A Certain Slant of Light

As tomorrow (Wednesday) is Honeytrap release day, I’m doing the Wednesday Reading Meme a day early this week.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

George MacDonald’s The Light Princess is a delightful fairy tale about a princess who is cursed by… well, lightness: she’s both unaffected by gravity, liable to float away on the lightest breeze, and terminally light in spirit, unable to feel any emotions with any degree of gravity.

This being MacDonald, there is of course a moral/philosophical underpinning here, but the main feeling of the book is one of, well, lightness: it’s frolicsome and fun and full of puns. There’s a wonderful scene where her parents bat terms to do with light back and forth. Her father, determined to make the best of the curse, comments that it’s good to be light-footed, lighthearted! - while her mother, more realistic, sighs that it is good neither to be light-fingered nor light-headed.

On the other end of the nineteenth-century fantasy spectrum, I also read William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, which is an excellent book to read if you loved Lord of the Rings but thought that it was just too bad that the characters, while capable of reciting poetry at the drop of a hat, did not actually speak their lines in verse. Morris has you covered! As his Goths head out to face the Romans, they declaim, sometimes for multiple pages!

Suffice it to say I found The House of the Wolfings a bit of a slog. But at the same time the book is just so very much itself that I can’t help but feel a certain admiration for it. It may not be what I want in a fantasy novel, but by God it’s what Morris wanted and he did it to the very utmost. (And if you are a Tolkien fan, there’s an added interest in that this is a book he read and liked. It may be the source for the name of the forest Mirkwood in The Hobbit.)

When I was a child, I never read the Babysitters Little Sister books; I was, in fact, invincibly opposed to them, in the way that children sometimes are opposed to things that are aimed at children ever so slightly younger than they are. (I also disdained Barney.) But piggybacking on the success of the Babysitters Club graphic novels, two Little Sister books (Karen’s Witch and Karen’s Roller Skates) have also been adapted into graphic novel form, so I decided that I had to check them out, and…

Well, to be honest, I still find Karen Brewer annoying. I guess some things never change!

But also sometimes things do, because as I mentioned last week, I didn’t get on with Willa Cather when I was in college (one of my friends had become a Cather fangirl and I just Did Not Get It), but over time I’ve grown to appreciate her, and quite liked O Pioneers!, especially from a sociological standpoint; it was interesting to see Cather’s viewpoint on all these disparate immigrant groups meeting in the Nebraska plains: Swedes, Bohemians, the French, etc.

What I’m Reading Now

Tamar Adler has had a new book out for two years and I didn’t even notice, WHY, HOW, anyway, I am making up for lost time by reading Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revisited, a work of minor culinary archaeology (I believe the recipes are mostly from within the last two hundred years, not like this Atlantic article about recreating ancient Egyptian bread, which sounds amazing but NOT a project for my home kitchen). The only thing I love more than history is history that is EDIBLE.

I’m also reading James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, about which more anon, but for now I just want to leave you with this quote from a review of Carmen Jones, a 1950s black cast musical based loosely on the opera Carmen. The actors, Baldwin notes wearily, “appear to undergo a tiny, strangling death before resolutely substituting ‘de’ for ‘the.’”

What I Plan to Read Next

Did you know that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a sequel to Kidnapped, called various Catriona (UK) or David Balfour (USA)? Like The Light Princess and The House of the Wolfings and even O Pioneers!, this is research for the boarding-school-friends-reconnect-after-World-War-I book, let’s just call it David & Robert for now so I don’t have to recapitulate the book every Wednesday Reading Meme, as it may affect my reading for quite some time.

Perhaps I ought to read more early twentieth century boarding school books. You know, for research. Maybe I ought to take another run at Mike & Psmith. (Actually, it looks like Mike & Psmith is the sequel to Mike, so really I ought to start there.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, which has made me want to read his other books, of which there are many… because if there’s one thing I need, it’s a new author to follow, right?

I put off reading Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place because I got the impression somewhere that it was a self-righteous tract about how lying is always a sin, even if you’re lying to the Nazis to protect the Jews hidden in your attic. But now that I’ve read it I’m pretty sure this is actually just the way some Evangelical readers interpret the book, because Corrie had some relatives who followed this philosophy and it worked out for them, through either divine intervention or luck, depending on your view.

Corrie herself lies when necessary, although with pangs of conscience, because she had been raised in the belief system that lying is always wrong. But she doesn’t only lie when forced to it, but actually practices lying: the family shakes her awake at midnight to simulate a possible arrest by the Nazis, so she’ll have practice answering “We have no Jews here” rather than mumbling, groggy and disoriented, “Oh, they’re behind the false wall.”

Willa Cather’s My Antonia is another book I put off reading, in this case because I had the impression that Antonia gets raped at some point in the book, which also turns out to be incorrect. Maybe I should try to stop gathering impressions of books that I haven’t read, although probably it’s not entirely avoidable.

But actually in this case the delay worked out well, because I don’t think I would have appreciated the book as much when I was younger. It’s a slow book, with a lot of description of the Nebraska prairies and the different immigrant groups settling the country and not a lot of action: the narrator, Jim Burden, is often an onlooker rather than a participant, a little bit in love with Antonia and some of her friends (also strong immigrant girls), but not so much that the book ever becomes a love story. Or rather, it’s about love of a time and a place rather than a person.

What I’m Reading Now

The very first chapter of Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women burnt up my hope that maybe the heroines would remain friends for the entire book, but it also got me all invested so I kept reading. All of See’s books seem to have this ur-scene where the heroines’ friendship shatters when they confront each other over some great betrayal - I don’t know why she feels the need to repeat it over and over, but I should probably just accept it and stop hoping for something else.

And although it does share this tic with See’s other work, this book is one of her best - perhaps not quite up there with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but then that is the first See book I read so it may have an unfair advantage. The Island of Sea Women is set on Jeju Island, where women deep sea divers are traditionally the main support for their families, and this portrayal of a traditional society where women have a lot more power and freedom than in many traditional societies is so interesting.

I’ve also been reading Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, which is an unexpectedly delightful look at office culture in interwar Britain. Lord Peter has taken a job as a copy writer for an advertising firm in order to investigate a murder, using his two middle names, Death Bredon, and yes Dorothy Sayers did in fact give her detective the name Death, Lord Peter is the Most Extra and I love it.

What I Plan to Read Next

evelyn_b, we had talked about maybe reading Kristin Lavransdattar in tandem. Are you still interested? I’ve acquired a copy, so we could start whenever is convenient for you.

I’ve also realized that Andrea Cheng’s The Year of the Book, which I read last year, is in fact the first book of a five-book series (although alas there will be no more after that: Cheng died a few years ago), so now I want to read them all.

I am so sorry that I didn't bring A Room with a View with me. It was the first grown-up classic I ever read, a gift from my seventh-grade English teacher (he was totally amazing), and for these reasons as well as its intrinsic merit I am devoted to the book. Lucy Honeychurch is a wonderful heroine, ordinary in a way that is heroic, and Forster has such wonderful insight into people; Lucy's long-suffering cousin Charlotte is a masterpiece.

I think George Emerson is rather flat, though. He's a bit too perfect a romantic hero, angsty as Rochester but without the rough edges that make him interesting.

Instead I'm stuck with George Eliot's Middlemarch, which is not an acceptable substitute. She keeps pausing to explain to us why we should feel sympathy for odious people, which slows her pacing to a glacial speed and, more crucially, backfires. I might have sympathized for Casaubon for being so pathetically insecure, but five pages telling me why I ought to feel bad for him...? I refuse to have my sympathies dictated! Revolt! Vive la France!

Eliot displays this bizarre mixture of grimness and sentimentality that I find particularly hard to take. It's most obvious in Silas Marner (I've read three of Eliot's books. Whyyyyyyyy do I keep doing this to myself?), where miserly Silas is Saved by the Love of a Golden-Haired Child, who is the product of a grim subplot about either bigamy or illegitimacy and dying in quarries.

And! And! As I'm ranting about Eliot already! The way she handles female characters bugs me. She seems dedicated to a peculiarly conservative model of gender relations - more so than Austen or the sisters Bronte, so you can't just blame it on the times.

But she's still not as irritating as Edith Wharton, so I suppose it could be worse.

ETA: And by Edith Wharton I definitely mean Willa Cather, because I haven't read any Wharton except Ethan Frome.

ETA, a year after the fact: And now that I have read some Edith Wharton, I apologize to her unreservedly. Her female characters are delightful. It's the male characters I sometimes want to strangle.

ETA, after reading House of Mirth: Actually, I don't want to apologize to Edith Wharton, because Lily Bart is so irritating in every conceivable way.