A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition would make an amazing addition to an interdisciplinary course in history and literature. It’s both a good novel and a good social tract - a rare combination! - an interesting story (actually, several intertwining stories, to better cover the many facets of society in the Virginia town of Wellington) peopled by three-dimensional characters, which also serves to demonstrate the whys and hows of white supremacy’s resurgence in the south after the end of Reconstruction.

The ending sequence, in which a race riot engulfs Wellington, is particularly excellent: tense, frightening, chaotic, a whirlwind that swiftly grows beyond the control of its instigators but will nonetheless serve their ends. It leads to a confrontation between Mrs. Carteret, the daughter of a white plantation owner, and her hitherto unacknowledged half-black half-sister Janet Miller, which… well, I won’t spoil it, but it’s stunning.

I also finished Marie Brennan’s Turning Darkness into Light, which after a somewhat slow start (I feel this way about a lot of Brennan’s books) built to a VERY satisfying crescendo, although ( minor spoiler )

One thing I love about Brennan’s work - this is true of the Lady Trent books, too - is how engaged they are with the process of scholarship, the intricacies and the pleasures of research, that beautiful Eureka! moment when everything clicks into place but also the enormous amount of groundwork that has to be laid before that moment can occur.

A lot of books, even books supposedly about scholars, don’t delve into this topic. I suspect it’s very hard to write, not least because you’ve got to do all of that research yourself or else make up an imaginary subject for your characters to research, which in the end would be almost as much work. And then, of course, you’ve got to parcel all that information out so that the reader is always hungry for more. But Brennan does it very well.

Oh, and I read Hope Larson’s All Summer Long, a graphic novel about a girl’s summer in between seventh and eighth grade, as she navigates changing friendships and delves deeper into her love of music. Sweet! I enjoyed it.

What I’m Reading Now

Thanhha Lai’s Butterfly Yellow is told in alternating POV’s, and at first I didn’t get the point of including LeeRoy the wannabe cowboy who has never actually ridden a horse when clearly Hang, the Vietnamese refugee who is searching for her brother who was brought to the US as an orphan years ago, has a much more interesting story. But then I realized that LeeRoy is like, oh, the whipped cream that you eat with an exceptionally rich flourless chocolate cake. The cake is amazing, but you could eat a bite or two at a time without the whipped cream to cut the intensity.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve just realized that the first four Newbery Honor books are all available on Gutenberg (all the later ones are still under copyright in the US, because American copyright law is The Worst), and now they are all on my Kindle.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Beyond the Gates is a wild ride from start to finish. In heaven, the narrator attends a concert by Mozart - a sermon by St. John the Apostle - and then a symphony of color directed by Raphael, which sounds like Fantasia, and Imax, except genuinely a sphere so the color is literally all around you, and as saturated and intense and yet also as delicate as the most wonderful sunset...

Among other prominent men, Phelps also places Darwin in heaven; I wonder how her readers reacted. Then she goes on to muse, “Where was Buddha, ‘the Man who knew’? What affectionate relation subsisted between him and the Man who Loved?” which ecumenicism I imagine made some of her readers froth too…

Someday I should track down contemporary reviews and see what people really did think. Although it seems likely the people who would blow their tops about Darwin in heaven would probably know better than to read a Phelps book by that point in her career.

What I’m Reading Now

Jean Webster’s Just Patty, an American girls’ boarding school story. Did you know that the Americans actually got cracking on girls’ boarding school stories before the British did? (What Katy Did at School is an early example; the Little Colonel series also contains a book set at boarding school.) Then in the twentieth century the British took it over so thoroughly that we all think of it as their genre, which is a very British thing to do, really.

Patty’s school has a farm attached to it; Webster tosses out this detail as if it were a regular thing for schools to have. I note this down because I’ve got a dim idea about writing an early twentieth century American boarding school story (or perhaps women’s college story? Those were also quite popular) and it might be a useful detail. There could be horses.

I’ve also continued on in Thanhha Lai’s Listen, Slowly and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Friendship, but I have nothing new to say about them, except that I’m trucking on. NaNo is rather hard on one’s reading time.

What I Plan to Read Next

The library ought to have Abbie Reese’s Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns for me any day now. ANY DAY. ALL I WANT IS NUNS, LIBRARY.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women. What a peculiar, intense book this is. evelyn_b, I hope you do read this one, for the entirely selfish reason that I want someone to talk about it with; I’m not sure if you’ll like it (I’m not sure if I like it) but I think I can say pretty definitely that you won’t be bored.

It’s a hard book to describe without giving away spoilers, which is odd because it’s not a hugely plotty book. But the way that you see certain characters changes as the book progresses till they seem like different people - not because they’ve changed in any way - it’s as if as you learn more about them, the things you already know snap into a different configuration, and suddenly you’ve got a totally new view.

I also read Caroline Frances Little’s Little Wintergreen, purely because it came up when I searched Frances Little (author of Lady of the Decoration) and I was curious what it was. It turns out that it’s a Sunday school tract, complete with a Terrible Accident Caused by Disobedience which leads to conversion (with the aid of a little book of Bible verses).

Oh! And I finished a couple more books for the Newbery Honor project. The voice remained good throughout Sheila Turnage’s Three Times Lucky, but as a mystery I thought it relied too much on luck & coincidence, which is a problem I’ve had with other children’s mysteries I’ve read.

And I had mixed to negative feelings about Stephanie Tolan’s Surviving the Applewhites. After he gets kicked out of all the schools in Rhode Island, thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent Jake Semple is sent to live with friends of his family: the artsy Applewhite clan, who live in an old motel which they’ve transformed into a studio.

In some ways the Applewhite clan is charming, and I suspect that when I was actually in school, I would have been thrilled by the descriptions of project-based homeschooling: yes, let me read about the psychological effects of torture all day! (That was my hobby when I was a teenager. I thought it would help me write better and more realistic trauma in fic.)

But I thought Jake’s reform was much too easy: within a few chapters he’s decided it’s this or juvie so he’s gotta make this work (people have told him this before, so why did he decide it was true this time around?) and he begins to settle in, and even before his reformation, he never does anything seriously delinquent on Applewhite property. Sure, he smokes, he swears, he wears a lot of earrings, but he doesn’t set the barn on fire (he’s famous for having set his school on fire, which was evidently an accident, though we never hear the details) or punch anyone in the face or whatever. If you’ve set a character up as the most delinquent juvenile delinquent EVER, there’s gotta be some deliquenting before he’s saved by the power of Art, you know?

And I gave up on Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Life is too short for books that aren’t grabbing you.

What I’m Reading Now

Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers, and How They Grew. Can you believe I haven’t read this book before? I feel that I really ought to have read it for my college capstone paper. So far it’s treacly.

What I Plan to Read Next

Deborah Ellis’s The Breadwinner. I liked Nora Twomey’s animated version so much that I decided to check out the book as well.

Oh! And it turns out Thanhha Lai (who wrote Inside Out and Back Again) has a new book out. So probably that, too!