A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Jean Slaughter Doty’s Can I Get There By Candlelight?, a horse girl book mashed together with a magical time travel book, which I adored. One day when Gail is out riding her horse Candy, she finds a gate leading to a cool shadowy path through the woods. At the other end of the path, Gail meets Hilary, a girl her own age who is wearing an old-fashioned white frock and eating tea cakes in the summerhouse outside a mansion! Gail and Hilary quickly become best friends, meeting almost every afternoon all summer to take turns riding Candy, even as Gail feels a growing unease about the oddity of the whole situation.

This book heads directly for the gooey center of its premise: the bond between girl and horse, the mysterious pathway through the woods, the instant best-friendship. If that appeals to you, you’ll probably love it as much as I did. If it doesn’t, there is not a lot else here, as Doty doesn’t get side-tracked by subplots or side characters.

My only complaint is that the book ended too abruptly. Partly this is just that I didn’t want it to be over! But also ( spoilers for the ending )

Elizabeth Enright’s Tatsinda is a brief, sprightly fairy tale. A magical mountain is entirely populated by people with ice-white hair and blue eyes… except Tatsinda, a golden-haired, brown-eyed girl who was dropped on the mountain by an eagle when she was a baby. The other mountain folk think Tatsinda is a wonderful weaver, but strange-looking and ugly… until the prince confesses his love of Tatsinda, and everyone realizes that different doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Happy end! It’s cute, but it feels shallower than the Melendy books.

I’ve loved Doris Gates’s Blue Willow ever since I read it as a child, so I had high hopes for Gates’s Sensible Kate, but alas I didn’t like it nearly as much. Maybe if I had read it as a child? But also maybe not. I felt that it was just a little too thick with life lessons, and needed more story to string them together.

What I’m Reading Now

Almost done with Teresa Lust’s A Blissful Feast: Culinary Adventures in Italy’s Piedmont, Maremma, and Le Marche! Sorry in advance that the journey has to end. The chapters are so perfectly bite-size, and they always make me hungry. This morning I read one about homemade pasta...

What I Plan to Read Next

I just learned that Elizabeth Wein has a new book out! It’s called Stateless and it’s a murder mystery set during a pre-World War II air race and I have it on hold at the library.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Bowen’s Philip and the Faun is a more straightforward fantasy than his novel The Old Tobacco Shop. Young Philip, camping in the sequoias with his father, meets a faun piping away below the trees. The faun is astounded that Philip can see him, and soon Philip and the faun and the nymph Arethusa set off on a quest: if they can find two other people who can see and hear these mythological folk, the creatures of Greek myth can leave their seclusion and come back to the world!

They go to San Francisco - never named, but recognizable for its cable cars and steep hills; impressive that the city has remained so unchanged a hundred years after the book was written. There they find these two people: a young man playing his oboe in the streets, and a young Chinese girl in Chinatown. (This sequence is about what you would expect from a book from 1926.) The young man and the girl each give a little bit of blood to the Cause of bringing the Greek myths back! But then the oboe man bows to his rich father’s entreaties to come home, thus introducing a tiny impurity into his blood, so the Greek myths do not return after all, ALAS.

Actually the nymphs and fauns etc. were feeling kind of bummed about leaving the sequoias, as who would not?? So they are far from sorry at the turn that this has taken. But nonetheless this seems like kind of a downer ending, and I for one would far rather have watched the Greek mythological creatures run riot through the streets of San Francisco, a la the ending of C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair.

I also finished Bruce Catton’s The Coming Fury! After how I struggled with the Army of the Potomac trilogy, I was surprised to zoom through this book - I think because it’s almost all about the immediate political background to the Civil War (it starts with the Democratic national convention of 1860, which ended up splitting between two regional candidates), rather than actual battles. Hopefully someday I can read about battles again…

Actually, the next book (this is ALSO a trilogy, the Centennial History of the Civil War) may include a lot of battles, as The Coming Fury ends with the Battle of Bull Run. So I may be about to find out.

I meant to read Teresa Lust’s Pass the Polenta: And Other Writings from the Kitchen one delectable essay at a time to truly savor it… but each essay was so interesting, a meditation on wine or heirloom apples or strawberry shortcake (or of course polenta), that I kept reading two or three instead. And now the book is all gone! Gobbled up like a slice of apple pie, when you only meant to have a bite…

What I’m Reading Now

Last week, I said I shouldn’t start any more books until I finished a few… then instantly checked out Judith Flanders’ A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order and Kim Todd’s Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters”. In my defense… I have no defense. I simply saw them and was overcome with lust.

I haven’t actually started Sensational yet, but I have begun A Place for Everything. You may be interested to learn that in the early days of organization, geographical and hierarchical orderings were often preferred to alphabetical - to the point that chroniclers who used alphabetical ordering sometimes apologized for its anarchic tendency to turn hierarchy topsy-turvy, for instance putting “angelus” (angels) before “Deus” (God).

No new Dracula. I fear we must give up our dear Jonathan Harker as Lost to the ravages of that rampaging count.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m REALLY trying to focus on the physical books on my TBR shelf… and conveniently, I have Teresa Lust’s A Blissful Feast: Culinary Adventures in Italy’s Piedmont, Maremma, and La Marche! So I will be reading that.