A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, in which Romney tracks down many of the books Jane Austen admired (often as ebooks, which I must admit takes much of the romance out of the rare book hunt) and discovers many lost gems of literary excellence. (And also Hannah More, whom she did not take to.) An engrossing read.

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job. Like all of D. E. Stevenson’s novels, this is cozy like sitting curled up in an armchair by the fire with a cup of cocoa while a thunderstorm beats against the window in the night. It’s not that she’s writing in a world where bad things don’t happen, or even where bad things don’t happen to our heroes, but by the end of the book it will all turn out right.

Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, edited by Mikail Iossel and Jeff Parker. An essay collection published not long after 9/11, although only a few of the essays actually touch on that event. Many of them include potshots at American political correctness (hard to embrace the concept if you come from the country where you could literally be sent to a gulag for “political incorrectness”), as well as lists of American books the authors read at a formative age.

I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t read this before Honeytrap, as the book might have been delayed indefinitely while I tried to work my way through the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, as well as some other authors I’ve never even heard of. With truth the author of this essay notes “the average Soviet person probably knew [American science fiction] better than the average American.”

What I’m Reading Now

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Sadly suspicious that none of these characters are ever going to make it to the lighthouse.

What I Plan to Read Next

Does my lightning zoom through Jane Austen’s Bookshelf mean that I will at last read an eighteenth century novel? MAYBE. The library boasts Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. Any recommendations among those works?