A Certain Slant of Light

Lo, I stand before you a god among men! For I have finished reading Les Miserables!

Eventually I will have coherent thoughts about other things that happened in the book, specifically EPONINE, who remains my favorite, because she is so deliciously messed up, poor Eponine, I want to write all the AUs where she lives.

I think the simplest way is to have Marius get shot by the soldier that Eponine stops in the book. Thus Marius won't save the barricade; it will fall quite early on. Unlucky Enjolras will be deprived of his glorious last stand, but he will get to shoot Javert, as Valjean won't be there to save anyone...

BUT FIRST I HAVE TO VENT MY FEELINGS ABOUT THIS ENDING which will of course involve spoilers ( spoilers, all the spoilers, though probably unless you are living under a rock you know how Les Mis ends by now... )

IN CONCLUSION: I now need to decide which French classic to read next. Should I stick with Hugo, who (despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that he makes me write screeds about some of his decision) is clearly a winner, and read The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Or should I branch out into Dumas with The Count of Monte Cristo, and thus consider the "prisoner who escapes unjust imprisonment" genre from a different angle?

Books I’ve Just Finished Reading

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Promises to Keep. Atwater-Rhodes’s books are not what you might call “good,” but I keep reading them because they are ridiculously idtastic, although sadly nothing has quite reached the idtastic heights of Shattered Mirror. (Although Hawksong, featuring a political arranged marriage turned love match meant to reconcile two warring species of shapeshifter, got pretty close.)

So on about page five of Promises to Keep, our hero Jay Maranitch starts flirting with a vampire, who is all “So how about some homoerotic blood-sucking action,” to which Jay is like, “Sure,” because vampire-hunters in Atwater-Rhodes are always interested in vampire nookie - no, seriously, they always have vampire lovers. It’s kind of weird.

Jay, however, is apparently an exception to this rule! Because despite spending the book palling around dozens of vampires (well, okay, two vampires, but one of them calls Jay her “pretty witch,” come on), no one sucks Jay’s blood at all. I felt so cheated.

On the other hand, in Promises to Keep Atwater-Rhodes kind of blows up the social structure of her universe, so I have to give her some points of chutzpah.

Books I’m Reading Now

L. M. Boston’s The Rivers of Green Knowe, which is the third book in the...I hesitate to call it series, because this third book has swept away the characters of the first two as if they never existed. Where have Tolly and his grandmother Mrs. Oldknow gone? There doesn’t seem to be a big time gap between books to explain their disappearance.

As such, this book lacks the family history aspect that I so enjoyed in the first two books, where Tolly sees ghosts and learns their stories piecemeal. In its place we have a trio of children - Ida, Oskar, and Ping (whose real name is Hsu, which Oskar changes because he thinks it’s too hard to pronounce) who spend their days messing about in a canoe, finding hermits and giants and islands of winged horses.

I daresay in 1959 Ping’s existence in the book was rather progressive, especially given that he speaks proper English (rather than allegedly comical pidgen) and is no more or less comic than any of the others. (If anyone is wondering how he and indeed Oskar got to Green Knowe: they are refugee children.) But, uh, the other characters randomly changed his name. I am just saying.

Also Les Miserables. I have met the Amis! Grantaire sounds like the most annoying person in the history of the universe and also kind of a stalker! Enjolras is like, “Please go away, you are so annoying,” and Grantaire is like, “NEVER, I am just going to sit here and look at your face and bask in your ridiculous but nonetheless attractive ideals.”

(Maybe I should finish the Enjolras/Grantaire story by having Enjolras take out a restraining order.)

People in Hugo just seem to display their love via stalking; I still haven’t forgotten that scene where Valjean is like, “I don’t even know Cosette and have at this point no intention of adopting her, even though I just got her a super expensive present. But I think I’ll just creep around the Thenardiers’ house like a creeper to figure out where she sleeps, so I can watch her.”

What I Plan to Read Next

More Green Knowe! I intend to sweep through the entire series this summer. I save it for coolish days, when I can open up all the windows and read it in the cross-breeze while drinking tea.

Also Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds, because sineala recommended it to me and I am nothing if not malleable in the face of recommendations. Chinese inspired fantasy! It should be fun.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Jaclyn Moriarty’s A Corner of White, but I have a proper review in the works for that, so I shall not detain us here any longer than to note that I quite liked the book.

Also L. M. Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe, which is the first of her Green Knowe series. I don’t know if the rest of the series is like this, but the first book is great as long as you’re cool with the fact that it is not so much a novel as a long, atmospheric, lovingly detailed description of a slightly magical country house full of History and of ghosts. But, like, nice ghosts, so it’s not like they contribute suspense.

I found it deliciously soothing, but I suspect if it’s not your cuppa then it’s deadly dull.

What I’m Reading Now

More Les Mis. Infinite Les Mis. I’m kind of stalling on it because we’re going to meet the Amis soon, and I suspect that once I read about the book canon Enjolras and Grantaire, I will be way too embarrassed to finish/continue my fic, and that would be a mean thing to do to my readers, whom I have already dragged through seven chapters of poor life choices and philosophical rambling.

HOWEVER possibly it will simply inspire me to finish the story, so I should really get on that.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have Grace Lin’s Starry River of the Sky, which I am saving for my visit home over Memorial Day weekend. Chinese folktale remix! With illustrations! I am excited!

Also Maureen Johnson’s 13 Little Blue Envelopes, because I have heard Maureen Johnson’s work mentioned hither and thither AND ALSO the book features European travel, so. Clearly a win-win.

Plus if I like her work, she has a ton of books, so I am clearly set for the rest of the summer. Except there are SO MANY BOOKS I want to read, you guys, how will I ever be able to prioritize???

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frances Hodgson Burnet’s A Lady of Quality, which is interesting in part because it is such a contrast to Emily in The Making of a Marchioness. Emily’s chief quality is her good cheer, her patience, and her massive, massive gratitude once her Marquis proposes to her.

I get why she’s so grateful - she was looking at a long and lonely life and a probably-poverty-stricken death otherwise - but still, sometimes I just wanted to say to her, “Have a little self respect! Or at least do something to make me think there’s more to your relationship with the really rather selfish marquis than the fact that you are so, so grateful to him?”

Clorinda, the heroine of A Lady of Quality, is quite the opposite. She comes into the world shrieking like a banshee, and by the age of six her terrific willpower (and lung capacity, and willingness to kick and hit and shriek) have terrified all the servants into doing her will despite the fact that her father takes no interest in his children. But then he meets Clorinda, and makes a pet of her because he is so charmed by her fury and her beauty.

Clorinda’s beauty. Oh, man, Clorinda’s beauty. Like Cedric’s incredible handsomeness in Little Lord Fauntleroy, Clorinda’s beauty gets described every other page. I don’t even think I’m exaggerating. And in both books it gets so repetitive, I kept hoping Cedric or Clorinda would fall off horses and break their noses or do something to mar their looks, but nooo. And doubtless they would have been beautiful with broken noses, anyway.

(And then a bunch of other stuff happens to Clorinda: her childhood is actually rather a small part of the book. It’s a very odd book, perhaps especially for a Victorian book, although I don’t think a standard modern heroine could get away with some of the things Clorinda does. At any rate, I can’t remember the last book I read that presented the heroine beating a horse into submission as a sign of her own high spirit and willpower.)

What I’m Reading Now

Les Miz, for the foreseeable future. Javert and Valjean are playing cat and mouse through the streets of Paris.

Also also, I’m reading Maria Cummins’ The Lamplighter, which is a sentimentalist bestseller from the 1850s about a little girl named Gertie, who lives a terrible and squalid life, unloved by anyone, until she is taken in by the lamplighter - who is named, with one of those wonderful mid-century novel names, Trueman Flint. He is from New England. His name is the most New English of names.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have been thinking that as this summer I am taking French class, I should make this a Summer of French: French class, French classics (all the Hugo! more Zola!), French movies, and of course French desserts.

I need to decide which Zola novels to read, because he wrote approximately five zillion. Does anyone have Zola opinions?

What I Just Finished Reading

Charles Finch’s latest Charles Lenox mystery, A Death in the Small Hours. Since I first found this series I have been earnestly questing to make someone else read them, because - Victorian murder mysteries! Cracking good mysteries with a good sense of period and a more delicate grasp of character than mysteries often have! How can you go wrong with that?

Actually Finch does sometimes go wrong: he has an occasional fondness for convoluted conspiracies, which are not my cup of tea (although, now that I think about it, A Death in the Small Hours does contain a conspiracy. Clearly that one did not bother me). But A Death in the Small Hours catches him at the top of his game: the mystery is most satisfying, as is the depiction of the country village.

Finch has a great affection for his period, without being blind to its faults. His books are set rather earlier than Downton Abbey, but I suspect they would appeal to much the same audience - provided they appreciate murder mysteries as well as period pieces.

The mysteries are fun, but the thing that sets these books above is the slow unfolding of Lenox’s relationship with his neighbor Lady Jane, and the way the secondary characters grow and change, sometimes two steps forward and one step back. There’s a sense, sometimes melancholy, that we’re seeing snapshots of their lives.

What I’m Reading Now

Les Miserables. By which I mean, I read the first chapter, which is three pages long. Myriel has become bishop of Digne. But still! The journey has begun!

Also Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Shield Ring, although I started it when I was getting sick and the beginning has thus descended into a strange dreamlike quality. (To be fair, I think the first chapter is pretty dreamlike anyway: Frytha is too young and too confused to be thinking straight.)

What I Plan to Read Next

More Les Miserables, obvs. Also Sarah Rees Brennan’s Unspoken, which I’ve had for...like a week and haven’t started yet. Does anyone else have this problem? You get a book you’ve been looking forward to and then feel strangely reluctant to start it?

I’ve also got Jaclyn Moriarty’s newest, A Corner of White, which is waiting for just the same reason. It just doesn’t seem likely to me that any of her books are going to knock me off my feet like Bindy Mackenzie did - it’s not that I think Bindy Mackenzie is such a perfect book (in fact I tend to ignore the ending entirely, because I think it undercuts the rest of the book), but that it was the perfect book for me. And yet I can’t help going into Moriarty’s books with Bindy-size expectations.