A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sarah Rees Brennan’s Tell the Wind and Fire, a 2016 retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities which is quite enjoyable within the confines of its genre, which genre is modern YA. Therefore, Lucie Manette and her boyfriend Ethan and her boyfriend’s magical doppelganger Carwyn (a soulless double created when Ethan’s extremely wealthy and powerful family used a Dark spell to save him from death) are not merely more-or-less ordinary people caught up in a revolution. They are at the absolute center of the Revolution in which Dark New York (Brooklyn) rises up against Light New York (Manhattan).

Are all cities now divided into Light and Dark? Do other cities, in fact, exist, and if they do, do they have an opinion on this whole revolution thing? Reader, you are asking the wrong questions. The right question is “Do any of us really truly ship Lucie with Ethan when Carwyn is right there lounging in doorways being handsome and oppressed and full of quips?” (Perhaps also “Does Carwyn have a soul?”, but you’ve read modern YA. You already know the answer is “yes.”)

What I’m Reading Now

This week in Villette, Lucy Snowe acts as Ginevra’s lover in a play, then spends the long vacation all but alone in the abandoned school. Her already disordered nerves quickly take a nosedive into crushing melancholia, which ends with Protestant Lucy going to confession because if she doesn’t speak to another human being of her suffering she might just die.

I realize that many modern readers struggle with Lucy’s attitude toward Catholicism in this book, but I think if you mentally replace Catholics with the religious group you personally consider most wrongheaded - Southern Baptists, perhaps, or Mormons - you get a sense of the desperation that forced Lucy to this step, and the largeness of soul required for her to comment afterward (and notwithstanding that his response to her confession was “these impressions under which you are smarting are messengers from God to bring you back to the true Church”), “He was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good. May Heaven bless him!”

What I Plan to Read Next

After Thanksgiving passes, I’ve got a slate of Christmas books planned. Particularly excited for Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal and a couple of Christmas-themed books of Susan Cooper’s.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands! It reminded me of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books in its unusually grounded and realistic approach to romance, albeit in a world with elves and mermaids. The romances are not driven solely by grand sweeping feelings - Elliot actually does start out with a grand sweeping crush, and this doesn’t work out for him, and it’s very painful but not the end of the world - but by a complex calculus of who the characters are attracted to, and whether they actually like that person (a lot of books don’t bother to draw this distinction), and if so how much and if their feelings are returned and in what degree etc. etc. etc.

( Spoilers )

I also finished Bell Irwin Wiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy, which I don’t think is as strong as his later book The Life of Billy Yank. He worked harder to understand the Yanks because he had less natural sympathy with them (he states this right out in the book) and I think it ultimately resulted in a more thoughtful book - plus of course he had ten years more experience as a writer and researcher by the time the second book came out.

And I zipped through Michaeleen Doucleff’s Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, because I love books about what you might call cross-cultural life: “and THIS is how people in X country eat/sleep/play/exist!” This is one of those nonfiction books where the subtitle is at odds with the actual content of the book, wherein Doucleff points out that the cultures she’s writing are not fossilized remnants of the past, but living breathing current cultures where children watch TV and play on Xboxes and so forth and so on.

There’s a particularly good chapter at the beginning about the history of American child-rearing advice, which is fascinating and depressing in the same way as reading about the history of American dieting advice: both are replete with so-called experts blaring out with great authority advice that is based on shaky evidence (if any evidence at all!) and either does not work or actively works against the goal it’s supposed to achieve. For instance, in the intersection of dieting and child-rearing advice, a lot of advice that was intended to teach children healthy eating habits actually tends to create disordered eating behaviors, in part by focusing an unhealthy amount of attention on the child’s eating habits.

The other thing that struck me is that many of the child-rearing practices Doucleff describes could come straight out of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. I particularly had this feeling about the chapter about involving children in the work of the household at whatever level is appropriate to the child’s maturity and skill: sometimes the child can stir the bubbling pot of pumpkin, other times the child just looks on and watches as the parent melts lead for bullets.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Tom Brown’s School Days! Tom’s friend George Arthur has just been Dangerously Ill, and frankly I thought he was going to die because he is clearly Too Good for this World, but no, he’s been spared (for now! Wouldn’t be surprised if he dies before the end, though) to beg Tom to start actually doing his Greek homework instead of using cribs. Tom is aghast, but obviously he’s going to knuckle under and probably have an epiphany about how there might be something to these ancient Greek chaps after all.

What I Plan to Read Next

Does anyone know of any books that focus specifically on the experience of being a World War I amputee? Not just the medical experience during the war, but the lived experience after - what it was like to live with the prosthetic limbs of the era, and that sort of thing.

I’ve decided that I will, in fact, publish David and Robert (I’m thinking an October release date), so it’s crunch time on my World War I research.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Aiden halted by the first cute boy he saw. “What are you doing tonight?”

The boy seemed staggered. Harvard didn’t blame him. Aiden sounded rather as though he was demanding the boy’s money or his life.

“Being… heterosexual?” the boy answered at last.

Aiden stood there being gorgeous at him. A stunned and dazzled expression grew on the boy’s face, as though he’d accidentally looked directly into the sun or encountered a pinup model.

“Or maybe…not?” said the boy, a long pause between the words.

Sarah Rees Brennan’s Fence: Striking Distance is an absolute delight that frequently had me laughing and/or shrieking out loud. I went into this book wanting to smack Aiden and by the end of the book… well, okay, I still wanted to smack Aiden, but in a kind and loving way.

I loved Brennan’s characterization of Aiden and Harvard, and I thought Nicholas was pretty good (LOVED the way that his attention just slides of Aiden whenever Aiden talks; I always enjoy a character who is just not charmed by the Most Charming character), but I had some doubts about her characterization of Seiji. She presents him as just Not Getting social cues, whereas in the graphic novels I much more had the impression that he could have gotten social cues if he gave a damn, which he doesn’t.

I also loved Nancy Farmer’s A Girl Named Disaster, although I felt it very slightly fell off at the end, which seems to be almost unavoidable in the wilderness adventure genre; inevitably the character must return to civilization and I always feel like, “But do they HAVE to?” And, well, Nhamo was on the verge of starvation, so clearly she did.

The wilderness adventure parts are great, though, and they make up the bulk of the book. And it’s by no means a bad ending! Just not as exciting as Nhamo in the wilderness talking to a maybe-ghost (or maybe-dream) about how to repair her boat.

What I’m Reading Now

asakiyume! I bet Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm was the book you were thinking of last week with the walled village where people dress in traditional style, because that is ABSOLUTELY something that happens in this book! Outside is a futuristic city with flying buses and an old dump that has become a plastic mine; within the walls, a traditional village where people tell riddles to pass the time.

I’ve also been galloping through Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, you know, for a little light reading (but also research for the amount of trauma that I keep dumping on the heads of the poor benighted characters in my books, who really deserved better from life).

What I Plan to Read Next

I would like to read Fence: Disarmed, but ALAS, the library doesn’t have it yet, so I will have to make do with Sarah Rees Brennan’s earlier novel In Other Lands for now. I’ve meant to read it for ages anyway.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Laurel Braitman's Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves. It might also be subtitled "How Humans Drive Animals to Madness," because while some of the animals in the book seemed to have an underlying tendency toward instability, most of them seem to have been driven to their compulsions or anxieties by human abuse or neglect or captivity.

As you might imagine, this makes it a hard book to read, but interesting and thought-provoking. I particularly enjoyed the elephant sections.

What I'm Reading Now

Still Unmade, mostly out of sheer cussedness, because goddamnit but I want to know what happens to these characters. Unless the reviews on Sarah Rees Brennan's next book are phenomenal, I probably won't read it.

I've also just begun Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, which I think I'm going to enjoy.

What I Plan to Read Next

Mary Stewart's Rose Cottage. I waffled a while between that and her book The Stormy Petrel, but Rose Cottage looks like something my mother might enjoy too so I decided to read it first.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Lev Tolstoi was right when he dreamed of being put in prison. At a certain moment that giant began to dry up. He actually needed prison as a drought needs a shower of rain!

All the writers who wrote about prison but who did not themselves serve time there considered it their duty to express sympathy for prisoners and to curse prison. I...have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation:

"Bless you, prison for having been in my life!"

(And from beyond the grave come replies: It is all very well for you to say that - when you came out of it alive!)

This quote is from the second volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and illustrates, I think, one of the animating tensions of the books. Solzhenitsyn sees adversity as a great testing ground for morality, something that not only proves but can also strengthen character (although it can also ruin character - although not, in Solzhenitsyn's view, as badly as unconstrained power does), but he's also keenly aware that deadly adversity is, well, deadly, that many people don't come out of it alive, and for those who died of it - even if they didn't die badly; if they died without betraying their own beliefs, or anyone else - it is an unalloyed evil.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm on the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago. Right now I'm reading the bit about prison escapes, which is much easier going than the hopelessness of the second volume. Admittedly, the prison escapes are mostly hopeless too, in the sense that the prisoners rarely stay free for long, but at least they haven't yet consigned themselves to a miserable death.

Also reading Annie Jacobs' Operation Paperclip, about the American program to bring German scientists to the US after World War II. Right now Operation Paperclip and the War Crime Commission are dueling over who's going to get a certain aviation engineer who conducted human experiments on prisoners on Dachau. Spoiler alert: Operation Paperclip is going to win.

It's an excellent book, and I can even sort of if I squint a lot see where the Operation Paperclip people are coming from (I wouldn't want Stalin getting his hand on biological weapons experts either), but man, I feel like turning some of these people over for trial and hanging would have kept them out of Stalin's hands just as effectively.

I'm also reading Sarah Rees Brennan's Unmade. Brennan is trying to depict a town under the sway of evil rulers who have cowed most of the local populace into submission; juxtaposing her book with The Gulag Archipelago really highlights the flaws in her depiction. She tells us the townsfolk are scared, but I'm not really feeling it. So far, all of Kami's friends have stayed staunch, and none of the people cooperating with the sorcerers seem to be doing so out of crushing terror instead of either lust for power or weak wills.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have a book called The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute on hold at the library. Because who doesn't want to read about the dark side of cute?

And hopefully it will be a bit of light reading after all these gulags and Nazis.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which I fully expected to include an actual fistfight between the Long Ranger and Tonto. I pictured it kind of like the knock-down drag-out let’s-destroy-your-mansion fight between Kato and Britt in The Green Hornet, except the filmmakers totally cheated Kato out of his victory, whereas obviously Tonto would knock the Lone Ranger’s teeth out.

Suffice it to say that this story does not exist outside of my brain. I feel unreasonably disappointed about this fact.

Also Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting, which did not disappoint! My poor powers of description cannot do it the justice of Sarah Rees Brennan’s hilarious review, although I will say that Brennan’s review makes the book sound over the top in a way that it really isn’t. In context, the story seems psychologically plausible in a way that thrillers often don’t, and I think this groundedness is what made me like the book so much. The peril felt real.

I loved the heroine, Linda, with her love of books and her mind stuffed full of poetry - snatches of it drift through her head as she interacts with the world - who is yet sensible, calm, and protective of her nine-year-old charge Philippe. Linda’s affection for Philippe is one of the most charming things about a very charming book, and I love the way Philippe is written, too, because he feels just as real and individual as the adult characters.

Brennan comments that many of Stewart’s other novels have exasperating gothic heroes of the “I will keep huge secrets from you BECAUSE” variety, which is really too bad. I thought Nine Coaches Waiting did a good job hitting all the fun gothic tropes (giant scary mysterious house! luxurious living! mortal peril!) without including the similarly tropetastic asshole romantic lead who will drive me up the wall.

The comments on Brennan’s entry mention Stewart’s Thornyhold, The Ivy Tree, and Madam, Will You Talk as being good, though, so perhaps I will keep my eye out for them. And I’ve been meaning to read The Moon-Spinners, because I want to see the movie with Pola Negri… Any Stewart fans in the house?

What I’m Reading Now

John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. So far, it’s way less scarring than The Dead Ponies The Red Pony! But I wouldn’t recommend it; if you want good Steinbeck, I think The Moon is Down is more interesting and Travels with Charley is more fun. (My friend Micky swears by The Short Reign of Pippin IV, but it has a bit too much of Steinbeck On Gender Roles for my taste.)

I’m also reading Eva Ibbotson’s A Company of Swans, which is like cotton candy in the best way possible. Our heroine escapes her oppressive father by joining a ballet company, which goes to the Amazon, where she meets the lost heir to an estate that she just happened to visit right before she left England!

And of course the heroine and hero are both superlatively excellent people in the way that Ibbotson’s romantic leads always are, which would probably get tiresome as a steady diet but is wonderfully refreshing on occasion. Sometimes I just want to read about marvelously compassionate people (who incidentally dance beautifully) being wonderful to each other.

What I Plan to Read Next

Barbara Michaels’ Houses of Stone. I liked Nine Coaches Waiting so much, I’ve decided to check out some of the other books Sarah Rees Brennan reviewed in her Gothic Tuesday posts. I most wanted to read Trelawny, which sounded the most awesomely ridiculous (mistaken identity twins!), but sadly the library did not have it.

But Houses of Stone has lost literary manuscripts from a forgotten yet brilliant Victorian woman poet, so that should be fun!

Sarah Rees Brennan's Unspoken! I enjoyed this book very much. Our heroine, girl reporter/detective Kami Glass, lives in the quaint but secretly spooky English village Sorry-in-the-Vale - and I think Brennan did a good job capturing that village feel, the sense that everyone knows each other and that many of the families have known each other for generations, without belaboring it.

(This is especially impressive because Brennan's writing is often about as subtle as a hammer. It's getting less so: neither Unspoken nor Team Human harp on their Themes with the same repetitive tenacity that the Demon's Lexicon books often did.)

Anyway! Curious Kami has realized that there are dark secrets bubbling beneath her apparently idyllic town: secrets that seem about to bubble to the surface now that the Lynburns have returned to their ancestral home.

And Kami has a secret of her own: ever since she was a tiny child, she's been having conversations with a voice in her head, a boy named Jared.

But then she meets Jared in the flesh...

I don't want to give too much away, because I think one of the greatest charms of Brennan's books is her talent for surprising twists. But I will say that one thing Kami and Jared do not do is fall into each other's arms. Jared thinks their mental connection means they're soulmates, but this reflects his own emotional problems: his parents are neglectful when they're not downright abusive, and he's so emotionally cut off from the world that Kami is his only really stable relationship. Even though until recently he thought she didn't really exist.

Kami, who has had a far less traumatic childhood, is doubtful. After all, she points out, they can barely stand to touch each other: it seems to open up the mental connection between them so they both experience an emotional overload.

Their relationship is by far the most interesting one in the book. The secondary characters are a little sketchy. I liked Kami's best friend Angela a lot, with her devotion to napping and general disdain for everyone, and I hope Holly gets more screen time in the next book, because I have high hopes for her. (But I think giving Kami a side love interest was almost a mistake, honestly, because he's just so much less interesting than Jared).

But there is a sense that everyone talks the same way: this very snappy one-liner dialogue, which is entertaining - but at the same time, they all talk that way.

Nonetheless, Kami and Jared's relationship is interesting enough to make such concerns mere quibbles. They're very different in some ways - Kami is sensible and methodical, Jared emotional and impetuous - but they're united in an attraction to danger.

And I think Jared is a good take on the bad boy type. He's dangerous, but he's not dangerous to Kami, which she is uniquely equipped to know because of their telepathic connection.

( Anyone want to talk about the ending with me? )

I have a strange relationship with Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon trilogy. I read the first two books at top speed, shouting imprecations at their respective narrators ("Nick! Stop being a psychopath! Mae! Stop being ridiculous!") yet somehow coming to the ending filled with the need to read more.

And thus, I ended up ingesting The Demon's Surrender this weekend. In many ways, it's quite of a piece with the other books. The darkness quotient suffers some slippage - our heroes have killed too many magicians without significant repercussions (by which I mean "the death/injury of a named character we actually care about") for the magicians to really seem scary anymore.

The slippage is disappointing artistically, but emotionally I prefer it to the kind of body count the book would rack up if it were really dedicated to the darkness. I don't like stories where half the characters I love die, while the other half end up irreparably damaged, and I'm just as glad it doesn't happen here.

( A little spoiler )

Also, Brennan still tends to hammer her themes with a sledgehammer. (Our new narrator, Sin, is all about PERFORMANCE. Because she's a PERFORMER. Got that?)

Speaking of Sin. She's the narrator of a novel by Sarah Rees Brennan, yet - I like her! She's sensible and not psychopathic and her actions barely ever made me want to punch anything! Sin even likes the Ryves brother who actually has emotions, which made me happy, because Alan deserves love even if he is a lying bastard. Sin is also a liar, so they UNDERSTAND each other.

(I am very slightly sad that Mae and Sin didn't fall madly in love - not that I expected it to happen, really, but they do spend lots of time admiring each other and also if they fell in love they could totally co-rule the Goblin Market.)

Pleased as I generally am about the change, there is one - no, there are two - problems with Sin as narrator. The first is that the reader knows about the Secret Plan which ends up saving everyone, and Sin doesn't, which lends a certain dramatic irony to the proceedings. It's hard to get really into the suspense when you know the big twist ending already.

The other problem is that Brennan's story has simply gotten too big for one narrator, so Sin spends a certain amount of time in unlikely eavesdropping expedition. Two narrators would have been a break from the pattern of the previous books, but they could have covered the story more naturally. In particular I think the book would have been enriched by Jamie's POV. Seriously, man. What's it like living on a boat with a bunch of nutty evil magicians? Are you really as psychological intact as you make out at the end of the book?

I finished Sarah Rees Brennan's The Demon's Lexicon today. I'm of two minds about the book - I can't decide whether I liked it or not. On the one hand, it's exciting and fast-paced and set in an interesting world; on the other, I loathe the main character, and the writing style leaves something to be desired.

( A more in-depth review. No spoilers )

Bottom line: it's worth reading, although I wouldn't make a point of seeking it out. I'll be interested to see what her next book is - I'm confident that some of the flaws in this book will smooth out once Brennan is more confident in her skills - but she's not on my must-read list of authors by any means.

(If anyone else has read The Demon's Lexicon, I'd love to discuss it with spoilers in the comments.)