide to Fantasyland, and I’m really curious if the earlier book inspired this one - did she just keep thinking, “What if there really were tours of Fantasyland? How would that affect the lives of the Fantasyland inhabitants?”

What I Plan to Read Next

John Davis Billings’ Hardtack and Coffee, highly recommended by Bruce Catton as one of the liveliest memoirs of everyday life in the army during the Civil War.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

In Northern Ireland, peace has such a bad name that in order to achieve it they will have to call it something else.

Sally Belfrage’s Living with War: A Belfast Year is about, well, Belfrage’s year in Belfast, speaking to people on both sides of the conflict (this was in the 1980s, during the Troubles). What struck me as I was reading is, how shall I put this, the mind-boggling denseness of the assumed reader - the kind of person who cares enough to read a whole book about the Troubles, but approaches the whole thing with a wrinkled brow and the plaintive, baffled question, “But what are they fighting about?”

I say this not as a criticism of Belfrage, who is trying very hard to break through that willful obtuseness. But the intellectual climate that produces a whole contingent of cultured, literary, presumably intelligent people who look at conflicts and wonder Why We Just Can’t Get Along? strikes me as very characteristic of a certain kind of 80s/90s smug complacent liberalism that eventually found its apotheosis in The West Wing.

I also finished Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game, which I think made a mistake in having a fifteen-year-old narrator. The book keeps having to twist itself into a pretzel to justify Louisa’s presence at scenes where a civilian child’s presence makes no sense. Louisa should have been a few years older and connected in some official capacity to the airbase.

But that wouldn’t solve my biggest problem with the book, which is that ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Gerald Durrell’s Two in the Bush. I was delighted to discover that this Gerald Durrell book takes the reader to New Zealand (that’s the part I’m at) and points beyond. Durrell has just watched penguin hopping from rock to rock, apparently for no other reason than rock-hopping is fun, and it sounds like the cutest thing.

And I’m going onward in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. Lydia Gwilt is ON THE CUSP of arriving at Thorpe Ambrose, in the guise of Miss Milroy’s governess, in order to win Allan Armadale’s heart (the Allan Armadale who actually uses the name Allan Armadale, to clarify) and thereby secure Allan's fortune!

Am I rooting for her to succeed in this nefarious plot? IDK, kind of, I must admit that I find Allan Armadale kind of annoying (he’s SO careless, he LOST a BOAT because he forgot to tie it properly, my inner Swallows & Amazons is APPALLED). But on the other hand it might bring pain to Ozias Midwinter, the woobiest woobie to ever woobie (he loves Allan because Allan is the FIRST PERSON who was EVER NICE TO HIM, oh my God) and I just can’t be having with that.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve put on hold a lot of the Irish books recommended in my last post (plus Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which, like so many books, I’ve meant to read for years). What better time of year to do it, with St. Patrick’s Day coming?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Bill Brittain’s The Wish-Giver: Three Tales of Coven Tree, a Newbery Honor book in which a salesman rolls up at a church social, sells four wishes (a mere fifty cents a pop), and then rolls out of town, leaving his customers to deal with the chaos that their poorly conceived wishes create. I felt a little bit that the wishes were intentionally badly worded so as to have the most dramatic effects (a girl wishes that a traveling salesman would “put down roots,” which ends up turning him into a tree, when what she really wants is for him to fall in love with her - why wouldn’t she just wish for that?) - but I did enjoy the down home country narrative voice, which was flavorful without being over the top.

I also read Sally Belfrage’s Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties, which is more introspective than her other books that I’ve read (A Room in Moscow, Freedom Summer) and suffers for it: Belfrage is oddly opaque in describing herself, unable to dig beneath the surface as she can in describing 1950s Moscow or 1964 Mississippi. She talks about the split consciousness of her childhood, learning about American democracy and freedom in school while at home her father (who edits a leftist newspaper, The National Guardian) is under constant surveillance by the FBI for his political views, but it comes to feel repetitious, like we’re circling around some greater truth without ever really zeroing in on it.

The book is effective at evoking the terror of the 1950s Red Scare, however, and the way that it decimated progressive circles, by destroying some progressives’ lives and careers (through arrest or employment blackballing) and frightening the rest into silence. What struck me, as I read this, is that the culture war in America is not anything new; the only thing that’s changed is that progressives finally have the numbers to effectively fight back. (They certainly didn’t in the 1950s, when “78 percent of Americans said they thought it was a good idea to report relatives or acquaintances suspected of being Communists.” A nation of stool pigeons!)

I also liked this quote: “My father lived on hope, and made hope his chief bequest to me: a lifetime’s basic faith in people, which must be disabused daily, when every morning’s newspaper comes as a blow to the naive optimism that somehow grew again in the night as you lay helpless to defend yourself.”

What I’m Reading Now

Other people keep hogging door duty at work so I haven’t had as much time to read Gerald Durrell’s Fillets of Plaice as I would have liked. :( On the other hand, this means that I get to savor it for longer, so that’s nice??? This book is actually five mini-memoirs stuck together; I just finished the one where the Durrells settle briefly in London after leaving Corfu in advance of World War II, and young Gerry fills his time by getting a job in a reptile pet shop. He accidentally befriends a colonel after dropping a box of terrapins on a bus, and it turns out the colonel has filled the attic of his house with meticulously painted model soldiers for use in hours-long war games.

I’m also reading Jeff Dickey’s Rising in Flames: Sherman’s March and the Fight for a New Nation, from which I learned (1) German and Irish immigrant identity in the 1860s were both A Big Deal (actually I knew this already, but it’s easier to ignore when you don’t have a book shoving it in your face), so I can’t just give Russell a German father and an Irish mother (what church did they marry in, by the way? Are they both Catholic?) and skip merrily onward giving it ne’er a further thought, and (2) I almost certainly have Russell marching with the whole entire wrong army for the backstory I’ve given him. If he joins up from an Eastern college, he would march with the Army of the Potomac, not the Army of the Tennessee.

(I can’t make him Catholic and let him keep a fiancee with the incredibly WASPy name “Julia Gage.” Surely the Gages would collapse in prostration at the prospect of their daughter marrying a Papist.)

I strongly suspect that I’ve Dunning-Krugered myself. “Oh, I definitely know enough about the Civil War to write a book about a Civil War veteran who wakes up in 1964!” I cried, knowing next to nothing about the Civil War, in which happy state of ignorance I’ve already written a book featuring TWO Civil War veterans. At least The Threefold Tie has no historical pretensions (at least about the Civil War, it definitely has historical pretensions about Non-Monogamous Nineteenth Century American Marriage Customs) and simply uses the Civil War as an excuse for Jack and Everett to make out in a barn.

What I Plan to Read Next

A footnote in Emily Mayhew’s Wounded (I’m still working my way through) has led me to Jeffrey S. Reznick’s Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain During the Great War, which I hope might be more helpful in answering my question “So what were the prospects for a double leg amputee following the Great War?” than Wounded, although it will almost certainly be less mind-blowing and unbedizened by poetry.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Braxton Irvine published The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient in 2019, but nonetheless it seems tailor-made for 2020, the year that pulls the rug out from under your feet again and again.

The book is about how to deal with unexpected setbacks: view them as a challenge, he suggests; this is of course much easier to do with smaller setbacks, although the ancient Roman stoics were famous for applying it in situations like “exile” and “being ordered to commit suicide by the Senate.” It’s also about how to appreciate what you have: imagine what it would be like not to have it, and, well, lucky us! in 2020, you don’t even need to exercise your imagination on this one. If there’s one thing Americans have all experienced this year, it’s suddenly not having things we always expected to have. Movie theaters, restaurants, food and toilet paper on the grocery shelves, being able to see people’s faces, the expectation of a peaceful transition of power after the election in November…

It’s all unpleasant, of course, but I remind myself that historically speaking, we are really only paddling in the shallows of just how bad things can get, as evidenced (in this week's reading) by Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, which has a whole section on his maternal grandparents’ experiences escaping the Holocaust as Lithuanian Jews.

I actually got the book because I was interested in Halberstadt’s experience growing up gay in the Soviet Union. But in actual fact his family left the USSR when he was still a child, so there’s not too much for him to say about it; the most interesting tidbit is that he had his first sexual awakening looking at the illustrations in the textbook Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, a sort of Soviet martyrology of young people dying heroic, gruesome, patriotic deaths. (I imagined this sexually awakened MANY Soviet youths, of all sexual orientations.)

I also learned from this book that in Russian, chanterelles are lisichki, little foxes, which would have been ADORABLE in Honeytrap, oh my God.

Maybe I should stop reading about the Soviet Union for a bit. I seem to have this “that would have been AMAZING to include in Honeytrap” reaction to at least one tidbit from every book.

What I’m Reading Now

Continuing on in Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun. I’m enjoying the worldbuilding, particularly the imaginary Victorian theology of the fae (do they have souls or don’t they?), but boy, it would’ve been nice if the incest had been mentioned a little bit in the blurb. I suppose whoever wrote it must have thought comparing the book to Crimson Peak counted as due diligence?

I’m also working on Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer and of course Mary Renault’s The Charioteer, but I’m going to write full reviews for both of them once I’m done, so I won’t take up space talking about them here. (Oh, well, fine, for the Charioteer contingent, I will mention that I got to the part ( Spoilers ))

Another quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope:

The true believers were not only sure of their own triumph, they also thought they were bringing happiness to the rest of mankind as well, and their view of the world had such a sweeping, unitary quality that it was very seductive. In the pre-revolutionary era there had already been this craving for an all-embracing idea which would explain everything in the world and bring about universal harmony in one go. That is why people so willingly closed their eyes and followed their leader, not allowing themselves to compare words to deeds, or to weigh the consequences of their action. This explained the progressive loss of a sense of reality - which had to be regained before there could be any question of discovering what had been wrong with the theory in the first place.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve had Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona (called David Balfour in the United States; the lesser-known sequel to Kidnapped!) lying around for weeks and I really ought to just read it.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I really thought I was done with E. Lockhart after Genuine Fraud, in which the heroine rebels against patriarchy by… killing two teenage girls?... but I couldn’t resist Lockhart’s latest, Again Again, and it’s actually really lovely, a sort of fractal story about Adelaide’s summer at the Alabaster Academy, in which she pines for her ex-boyfriend… or falls for a new boy, Jack… unless she actually falls for Oscar…

It’s like Lockhart is exploring a series of different scenarios about Adelaide’s summer: you have the main story, and then you have different possibilities branching off, some of which become ongoing threads throughout the book, some lasting just the length of a vignette. It’s a fascinating structure, an interesting meditation on the fragility and contingency of love - the way that little happenstances either draw people together or keep them apart.

Last week, I was so charmed by George MacDonald’s The Light Princess that I instantly acquired his fairy tale The Golden Key after rachelmanija recommended it. The two fairy tales are actually in quite different registers: The Light Princess is light and pun-filled (it reminded me rather of A. A. Milne’s Once on a Time), while The Golden Key has a more serious, mythical tone, especially once the characters leave the borders of fairyland and plunge into a series of semi-allegorical meetings with the Old Man of the Sea, and the Earth, and Fire.

The edition I read had luscious black-and-white illustrations by Ruth Sanderson. Black and white is perhaps an odd choice for a story that begins with a golden key found literally at the base of a rainbow, and yet the dramatic contrast really seems to suit the mythical nature of the story.

I also finished Anne C. Voerhoeve’s My Family for the War, a novel about a young Jewish girl who escaped Germany on a kindertransport not long before World War II, and her life with a family in England. This book was perfectly fine without at any point taking wing and soaring for me, although I’m not sure if that was the book itself or the translation.

And finally - last but not least! - I read Tamar Adler’s Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revisited. Adler wrote what is probably my very favorite cooking book, An Everlasting Meal, which does include some actual recipes but is an exploration of a philosophy of how to cook and eat both frugally (in terms of time as well as money) and well.

Something Old, Something New is less philosophically ambitious, but just as beautifully written, and I marked down a few recipes I’d like to try (particularly intrigued by the inside-out chicken Kiev). Here’s Adler’s description of a recipe for crepes Suzette: “Here is a no-nonsense version to which nonsense should be added at will.”

What I’m Reading Now

Sally Belfrage’s A Room in Moscow. Why didn’t I get this from interlibrary loan sooner? I could have used so much of the info in this book in Honeytrap! That’s fine, though: I can just save it up and use it if/when I write another Soviet themed novel.

Seriously, though, it kills me that during the ice rink scene Gennady could have bragged to Daniel, “In Moscow we flood an entire park (Belfrage doesn’t say WHICH park, just “the largest.” Gorky Park??) for skating.” Such a missed opportunity!

What I Plan to Read Next

ladyherenya posted about The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking on the exact same day my RL friend Emma recommended it to me over Zoom, so clearly I have to give the book a try!