A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A boatload of books. To be fair, many of these are books that I’ve been patiently working my way through, and a couple of the others were short children’s books, but… still a lot of books.

Third time’s the charm. I didn’t think much of Kevin Henkes’ Junonia or Olive’s Ocean, both of which struck me as a trifle sententious, but The Year of Billy Miller has a Ramona Quimby-ish charm.

Speaking of Ramona Quimby, a different Beverly Cleary book fell my way! Socks, a tale told from the point of view of a cat, which I quite enjoyed. It’s in third person rather than first (like Ralph S. Mouse) and I feel that makes it sound more genuinely cat-like somehow.

I also read Alastair Bonnett’s Unruly Places: Lost Places, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies, which is an interesting catalog of places that defy easy categorization (like the city of Baarle-Nassau, which is a patchwork of border enclaves between Belgium and the Netherlands) but for the most part less memorable than one feels a book with this topic ought to be.

And I finally finished Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure! I must admit it flags in the middle: I thought we might never get out of India.

In fact, I got so bogged down that I took a break to read Susan Coolidge’s A Little Country Girl, in which said country girl spends the summer with her cousins in Newport, which was once a sturdy New England fishing village but has become an immensely fashionable seaside resort where the inhabitants order their sponge-cakes express from New York City. A sign of moral turpitude if there ever was one!

Really, though, Coolidge deploys these contrasts skillfully, and by no means are all the advantages on either side. Candace may have learned good sturdy values in her rural Connecticut home, but her life is immeasurably more cheerful in Newport, and cheerfulness is not a virtue to be sneezed at.

Refreshed by the sea breezes and dulcet descriptions of election cake, I returned to where I had left Duncan in India, and we finally managed to sail for Egypt and the Sphinx, and thence to Malta, where our intrepid heroines visit the tombs of the Capuchin monks, who are entombed sitting up and gazing at the visitors out of their hollow eye sockets. “One was confined behind a wire netting, doubtless not without good reason — probably for the enormity of his puns.” (414)

What I’m Reading Now

My mother lent me Rich Bragg’s The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Kitchen, which is a memoir/family history about working-class Southern cooking and pretty excellent so far.

What I Plan to Read Next

Summer reading is coming! Which means lots of children’s books coming through check-in, which means that I shall let serendipity be my guide. And hope that during the summertime the children will branch out a little from their standard chapter book fare of Geronimo Stilton and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Winston Churchill’s Savrola, which only gets more delightfully iddy as it goes on. It includes this delightful exchange between the despotic President of Laurania and Savrola, who has just been caught kissing the President’s wife (who is totes in love with Savrola now, they’ve spoken like three times but that’s enough):

“Down on your knees and beg for mercy, you hound; down, or I will blow your face in!”

“I have always tried to despise death, and have always succeeded in despising you. I shall bow to neither.”

Savrola succeeds in defeating the despotic president, only for the tide of politics to turn against him, forcing him to flee the city with his love. They stop at the top of a hill to gaze back at the burning city. “‘And that,’ said Savrola after prolonged contemplation, ‘is my life’s work.’”

And then he nobly rides on, the human embodiment of the paragon described in Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” who can “meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same.”

BUT WORRY NOT. Later on the people realize their folly and summon Savrola back, so after nobly bearing tragic defeat, he enjoys triumph after all.

I also read Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake, which was delightful! On an early summer exploring expedition, cousins Portia and Julian discover a pair of quirky old people living in a colony of abandoned summer homes by the edge of a swamp (which used to be a lake), one of which they offer to our heroes Portia and Julian to make over into a clubhouse (!!!!!), AND there are illustrations by the husband-and-wife team who illustrated The Borrowers. Could you ask for more from a single book? It’s a perfect summer idyll of a novel.

What I’m Reading Now

I meant to save up my Sara Jeannette Duncans, but in the end I couldn’t resist, and I’ve begun reading A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves, which is, well, what it says on the tin. In the late 1880s Duncan and her fellow journalist Lily Lewis (a.k.a. Orthodocia) traveled round the world together, starting in Montreal and working their way westward. They passed through Vancouver a mere two years after it was founded and have now landed in Japan, where they have had many adventures, not least of which involves eating something Duncan calls a fish roll which sounds an awful lot like sushi.

They also rent a tiny house for the duration of their stay, which prompts the characteristically droll reflection, “We might even make it valuable to other people by starting a domestic reform movement, when we went home, based on the Japanese idea. Life amounts to very little in this age if one cannot institute a reform of some sort, and we were glad of the opportunity to identify ourselves with the spirit of the times. We were thankful, too, that we had thought of a reform before they were all used up by more enterprising persons, which seems to be a contingency not very remote.” (76)

What I Plan to Read Next

The Iliad, as read by Dan Stevens. I meant to be a bit more thoughtful in my selection of which translation, but then I saw the audiobook with Dan Stevens as the reader and I threw caution to the winds, because it will be like I am listening to the bards of old and anyway the most important thing in an audiobook is a reader you like.

He also read The Odyssey and The Aeneid. I could get really cultured this summer.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did Next, the third book in the What Katy Did trilogy, in which Katy goes to Europe, travels about, nurses a sick girl, and - spoilers I suppose, but how else is a 19th century novel series about a young girl going to end? - finds love.

It cuts off before the wedding, which I thought was a little mean: I wanted to see Katy all in orange blossom, and sailing off to new adventures with her husband the navy officer! Oh well. But then again there is yet ANOTHER sequel (Clover), so I may yet have my wish. And probably see Katy’s little sister Clover married too.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m working on Alice Hoffman’s Nightbird, which is almost but not quite a thing I love - a portrait of a town, in this case a New England town, and a mildly uncanny one at that, and all in all it should be right up my alley but the town just doesn’t feel quite well-realized enough to me. It doesn’t feel solid. The attempted uncanniness is in peril of slipping into twee.

And I’m nearly done listening to Eleanor and Park. ELEANOR’S STEPFATHER IS THE WORST THE WORST THE ACTUAL WORST, although honestly her mother is pretty awful too; I just can’t get over the fact that her financial situation (along with all her other life situations) actually got worse after she married this horrible man. There is literally no excuse!

She tells Eleanor “Oh, I need a husband because otherwise when you kids are grown up I’ll be all alone,” but (1) the youngest of her pre-remarriage children is FIVE, she has more than a decade in which to figure things out, and (2) I can only hope that her new husband will get die in a not-so-tragic accident with a trash compactor and then all her children will abandon her the moment they turn 18 because they can't forgive her for ruining their lives by marrying that awful horrible man. It would be poetic justice for her to end up all alone when she threw her kids under the metaphorical bus in a desperate attempt to avoid it.

I’ve also been reading another Sara Jeannette Duncan (someday I’m going to convince someone to join me in reading Sara Jeannette Duncan, the most archly sarcastic writer in late nineteenth-century Canada), A Voyage of Consolation. Even the title of this book is sarcastic. The narrator Mamie embarks on a “voyage of consolation” to Europe after her engagement breaks, even though she is notably lacking in any need of consolation whatsoever.

Once in Europe, she runs into Mr. Dod, a young man whom she has known since childhood - who is attempting to romantically pursue an English girl named Miss Portheris. (“Miss Portheris only came out two months ago,” remarked Mr. Dod, with the effect of announcing that Venus had just arisen from the foam.)

However, an Englishman - who proposed to Mamie in a previous novel - is also attempting to win Miss Portheris’s hand! Mamie attempts to deflect his attention. This leads to exchanges between the Englishman and Mamie like -

”Marriage in England is such a permanent institution.”

“I have known it to last for years even in the United States,” I sighed.

At the moment my money is on Mamie & Mr. Dod ending up together. They were trapped in the catacombs together for hours! In the company of Mrs. Portheris, Miss Portheris’s formidable mother, who resorted to nibbling a tallow candle for sustenance during their seven hours ordeal, which perhaps makes the whole thing a comic rather than romantic interlude. But still.

What I Plan to Read Next

God, so many things. My next audiobook will be Roald Dahl’s Going Solo, which is a memoir of Dahl’s time as a World War II pilot (how could I say no to that?) AND is read by Dan Stevens, who played Matthew in Downton Abbey and more recently Dickens in The Man Who Invented Christmas, which I liked a lot - I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dan Stevens in anything I disliked - anyway, I expect he’ll be a fabulous audiobook reader.

And my next book-to-read-on-my-computer-at-work is Cornelia Meigs’ The Windy Hill, which was a Newbery Honor award winner in 1922. (Meigs went on to win the Newbery Medal in 1934 with Invincible Louisa, her biography of Louisa May Alcott.) 1922 is the first year the Newbery Medal was awarded and, because of the vagaries of copyright law, the only year for which some of the books are available free online, so after this I’m going to have to throw myself on the tender mercies of Interlibrary Loan, I guess.

Or I could start reading the Honor books from the most recent years instead of the most far-distant. That might be a better plan.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Mary Ann Caws’ Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women Painting and Writing, which is actually a reread; I mentioned this book in one of the very early entries on this journal, and I stumbled on the entry earlier this week and thought, “I want to reread that.”

The book, like the artists profiled within, is gloriously eccentric (and also somewhat poorly copyedited): Caws simply seems to have picked a group of female writers & painters whom she liked and written profiles of them, although commonalities do emerge. Three of the number ended up falling hopelessly for men who could never return their affection: Judith Gautier for Wagner (although this might not be so much love as hero-worship - there’s less of the passionate physical element here than in the others), Dorothy Bussy for Andre Gide, and Dora Carrington for Lytton Stratchey.

There’s a theme here about fearless love, even when that love is hopeless, even when society would see it as pathetic - plain middle-aged Dorothy Bussy falling passionately in love with the (very slightly) younger, dashing, homosexual Andre Gide. Why does western society encourage us to see unrequited love as sympathetic, even upliftingly tragic in men - look at Cyrano de Bergerac or Quasimodo - but silly and mockable in women?

Also Eric Blehm’s The Last Season, which is about the search for a backcountry park ranger who went missing in the High Sierra. Fascinating both in its descriptions of the backcountry - Blehm is perhaps a little too addicted to landscape description, but in such beautiful country it’s hard to blame him too much - and in the details of the search.

I also finished Kristin Levine’s The Lions of Little Rock, which I enjoyed more once I let go of the vision I had of the book I wanted it to be, but not quite enough to make me check out Levine’s other books.

What I’m Reading Now

Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Pool in the Desert, which is a collection of short stories set in British India - of the sort where Indians not only don’t get speaking parts, but don’t appear to exist at all. But it got my attention with the first story. The narrator has a baby in India, but the baby is swiftly sent back to England for health reasons, and therefore mother and child never really become attached to each other - and when, twenty years later, her grown daughter is thrust back on her hands, the narrator is aghast. They’re mother and daughter, but they’re also acquaintances just getting to know each other, and discovering that - while they don’t hate each other; they are nice to each other in the way that people who don’t know each other generally are - they also have nothing in common, no point of contact on which to create the kind of closeness that mothers and daughters are generally supposed to have.

It’s unsentimental about motherhood in a way that is rare even today. “Men are very slow in changing their philosophy about women,” the narrator notes wryly, when an acquaintance expresses horror at her lack of maternal feeling for her daughter. “I fancy their idea of the maternal relation is firmest fixed of all.” And time, perhaps, has proven her right.

I may need a Sara Jeannette Duncan tag.

What I Plan to Read Next

I want to cut down on my to-read list… but I went to the library yesterday to help process new books and ended up with three of them on my list. But of course I have to check out the new iteration of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books! (Which are about her niece, Missy Piggle-Wiggle. Not sure about this!) And there’s a sequel to The War That Saved My Life! And Victoria Jamieson, who wrote Roller Girl, has written another graphic novel (about Renaissance Faire’s!) so OBVIOUSLY I need to read that…

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My favorite of the books I read this week was Ngaio Marsh’s Night at the Vulcan, another one of her charming theater mysteries. And! There is a guest appearance by Mike Lamprey, the eleven-year-old son of the family in Surfeit of Lampreys, who was an important witness in the case and liked it so much that he conceived a desire to join the police. Which he has now fulfilled! And thereby become the first Lamprey to engage in remunerative employment probably ever.

I suspect that at the yearly Lamprey Christmas gatherings the other Lampreys treat him like a war hero for his dash and bravery in getting gainful employment. Mike enjoys it but is also ever so slightly embarrassed.

I also finished up Robert A. Gross’s The Minutemen and Their World, which was interesting although not particularly enlivening. Gross is interested mainly in the men of the town, which is his prerogative of course, but I would have been more interested if there had been more about the women.

I was interested to learn that it was quite common for young women to be pregnant on their wedding day - for couples to in fact use pregnancies as a way to force their parents’ hands in allowing a marriage. This might be useful in a historical romance.

And lastly, I read Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays, the first book in the Melendy quartet. I found this book when I googled “books like Betsy-Tacy.” It’s cute enough, but it has not captured my heart like Betsy-Tacy, so I probably won’t read the others. Unless someone else has read it and believes fervently that the later books in the series are marvelous?

What I’m Reading Now

Still Sara Jeannette Duncan’s An American Girl in London, although I am creeping up on the end. Oh no! Whatever shall I read on my lunch breaks next?

Actually I have a bunch of other books on my Kindle, but I feel that none of them will quite live up to this in sprightliness and local color.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m heading to Bloomington on a road trip, and in keeping with my usual practice I am taking along a Mary Stewart novel: Touch Not the Cat this time. It should be fun! Mary Stewart usually is.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Hampton Sides’ Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, which is excellent. If you’re into historical nonfiction and you’re interested in Martin Luther King Jr., the history of the FBI, the history of criminal investigative technology, manhunts, or 1960s America, I absolutely recommend this book.

I enjoyed Hellhound on His Trail so much that I rushed to the library before I’d even finished it to get another one of Sides’ books. so I could continue to bask in Sides’ clear, lucid prose and his excellent and extensive research. That second book, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, is good but not as propulsively enthralling as Hellhound on His Trail.

I think this is partly because I personally find 1840s & 50s America less interesting than 1960s America, and partly because the story more diffuse, skipping across a wide range of people in a wide-ranging territory (all the way from St. Louis to California), so it doesn’t build up momentum in the same way that the collision course between King and James Earl Ray does - or the post-assassination manhunt for James Earl Ray.

What I’m Reading Now

I am continuing Sarah Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of To-Day, the tale of young Elfrida’s maturation as an artist (she has segued from an artist on canvas to an artist of the newspaper article) and member of bohemia. It has currently developed an odd little love triangle, BOO. Hopefully that will resolve in an acceptable fashion - I say, without much hope at all.

I’ve also started War and Peace, but I’m thinking that I’ll probably set aside a day to post about that - perhaps Friday? - so it doesn’t clutter up the reading meme each week.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still waiting for interlibrary loan to send me Heaven to Betsy. Come on, interlibrary loan! I’m champing at the bit here!

In the meantime I have Roller Girl, a Newbery Honor book this year which is about a girl who gets involved in roller derby. That sounds promising!

It also reminds me of my long-standing ambition to read Shauna Cross’s Derby Girl, the book that inspired the movie Whip It. Maybe that should be my next ILL request...

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The Gadfly, by Ethel Lilian Voynich, and THIS BOOK, you guys. I have many feelings! Not least of which is that I can’t decide if I want to hug Arthur or strangle him, because he has the saddest life EVER, but at the same time everyone else is miserable too, and he has it in his power to make them happier, and he won’t.

( Spoilers, of course. )

This book is soaked, soaked with emotion. It’s kind of awesome in that way. And it makes sense, psychologically, that no one ever sits down to discuss the things that are uppermost in their mind, because Arthur in particular is very thoroughly broken. Even he knows he would be happier if he forgave Gemma and Montanelli and let them each cuddle him for a month (which they are both clearly dying to do). But he can’t. IT’S SO BEAUTIFULLY PAINFUL.

I also read William Dean Howell’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, which makes an entertaining contrast, because it contains a far less flattering portrait of an idealistic young man with an entire lack of self-knowledge. Witness, for instance, Beaton’s musings after he is forced to ask his elderly father for more money yet again:

He pitied his poor old father; he ached with compassion for him; and he set his teeth and snarled with contempt through them for his own baseness. This was the kind of world it was; but he washed his hands of it. The fault was in human nature, and he reflected with pride that he had at least not invented human nature; he had not sunk so low as that yet.

Look at the way Beaton twists even his self-contempt into yet more food for his own conceit! It’s a tiny masterpiece.

It would also get old swiftly at book-length, but fortunately Beaton only headlines one of A Hazard of New Fortunes many plot threads, and no one else is quite so self-deceiving. It’s a rather hard book to describe, actually, because there are so many characters, and while they’re all connected by the new literary magazine that they’re spearheading, they all have their own plot threads that are often quite separate. But it’s a sort of exploration of New York in the late nineteenth century, a musing on the problem of labor and capital; it explores and muses but comes to no conclusions, so while it is interesting it also ultimately feels rather slight.

What I’m Reading Now

Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist, which is evidently the most famous of her novels. I want to like this, because she was a somewhat important Canadian woman writer around 1900, and she wrote travelogues about, for instance, her trip around the globe with her best friend (two women traveling around the world on their own in the 1890s! Why does Kindle not have this).

And yet this is not grabbing me. I find Duncan’s sentence structure strangely hard to follow; I can’t pinpoint just why, though. Normally I find late nineteenth century punctuation easy enough (just look how many semi-colons William Dean Howells snuck into that paragraph above! A man after my own heart), but somehow, somehow not this time. .

What I Plan to Read Next

Not sure yet. I have the airplane ride home tomorrow, so I might read a lot…or I might be seduced by the lure of free movies. Or possibly Dad and I will end up discussing My Future, as the trip is coming to an end and My Future will swiftly become My Present.