A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Who just finished Kristin Lavransdatter? ME! *spikes football* It wasn’t always an enjoyable reading experience as I read, but I’m glad to have read it now that it’s done: it gives such a rich vision of medieval Norwegian society that you could almost step into the page and drink ale in the hearth house.

This is not to say that I would go around recommending it willy-nilly, because there are also times when it is a slog (Kristin and Erlend have many variations on the same problem - and you have to give Sigrid Undset this, she comes up with MANY new variations - but it’s always the same basic problem. Erlend is reckless and irresponsible, and Kristin can neither forgive him nor break from him.

I was so close to finishing William Dean Howells’ My Literary Passions last week that it only took me about fifteen minutes to wrap it up, but I’m still sad that it’s over. His musings about the book-reading life are just so relatable! Like this comment, after he confesses to a fondness to some long-forgotten trashy novel:

“Perhaps I shall be able to whisper the readers behind my hand that I have never yet read the Aeneid of Virgil; the Georgics, yes; but the Aeneid, no. Some time, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely. That is often the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely.”

Who among us doesn’t have such a book floating somewhere in our life-time reading plans?

I also finished Paul Watkins’ Stand before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England, and my days of thinking that the English boarding school system sounds like one of the worst things that people have ever voluntarily inflicted on their children are certainly coming to a middle.

What I’m Reading Now

In 1903, Jean Webster visited Italy, and like many Anglophone writers found it impossible to resist setting a novel there. (I can throw no shade; I’ve done it myself.) Webster wrote two: Jerry Junior, a light comic novel, and The Wheat Princess, which is the last book I need to read before I’ve encompassed Webster’s entire oeuvre.

So far it seems pretty solidly second-tier Webster; on par with Jerry Junior, certainly not reaching the heights of Daddy-Long-Legs or When Patty Went to College. But perhaps because it’s her final book for me, reading it has made me sad that she died so young: she has a fairly varied output (which is part of the reason the quality is so varied, probably) and who knows what new and interesting things she would have tried if she got the chance?

I’ve also begun Edward L. Ayers’ The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, which starts with Gettysburg and will stretch, presumably, through Reconstruction. I’m still in the Gettysburg part, and so far I’m really appreciating the way that Ayers makes battles make sense - not in the sense that he gives you a blow-by-blow of who is charging where, but as an overall part of the war, how battles are shaped not only by generals but by the sheer physical facts of the terrain and equipment and the available amount of food.

In a way it reminds me of Tolstoy in War and Peace (exasperating though it is to praise Tolstoy’s Theory of History in War and Peace) - of his emphasis on the physical limitations of armies. It’s easy to say, in hindsight, that Meade ought to have cut off Lee’s retreat (just as Kutuzov ought to have cut off Napoleon’s), but the fact that this would have been militarily advantageous doesn’t change the fact that an army can reach a stage of such exhaustion that neither its horses or its men are physically capable of going fast enough to cut off another army’s retreat.

What I Plan to Read Next

It’s October, which makes it the right book to read Shirley Jackson, am I right? (All months are the right months to read Shirley Jackson, but October is even more right than most.) The Road through the Wall is the only novel of hers I haven’t read, so I’ve put a hold on it at the library.

I probably ought to read some of her short stories too (at very least “The Lottery”!), but - confession time - I very rarely read short stories. It’s funny, because I love short books (this is one of the reasons I continue to read lots of children’s books), but somehow this has not translated into an interest in short stories.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sam Eastland’s Berlin Red, which is bafflingly poorly copy-edited. I don’t mean just that there are typos (although there are typos), but there are also bizarre formatting issues. For instance, many of the two-line paragraphs are indented on both the first and second line, so you think you’re getting a new paragraph and then surprise! it’s just the old one, continuing on. Or, conversely, you’ll have two lines of dialogue smushed together, like so:

“Yes?” said Kirov. “I think we should stop for the night,” said Pekkala.

I don’t understand how the book got like this and it’s SO distracting and frustrating. It’s the final book in the series, too; it deserved better.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun reading Mario Giordano's Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions, which is pretty good so far! Lots of Sicilian countryside and an alcohol-sodden older woman for the detective, which is an unusual combination.

And I’ve continued on in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which served up this fascinating fact this week:

“If you take ordinary grasshoppers of any of several species from any of a number of the world’s dry regions - including the Rocky Mountains - and rear them in glass jars under crowded conditions, they go into the migratory phase. That is, they turn into locusts. They literally and physically change from Jekyll to Hyde before your eyes… They are restless, excitable, voracious. You now have jars full of plague.”

Isn’t that cool? I always wondered where locusts came from.

But it also served up a harrowing chapter about death, the omnipresence of death in the natural world, and the human inability to quite comprehend or cope with that fact. Thanks, I guess?

“Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a species that I can hardly believe that they evolved. Other creatures manage to have effective matings and even stable societies without great emotions, and they have a bonus in that they need not ever mourn. (But some higher animals have emotions that we think are similar to ours: dogs, elephants, otters, and the sea mammals mourn their dead. Why do that to an otter? What creator would be so cruel, not to kill otters, but to let them care?)”

What I Plan to Read Next

Your enthusiastic recommendations of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency have convinced me to give it a try! As soon as I catch up on my backlog.

For many reasons, (mainly slothfulness), I didn’t get the Wednesday Reading Meme done in a timely manner this week, so here it is on Saturday again.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

evelyn_b raved about Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther earlier this year, so I read it for my reading challenge “a book recommended by someone with great taste,” and it was An Experience.

My previous experience with Werther consisted of Thackeray’s poem, Sorrows of Werther, which while funny is not really accurate: it makes Charlotte sound insensitive, but actually she’s quite distressed by Werther’s agonizingly intense feeligns for her and his suicide at the end of the book, not least because he arranged it so that he shot himself with Charlotte’s husband’s pistols. Werther WHY. Not in a “trying to make this look like murder” way, more of a “the existence of your husband has destroyed my life” symbolism, but actually that might make it worse for Charlotte. At least if Werther was trying to frame her husband she could be mad at him for acting with such venom and malice, you know?

I also read Sam Eastland’s Red Icon, which involves art theft AND religious cults, which are two of my favorite things, especially in a murder mystery. (If art theft mystery without murder was its own genre, I would totally read that too. One of the most disappointing reads of my life was a nonfiction book about a rare book thief, which I would have thought couldn’t help being good, and YET.)

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve become unexpectedly enthralled by a subplot in E. M. Delafield’s Gay Life. Private secretary and general sadsack Denis has fallen in love with the young novelist Charlotte Challoner. I was briefly afraid that Charlotte might be studying him to create a shy, lonely, self-conscious nobody for some future novel, but in fact she seems to be just as keen on him as he is on her and I’m really hoping that having met with sympathy and companionship for the first time in his life, Denis will blossom - if not like a rose than at least like some country wildflower growing up by the roadside.

I’ve begun Susanna Kearsley’s The Shadowy Horses, which has a Mary Stewart-ish charm so far: a plucky heroine far from home (in Scotland, this time) becomes embroiled in a mystery. There begin to be suggestions of ghosts and I will be thrilled if this comes to fruition.

I’m keeping on with Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This week she comments, “In my life I’ve seen one million pictures of a duck that has adopted a kitten, or a cat that has adopted a ducklings, or a sow and a puppy, a mare and a muskrat. And for the one millionth time I’m fascinated.”

I had thought this “unusual animal friends” trend began with the internet, but evidently some human fascinations are perennial.

What I Plan to Read Next

Sam Eastland’s Berlin Red, which I was bereft - BEREFT - to learn is the final Inspector Pekkala book. What mystery series will I read now???

Actually, I’ve had my eye on Sarah Caudwell’s Hilary Tamar quartet for some time, so probably I should take this opportunity to give it a try.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Lots of things! I have two weeks worth of things to report on, after all.

I finally read Lia Silver's Prisoner, which I have foolishly, foolishly left sitting on my Kindle for *mumblecough* a while - although possibly this was not so foolish, as it means that I won't have to wait quite as long before the sequel comes out?

ANYWAY. DJ's a werewolf marine, Echo's a super-secret badass assassin with an angsty past who valiantly struggles against her feelings - all her feelings, not just her feelings for DJ, although those too. They meet after DJ ges kidnapped by a secret evil government organization with shadowy but clearly assassinate-y aims. Obviously they fall in love.

( Echo's angsty past! )

Also the evil government organization has created an unruly pack of creepily codependent miserable werewolves, I am so there for that.

I finally got the third of Sam Eastland's Inspector Pekkala mysteries set in Stalinist Russia, The Red Moth. Now that his premise is no longer new and exciting, the thinness of his characterization is beginning to gnaw on me.

Also Barbara Hambly's Crimson Angel, the latest Benjamin January book, and probably the most OT3 of the books so far. Rose has to pretend to be Hannibal's concubine for Reasons! They are forced to sleep together in an extremely narrow ship's berth - like, just sleeping, obviously - and Ben notes that it totally doesn't bother him at all because he trusts them both so much.

And then Rose gets kidnapped and both Ben and Hannibal (who are separated) chase her at top speed across the ocean to Haiti, even though Haiti is pretty much a death trap (especially for Hannibal, who is white, but really for everyone)! And when he arrives Ben is tormented, tormented by the fact that he will have to choose whether to search for Rose or Hannibal first. He chooses Rose, but because he has at least a vague idea where she might be, not because he feels good about abandoning Hannibal to his fate.

I also read Isabelle Holland's Trelawny, which is a trip. In fact it's such a trip that my discussion of it bloated out to five hundred words because there is just so much WTFery to discuss, so I'm going to post that separately after Christmas.

What I'm Reading Now

Ben MacIntyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, which is about, well, what it says on the tin. People betraying the hell out of each other for ideological reasons is kind of my jam.

What I Plan to Read Next

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

Shadow Pass is the sequel to Sam Eastland's Eye of the Red Tsar, which I quite liked. Unfortunately, Shadow Pass doesn't live up to its predecessor. The pacing is slower, and the book lacks the sense of impending menace that the first book portrayed so well - a major flaw, given that Shadow Pass takes place during Stalin's purges.

The characters seem increasingly like one-trick ponies - the trick they know is excellent, mind, but it's one I've seen before. Oddly, the characters in Pekkala's flashbacks to tsarist times have considerably more complexity than the Soviet characters. The tsar in particular - obstinate, kindly, but tinged with an erratic ruthless streak - is a standout. Eastland should seriously consider writing a prequel.

Lastly, the issue of Pekkala's possible (probable) complicity in the purges is scarcely dealt with. Now, on the one hand I can respect this. If you don't want to really grapple with an issue, it's often better (in my opinion) to ignore it than to deal with it sloppily.

Writing a book about a government agent in Stalinist Russia during the purges without dealing with the issue of his complicity is like writing a book on an antebellum plantation and ignoring the slaves. The issue is so enormous that it hovers over the book even if the author never brings it up; it's impossible to pretend it's not there, so you have to deal with it even if you'd really rather not. And if you can't bring yourself to do that - perhaps you should consider writing something else.