A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, which was a wild ride from start to finish. (Collins is clearly having a great time, especially when he’s writing ( Spoilers )

Also Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Racketty-Packetty House, a book about a set of dolls who live in an early Victorian dollhouse, which has been pushed to the side of the nursery now that their owner has a brand spanking new up-to-the-minute dollhouse of 1906. Although the dolls live in fear that their dollhouse may be burned at any minute, they are essentially jolly souls, always joining hands and dancing around in circles. One of the dolls from the new dollhouse yearns to come over and join in the fun… particularly if it means she can meet Peter Piper, who is always turning somersaults. A tale as old as time!

What I’m Reading Now

Traipsing gently onward in Sir Isumbras at the Ford. Young Anne-Hilarion is paying a visit to two elderly ladies who are friends of his father… or are they? I have a suspicion that they may be SPIES, attempting to wrangle details of his father’s secret mission out of innocent young Anne-Hilarion, who of course has no idea what they’re doing.

What I Plan to Read Next

Pining for my Vivien Alcock novels to come in at the library. (The Red-eared Ghosts and Stranger at the Window.) Surely someday soon…

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking, a cookbook/food memoir about Lewis’s childhood during the Great Depression in Freetown, Virginia, a small agricultural hamlet founded by freedmen after the Civil War. A classic, full of succulent descriptions of food as it changed with the rhythms of the seasons. I read this on Thanksgiving and it is indeed a perfect Thanksgiving book.

Also Mary Stolz’s To Tell Your Love, another one of her young adult novels. (I briefly described it as a YA novel, but mid-century young adult is so different from modern that it feels misleading to use the acronym.) In this summer story, the POV drifts between 23-year-old Theo, a hospital nurse; her 14-year-old brother Johnny; and the middle sister, 19-year-old Anne, broken-hearted over a boyfriend who has just ghosted her.

But Anne begins to wonder if it might be just as well to lose the boyfriend when she meets up with her friend Nora, who gave up college last year to make a glorious romantic marriage at the age of seventeen… and now feels trapped in her new life, which she can’t admit to Anne but which Anne nonetheless can see. (At one point Nora leaves the baby with a sitter and feels “like a prisoner released from jail.”)

There is a tag scene where Nora calls her husband at his job at the garage (he had to quit college to support the growing family) and he’s happy to talk to her and Nora feels a warm glow, suggesting the marriage might work out after all, but the overall effect is to warn the young reader that perhaps getting married so very young is not so romantic after all.

What I’m Reading Now

Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White! Marian Halcombe sure is the kind of girl who bonds with men by chattering about how silly women are, huh. (And Wilkie Collins sure is the kind of writer who can write great individual female characters without having any very high opinion of women as a whole.)

I've also just begun D. K. Broster's Sir Isumbras at the Ford! Truly JUST begun it: our hero is still a little boy, who has just been put to bed.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday! Simply ambushed by Laura Amy Schlitz earlier this week… not my fault.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

AT LONG LAST I have finished Wilkie Collins’ Armadale! It probably would not have taken so long, but honestly I found the suspense so stressful that I often had to take breaks before I could go on… Perhaps not what you’d expect from a book that’s 150 years old, but what can I say, Wilkie Collins knows his craft.

( Spoilers )

After Armadale, I wanted something short to read as a palate cleanser, so I read Paula Fox’s One-Eyed Cat, in which a boy in upper New York in the 1930s gets an air rifle for his birthday, which his father forbids him to use… but the boy sneaks it out that night and shoots at a moving shadow - or maybe not a shadow? - it was really too dark to say, but when he sees a one-eyed cat later, he becomes convinced he shot that cat. Some lovely nature descriptions and a lovely picture of his relationship with his mother, who suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis.

I also zoomed through Gerald Durrell’s The Whispering Land, in which Durrell travels to Argentina to film penguins and seals and gather specimens for his zoo, including “an orange-rumped agouti, a large rodent with dark eyes, slender legs and the disposition of a racehorse suffering from an acute nervous breakdown.” A jolly romp, like all of Durrell’s books. I also particularly enjoyed this description of trying to book passage home for a collection of animals:

Most shipping people, when you mention the words “animal cargo” to them grow pale, and get vivid mental pictures of the Captain being eviscerated on the bridge by a jaguar, the First Officer being slowly crushed in the coils of some enormous snake, while the passengers are pursued from one end of the ship to the other by a host of repulsive and deadly beasts of various species.

What I’m Reading Now

lucymonster recommended Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and I’ve started reading it because I’m weak for all things Soviet… But it may take me some time to finish it, because the Soviet Union keeps losing entire armies because Stalin refuses to allow them to retreat, and then the Nazis encircle YET ANOTHER SOVIET ARMY and I shriek “WHY? WHY? WHY?” (this is a cry of existential angst rather than a request for clarification) and then I have to take a little break to read something else.

I’ve also been reading Monika Zgustova’s Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag. I plan to write a longer review (or at least post a selection of quotes), but here’s one for the road. In 1950, Susanna Pechuro recalls, one of her teachers condemned a classmate’s poem as anti-Soviet:

“Don’t you see it’s sad? Some feelings are not meant for Soviet youth.”

“But we’re all sad sometimes,” I objected.

“Soviet youth should never be. Sadness is decadent,” the teacher cut me off.

This is five years after the end of World War II, in which those entire armies kept getting destroyed. But no sadness! Sadness is decadent, comrades!

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m back in the saddle with the Newbery Honor project. I’ve got seven books from the 90s left to go, plus the five (!) Newbery Honor books from this year.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“...perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted; all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words.”

Shirley Jackson’s Come Along with Me: Classic Short Stories and an Unfinished Novel also includes two essays about the craft of writing fiction. The above quote comes from one of those essays and it’s just so true.

I’ve also gotten a start on the 2021 Newbery award winners. Often I quibble with the Newbery committee’s decisions (I still haven’t gotten over their choice of Hello, Universe), so I’m pleased to report that I enjoyed this year’s winner, Tae Keller’s When You Trap a Tiger, which weaves together magical happenings drawn from the Korean folktales that Keller’s grandmother used to tell with an engaging contemporary story about… well, okay, a girl whose beloved story-telling grandmother is dying. Would I have enjoyed the dying-grandmother part of the book as a child? As an adult it’s very touching and made me cry, but little!me might have wanted More Magic and Less Death.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Armadale! (Perhaps I will make faster progress in this book now that I’m not dividing my online reading time with Battle Cry of Freedom.) The two Allan Armadales’ friendship has been TORN ASUNDER by Lydia Gwilt, who is… perhaps in love with Allan Armadale #2, alias Ozias Midwinter? Possibly appalled to discover herself still capable of the emotion of love?

I’m fairly sure that this is going to end with Allan Armadale #1 married to Miss Milton, but Very Concerned about how the book will wrangle a happy ending for Ozias Midwinter and Lydia Gwilt, given that Midwinter is penniless and Miss Gwilt an adventuress who came to Thorpe Ambrose specifically planning to marry into a large fortune. I JUST WANT OZIAS MIDWINTER TO BE HAPPY, WILKIE COLLINS, is that too much to ask???

I almost gave up on Maeve Binchy’s Evening Class a couple of chapters in; I couldn’t get over the forty-five-year old who had just fallen in love with a twenty-one-year old… who does that?. But I kept going, and although I continue to question almost all of the characters’ romantic choices (Bill, for instance, should really consider breaking up with the girlfriend who locked up her visiting mother, threw away the key, and then called Bill hysterically for help), I’ve become just as invested in their lives as they have grown invested in each other through their Italian class.

What I Plan to Read Next

Continuing my journey through Jacqueline Woodson’s oeuvre with Before the Ever After.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

In Northern Ireland, peace has such a bad name that in order to achieve it they will have to call it something else.

Sally Belfrage’s Living with War: A Belfast Year is about, well, Belfrage’s year in Belfast, speaking to people on both sides of the conflict (this was in the 1980s, during the Troubles). What struck me as I was reading is, how shall I put this, the mind-boggling denseness of the assumed reader - the kind of person who cares enough to read a whole book about the Troubles, but approaches the whole thing with a wrinkled brow and the plaintive, baffled question, “But what are they fighting about?”

I say this not as a criticism of Belfrage, who is trying very hard to break through that willful obtuseness. But the intellectual climate that produces a whole contingent of cultured, literary, presumably intelligent people who look at conflicts and wonder Why We Just Can’t Get Along? strikes me as very characteristic of a certain kind of 80s/90s smug complacent liberalism that eventually found its apotheosis in The West Wing.

I also finished Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game, which I think made a mistake in having a fifteen-year-old narrator. The book keeps having to twist itself into a pretzel to justify Louisa’s presence at scenes where a civilian child’s presence makes no sense. Louisa should have been a few years older and connected in some official capacity to the airbase.

But that wouldn’t solve my biggest problem with the book, which is that ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Gerald Durrell’s Two in the Bush. I was delighted to discover that this Gerald Durrell book takes the reader to New Zealand (that’s the part I’m at) and points beyond. Durrell has just watched penguin hopping from rock to rock, apparently for no other reason than rock-hopping is fun, and it sounds like the cutest thing.

And I’m going onward in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. Lydia Gwilt is ON THE CUSP of arriving at Thorpe Ambrose, in the guise of Miss Milroy’s governess, in order to win Allan Armadale’s heart (the Allan Armadale who actually uses the name Allan Armadale, to clarify) and thereby secure Allan's fortune!

Am I rooting for her to succeed in this nefarious plot? IDK, kind of, I must admit that I find Allan Armadale kind of annoying (he’s SO careless, he LOST a BOAT because he forgot to tie it properly, my inner Swallows & Amazons is APPALLED). But on the other hand it might bring pain to Ozias Midwinter, the woobiest woobie to ever woobie (he loves Allan because Allan is the FIRST PERSON who was EVER NICE TO HIM, oh my God) and I just can’t be having with that.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve put on hold a lot of the Irish books recommended in my last post (plus Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which, like so many books, I’ve meant to read for years). What better time of year to do it, with St. Patrick’s Day coming?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a quiet yet absorbing SF novel about a little coffee shop in an alley in Tokyo where one of the seats can transport a patron through time. But there are rules: nothing the time traveler does will change the present; once they’re in the past, they must stay in the seat; and they have to finish their visit before their coffee grows cold, or they will remain in the seat as a ghost.

If the book had placed more weight on that last rule it could have turned toward horror, but the author instead focuses on the intimate, emotional aspects of these journeys. Although time travelers can’t change anything that happened - if someone died, they will stay dead - their trips through time can change their attitude toward what has happened and their behavior in the future.

I also read Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, in which May argues that our current cultural expectation (May is writing from England, but this is true in America too; possibly this is an Anglophone thing?) that constant happiness is possible is not only false but fundamentally damaging, because it makes people feel alone and broken when they meet with life’s inevitable sadnesses, when really what they are going through is as inevitable as the winter in temperate climes.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I agree with this thesis whole-heartedly. I thought the book would have been improved if May cut down on the excursions into memoir by about two-thirds, though. This is my perennial complaint about modern nonfiction. If the book isn’t actually meant to be a memoir, then adding memoir very rarely adds anything.

Here is a quote that I liked, though, from one of the non-memoir portions, when May muses about the widespread human tendency to project the qualities about ourselves that we like least onto wolves: “In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again.”

What I’m Reading Now

“Why didn’t anyone tell me about Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow?” I was going to complain, but actually I am glad no one did, as I think I’m reading this book at exactly the right time. It’s a slow-moving (yet absorbing) book about a Russian count whom a Bolshevik court sentences to life imprisonment in the Metropol Hotel, and how he finds meaning and interest in his life within those confines. A good read for pandemic times, when many of us are finding ourselves living (at least for the moment) more confined lives than we anticipated.

I also started reading Louisa May Alcott’s Work, because it was in the same collection as Diana and Persis and I did not realize that the collection only included the first six chapters, plus the concluding chapter. Why! Why would you print only a part of the book like that? Fortunately ebooks exist, but I cannot IMAGINE how frustrating it would be to have read this in the pre-ebook days of 1988, when the collection was published, and discover that there are THIRTEEN CHAPTERS MISSING.

Last but not least, I’m continuing on in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. Allan Armadale (1) has just become fast friends with a mysterious stranger who (as Collins gleefully points out) MIGHT be Allan Armadale (2).Would Collins really have the face to lampshade the possibility if the mysterious stranger really IS Allan Armadale (2)? MAYBE. I certainly wouldn’t put it past him.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m finally getting Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game!!!! And Micah Nemerever’s These Violent Delights will be arriving around the same time. WHAT DO. I feel the library could have staggered the book’s arrival more effectively…