A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Bowen’s Philip and the Faun is a more straightforward fantasy than his novel The Old Tobacco Shop. Young Philip, camping in the sequoias with his father, meets a faun piping away below the trees. The faun is astounded that Philip can see him, and soon Philip and the faun and the nymph Arethusa set off on a quest: if they can find two other people who can see and hear these mythological folk, the creatures of Greek myth can leave their seclusion and come back to the world!

They go to San Francisco - never named, but recognizable for its cable cars and steep hills; impressive that the city has remained so unchanged a hundred years after the book was written. There they find these two people: a young man playing his oboe in the streets, and a young Chinese girl in Chinatown. (This sequence is about what you would expect from a book from 1926.) The young man and the girl each give a little bit of blood to the Cause of bringing the Greek myths back! But then the oboe man bows to his rich father’s entreaties to come home, thus introducing a tiny impurity into his blood, so the Greek myths do not return after all, ALAS.

Actually the nymphs and fauns etc. were feeling kind of bummed about leaving the sequoias, as who would not?? So they are far from sorry at the turn that this has taken. But nonetheless this seems like kind of a downer ending, and I for one would far rather have watched the Greek mythological creatures run riot through the streets of San Francisco, a la the ending of C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair.

I also finished Bruce Catton’s The Coming Fury! After how I struggled with the Army of the Potomac trilogy, I was surprised to zoom through this book - I think because it’s almost all about the immediate political background to the Civil War (it starts with the Democratic national convention of 1860, which ended up splitting between two regional candidates), rather than actual battles. Hopefully someday I can read about battles again…

Actually, the next book (this is ALSO a trilogy, the Centennial History of the Civil War) may include a lot of battles, as The Coming Fury ends with the Battle of Bull Run. So I may be about to find out.

I meant to read Teresa Lust’s Pass the Polenta: And Other Writings from the Kitchen one delectable essay at a time to truly savor it… but each essay was so interesting, a meditation on wine or heirloom apples or strawberry shortcake (or of course polenta), that I kept reading two or three instead. And now the book is all gone! Gobbled up like a slice of apple pie, when you only meant to have a bite…

What I’m Reading Now

Last week, I said I shouldn’t start any more books until I finished a few… then instantly checked out Judith Flanders’ A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order and Kim Todd’s Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters”. In my defense… I have no defense. I simply saw them and was overcome with lust.

I haven’t actually started Sensational yet, but I have begun A Place for Everything. You may be interested to learn that in the early days of organization, geographical and hierarchical orderings were often preferred to alphabetical - to the point that chroniclers who used alphabetical ordering sometimes apologized for its anarchic tendency to turn hierarchy topsy-turvy, for instance putting “angelus” (angels) before “Deus” (God).

No new Dracula. I fear we must give up our dear Jonathan Harker as Lost to the ravages of that rampaging count.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m REALLY trying to focus on the physical books on my TBR shelf… and conveniently, I have Teresa Lust’s A Blissful Feast: Culinary Adventures in Italy’s Piedmont, Maremma, and La Marche! So I will be reading that.

I waffled about whether to post my Wednesday Reading Meme as usual even though it's Christmas, but in the end the siren song of habit simply proved TOO STRONG, as did the fact that I read Donna Tartt's The Secret History and I simply had to share.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which was An Experience, a little bit like Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, another book full of whip-smart college students in beautiful surroundings having crackling intellectual discussions full of allusions to a thousand books they all read and can quote at the drop of a hat - except that The Secret History is like if Tam Lin took place inside its own insular classics department, and also the magic was… possibly nonexistent? There’s an important (off-page) incident in The Secret History that could go either way.

Or you could also compare this book with Brideshead Revisited, in that both of them begin with a sort of college idyll, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” beautiful well-off young people (and their less well-off admirer) hanging out in the country and drinking far too much and whiling away the happy days as if they have all the time in the world. But in both books, this is an illusion: this is only a golden bubble in time before darkness bears down to crush the characters. (Both books also have an atmosphere saturated with homoeroticism.)

It’s also - well, it’s just an experience. I was also really impressed by Tartt’s use of, hmm, inevitability? The book centers around an event, an murder, that most books would make a great mystery of, but Tartt lays out the basic facts about it in the prologue, and then the first half of the book is just laying out how it came to that point, a march of doom toward a predetermined end - while the second shows what came after.

I also finished William Bowen’s The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure, which, as you may recall from my post last week, is bananas. When last we left Freddie and his friends, they were being menaced by pirates from the reign of King James, who were at length banished with the churchwarden’s Odour of Sanctity (an evil-spirit-banishing perfume that he keeps in a little stoppered bottle) once it finally occurred to him that two-hundred-year-old pirates had to be spirits and not mortal men.

But before the churchwarden realized this, the pirates (with Freddy and company in tow as their prisoners) retired in High Dudgeon, which is their castle stronghold. There’s a certain Phantom Tollboothishness about all this that makes me wonder whether Norton Juster read this book in his youth.

I also finished Aminder Dhaliwal’s Woman World, which I would have liked more if I went into it with the understanding that it’s a gag comic rather than a high concept one. The basic premise is that it takes place in a world where men have gone extinct, so you can see why I expected some in-depth worldbuilding.

But all the world-building questions are dealt with perfunctorily, as in the early comic where Gaia announces to an assembled crowd, “The men are extinct! What will the straight women do?” She ponders a moment, then asks, “How many of you skewed bi anyway?” and then almost all the women raise their hands, and that’s the end of that. We never come back to the question.

It’s not that I wanted the comic to navel-gaze specifically about the difficulty of being a straight woman in a world that no longer has men, but this is the level on which Woman World deals with everything and I found it disappointing.

What I’m Reading Now

The introduction to Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North states specifically that the book is not about amputees, which I suppose is fair enough, but as I got the book specifically because I’m working on a novella where the hero is a Civil War amputee… well, I put it aside for most of the week in a fit of pique. However, I’m sure it has lots of interesting information and I should read it anyway.

Oh! And I also began reading Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch! But then I got distracted by The Secret History, so I haven’t finished it yet, although I’ve gotten far enough to strongly suspect that this book has a truly off-the-charts woobie concentration.

What I Plan to Read Next

A few days ago I realized that I was six books away from reading all the Newbery Honor books of the 2010s (have since whittled this down to three), and my goal is to knock those last three out before 2020. Heart of a Samurai! Splendors and Glooms! (This one has puppets on the cover, which intrigues me. Magic puppets?? And was written by Laura Ann Schlitz, who wrote Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, which I liked a lot.) Bomb: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon! CAN I MAKE IT???

I have also decided that I should read Donna Tartt's other novels, of which there are only two, The Little Friend and The Goldfinch. My impression is that The Goldfinch is more highly regarded than The Little Friend, although possibly this just reflects the fact that I've heard more about it because there was a recent movie adaptation?