A Certain Slant of Light

The B&B in Mankato promised a gourmet four-course Sunday brunch, so I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed yesterday morning, ready for a delicious brunch to set me up for the long drive home. Savory smells came from the kitchen… a cutting board full of fruit reposed on the counter…

And then the power went out!

Fortunately, the brunch was delicious anyway - and very atmospheric for Betsy-Tacy, as I pointed out to my table companions, for Betsy would have eaten breakfast in the sunlight through the windows just like us. And, as the house was built in the 1880s (it belonged to Winona Root’s uncle, who co-edited the local paper with her father, for Betsy-Tacy fans), the windows let in plenty of light for the purpose.

And brunch was delicious! A fruit course, including honeydew fresh from the garden (not usually a big honeydew fan, but who turns down garden-fresh fruit?). Thick slices of blueberry loaf with rhubarb compote. A stovetop course created on the fly by the B&B owner when the power outage forced a change of plans: cheesy polenta, sausage, and scrambled eggs with cherry tomatoes and basil, also fresh from the garden. And to top it off, a tiny desert course of ice cream bonbons with almond cookies. Delicious!

Fortified by this excellent brunch, I drove back to Indiana, where I am visiting my parents and taking a brief breather after the western leg of the trip!

I have of course a backlog of books that I want to write about, so I thought I’d start with a couple quick reviews of books that I actually finished before the trip began. (One always ought to clear one’s plate of book reviews before the trip, but to be fair I wrote MANY book reviews in that last week as it was!)

The cover copy describes Monica Dickens’s Mariana as a read-alike to I Capture the Castle, but although both books are coming-of-age stories about young girls in interwar Britain, Mariana is a sharper book, without the charm and whimsy of I Capture the Castle, which was written during the war and already views the interwar period with a wistful nostalgia.

Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland is historical fantasy, or rather more of a historical fairy tale or folktale, an origin story for the horses of Iceland. A man heads out from Iceland on a trading voyage through Europe and Central Asia, and through strange and ghostly happenings (which give him a pain in the neck: he doesn’t want to get entangled with magic! Way too much trouble!) he comes home with a herd of horses.

I did also finish E. F. Benson’s David Blaize of King’s, but it’s going to get its own post.

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Later this week, I’ll be heading off on a camping trip in the Indiana Dunes, followed by a visit to my friend Micky in Michigan, which will at long last include a visit to the massive Detroit bookstore John K. King books!

This trip has already featured many bookstores. The gorgeous public library in St. Cloud has a used bookstore on the first floor, where I found Phyllis Fenner’s The Proof of the Pudding: What Children Read, an enchanting book from 1957 full of book recommendations. Fenner was a school librarian, and each chapter offers a list of books that children have enjoyed about mythology, or adventure, or biography, or what have you.

She also includes a list of classics and books that she believes will become classics. Many of her guesses are spot on, and it’s also fascinating to see which books have fallen off the shelf in the years since, like Lucinda P. Hale’s 1880 The Peterkin Papers. These comic stories were evidently still popular with children in 1957, but I hadn’t heard of them till this year. In fact, I had started reading The Peterkin Papers just before I got The Proof of the Pudding, so it was a delightful moment of synchronicity when they showed up here!

However, the true find occurred in the middle of Wisconsin. I was driving through the cornfields along quiet little US-10 when from the corner of my eye I caught sight of KG’s Unique, Rare, and Antique Books. Already I was flying past, but at the next crossroads I executed a U-turn and went back…

Only to find that the store was closed! But as I was turning back to my car, the door opened: the owner was there, and he invited me in, and so in I went. I trawled the children’s books; I considered the shelves of leatherbounds; I sat on the floor to sort through a stack of books with that distinctive look of the first half of the twentieth century…

And there I found William Heyliger’s The Spirit of the Leader! I’ve never seen a Heyliger book in the flesh before, and this is one of my favorites, the book that got me started on Heyliger in the first place when I read an excerpt in an old reading textbook.

So of course I bought it. That was why I turned back, after all. The book was calling for me.

There is nothing quite so satisfying as running a book to earth after years of searching, and so I read William Heyliger’s The Spirit of the Leader with the deep, satisfied sigh of one who drinks a cup of cool water after a long sweaty hike on a hot summer’s day.

Even for Heyliger, this book is extremely Heyliger, by which I mean that it is so earnestly idealistic that one pictures young Steve Rogers reading it as a guilty pleasure: he knows that people aren’t really like this (he fails to notice that he himself is a close approximation of a Heyliger hero), but wouldn’t it be nice if high school students were truly this honest and upright?

The Spirit of the Leader takes place at Northfield High, and particularly focuses on the students’ attempts at self-government. Their student council has actual power, a fact that struck me as absolutely novel when I first read an excerpt from this book during my own high school days. Not only that, but led by George Praska, the student body marches eight hundred strong on the city building to demand that the pot-holed street in front of their school should be paved. (The city government, presumably petrified by the specter of eight hundred high school students marching for anything, gets on it double-quick.)

The book is an ensemble piece, featuring Perry (clever, funny, unathletic but yearning to be a part of a team), his best friend George Praska (solid, athletic, smart but not quick-witted; he needs time to think things through), and various other school types, including - wait for it - that unusual creature in a Heyliger book: a girl!

In this case the girl is Betty Lawton, a leader among the girls of the school. (The girls, Heyliger notes in passing, outnumber the boys; this was common in early twentieth-century high schools.) She is here to demonstrate to the reader that girls can be good citizens too; that, as Praska puts it, girls “are just as much alive to the real things as any of us are. I think they’d be insulted if they thought the school had one line of treatment for the boy citizens and another for the girl… They’re citizens; and the fellow who refuses to judge them as citizens belittles them and belittles the school.”

Betty proves this point of view correct by throwing her weight behind the candidate who truly has the school’s best interests at heart (Praska, of course) and becoming a pillar of the later campaign to win the school an athletic field.

You might imagine that, having introduced a girl to the scrum, Heyliger might also introduce a hint of romance. Absolutely not. Sexual attraction is absolutely alien to the Heyliger verse. I strongly suspect that babies come into being when their parents hold hands while wishing on a star till a stork drops a baby in the cabbage patch.

Despite this general atmosphere, I have long cherished the hope that I might find a slashy Heyliger novel (not least because then I might be able to drag other people into my Heyliger readings)... and we do, finally, get a glimmer near the end of this book! Praska hero-worships former Northfield quarterback Carlos Dix, to the point that a friend teases him, “I’ll bet there was a time you dreamed of him at night.” When Praska thinks Dix might be involved in a shady real estate deal, Praska nearly loses faith in humanity: if you can’t trust Carlos Dix, “a keen, alert man, generous, public spirited, and straight as a string,” then who can you trust?

But of course it all turns out to be a misunderstanding. Praska restores Carlos Dix to his pedestal and gazes at him in the Heyliger version of love, where you just really, really, really admire someone’s outstanding good citizenship.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished William Heyliger’s You’re on the Air, which is about a young man who tries to break into local radio. ( This book reminded me of E. Lockhart’s Dramarama )

What I’m Reading Now

William Dean Howells’ A Foregone Conclusion, in which an American consul to Venice during the Civil War (Howells was the American consul to Venice during the Civil War) befriends a Venetian priest, who first visits him because he’s invented a cannon that he hopes might be of use to the United States government in its fight against the South Americans. The consul gently explains that in fact the US is not at war with the entirety of South America, but only the American South, and also inquires if the good priest has any practical experience with cannon? Or firearms of any sort? Well, no, alas.

But the consul’s interest is nonetheless piqued by the priest-inventor, and they become friends, and the consul has helped find the priest a job as tutor in Italian for a young American lady. If the priest weren’t a priest, I would expect the Foregone Conclusion of the title to be a romantic rivalry over the young lady between the two friends, but as it is that seems somewhat unlikely so I really have no idea how the story will develop. We shall see!

What I Plan to Read Next

I have Rainbow Rowell’s Wayward Son.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The Sundial is one of Jackson’s lesser-known books. There are times when I’m puzzled by the way that an author’s works are remembered - why is such-and-such a book lesser known when it seems just as good as the most famous one? - but this is not one of those times. The Sundial contains many of the qualities that will become so powerful in Jackson’s later work: the creepy yet beloved house, the sense of dissolving boundaries between the characters and the outside world - I’m not sure if I’m putting that right - the sense of disorientation that makes it feel as if the characters’ identities are dissolving.

But these qualities haven’t reached their full potential yet. In particular, I think the ending doesn’t quite work, mainly because it doesn’t really feel like an ending at all, but as if Jackson realized she had written herself in a corner where any ending would be anticlimactic and therefore just stopped.

On a lighter note, I read Anne Bogel’s I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life, which is a light read about… well, what the title says. It has short chapters and it fits nicely in a purse, which makes it a good book to carry around for errands or doctor’s appointments or any other time when you’ll have bits and pieces of reading time.

I also treated myself to another William Heyliger book, Detectives Inc, which I expected would be about a boy detective… but in fact the boy is a mere sidekick to his uncle, former police detective Dr. David Stone, who went blind five years ago but still solves crimes with the aid of his nephew and his trusty Seeing Eye dog Lady (the book begins with a prefatory chapter about Seeing Eye dogs and you get the impression that Heyliger learned about the program and was so enchanted he felt he HAD to write a book), but mostly relies on his powerful deductive reasoning skills, insight into human nature, intricate mental map of the town, ability to orient himself by reading air currents and the temperature gradients of shadows, and also echolocation.

I read a recent nonfiction book that mentioned a blind man who navigates on bicycle by echolocating through clicks of his tongue, so this is actually a thing some humans can do.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Enid Blyton’s Upper Fourth at Mallory Towers and I will remain forever sad that I didn’t read these books as a child. I’m enjoying them now, but if I had read them when I was ten I think I could have joyfully obsessed over them. Their boarding school is in Cornwall right by the sea! They can hear the waves in their dormitory! THEY HAVE AN OCEAN POOL TO BATHE IN.

I’m also reading Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s A Street in Marrakech, which I’m not loving quite as much as her earlier memoir Guests of the Sheik - Fernea’s children leave her less time for charting the intricate social world of women in Marrakech than she had in the village in Iraq where Guests of the Sheik is set. However, it’s still interesting, and I’m definitely planning to read the memoir that comes in between the two, A View of the Nile.

What I Plan to Read Next

The library has the new Charles Lenox book, The Vanishing Man! I actually HELD IT IN MY HAND but it was on hold for someone else so I haven’t gotten to read it yet. :( :( :( BUT SOON IT WILL BE MINE.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished William Heyliger’s Captain of the Nine, in which that PERFIDIOUS TRAITOR Mellen becomes so filled with loathing of the team captain, Bartley, that Mellen tries to throw the final game of the season by sending a fake telegram telling one of the players that his father’s sick and he has to go home. THAT DIRTY RAT. I thought nothing could be lower than Kennedy’s blackmail trick in Bartley, Freshman Pitcher BUT I WAS WRONG.

Fortunately Mellen’s trick is caught in time, the other player is retrieved, and Mellen is kicked off the team - although they decide to allow him to graduate so as not to hurt his mother. ONLY HIS MOTHER FINDS OUT ABOUT HIS DISGRACEFUL BEHAVIOR and drags Mellen away, presumably by his ear, and she is going to be disappointed with him for the rest of his misbegotten life and I would be delighted by this poetic justice except that his poor mother was so looking forward to watching him graduate and instead all she gets to witness is his bitter shame.

I also finished listening to Roald Dahl’s memoir Going Solo, about his time working for Shell in east Africa just before World War II and his time in the RAF in North Africa and Greece during the war, which is fascinating and sometimes quite funny even as it is horrifying (as you would expect from Dahl). Possibly something that would interest my fellow Code Name Verity fans, although of course it is a very different thing.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m listening to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I’m not in love with the audiobook narrator, but the book has drawn me in so effectively that it doesn’t really matter. Leopold has been sawing down a lightning-blighted oak and drifting back in time tree ring by tree ring, noting ecological milestones as he goes. This is the year Wisconsin decided to drain all its wetlands, or the last major passenger pigeon hunt in the area, or so forth.

Possibly this sounds grim (Leopold is writing against the majority opinion of his society vis-a-vis conservation and he knows it), but even with a subpar audiobook reader it’s actually quite soothing to listen to. Yes, Leopold! You follow those skunk tracks through the melting snow and muse upon the life cycle of the meadow mouse!

This is much more enlivening than Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. The book is basically a series of philosophical memoranda that Marcus wrote to himself, and therefore pretty repetitive. There are countless meditations that follow the same basic outline as this one: “On death: If the universe is composed only of diverse atoms, death is dispersion; if the universe is really one unified whole, death is extinction or transfiguration.”

The fact that Marcus repeats it so many times make me doubt its efficacy at making him dread death less.

Having said this, this isn’t really a book that you’re meant to read right through, and it probably works better if you just open to a random page and dip into it. Although it’s hard to imagine a day where the wisdom you really need is “Just as circus games and other popular entertainments offer the same tedious scenes over and over, so it is with life - an appalling sameness, a tiresome round of cause and effect. When will it ever end?” Thanks, I guess!

I’m also - good God am I reading a lot this week - reading Caroline Dale Snedeker’s Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community, which I took some time to get into, but now the book has introduced a bright-eyed young woman from Europe with Ideals about women’s rights and the abolition of slavery and the glory of democratic government, and everyone who meets her either loves her or despises her and the book has become ten times more interesting to me.

I think historical fiction often fails in depicting forward thinking outspoken people by failing to grapple with how disruptive that can be - what’s forward-thinking in the past is often just common sense in the present and therefore no longer feels disruptive - but Seth Way is really going for it and it gives me a good feeling about how the book may eventually deal with the collapse of New Harmony.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m finally going to read Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler! This has been on my to-read list since I was in college and finally I’m going to read it.

I’ve also decided that now is the time to read the rest of Edward Eager’s books, so I’m starting in on The Time Garden as soon as the library brings it to me.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Miriam Bat-Ami’s Two Sun in the Sky, about which I felt pretty meh all the way through the end. I won the book as a prize, so a part of me doesn’t really want to part with it; but I also can’t really see myself reading it again, so there’s no reason to keep it.

I also read Theresa Tomlinson’s The Forestwife, which appeals to many parts of my id all at once and therefore filled me with great fondness. Rather than focusing on Maid Marian as the sole woman among the Merry Men, here Marian lives in a forest glade with an ever-growing band of outlaw women - although I think outlaw might give the wrong impression; they’re not robbing the rich to feed the poor, but feeding the poor with the fruits of the forest and healing them with their herb lore. Eventually they are joined by a band of renegade nuns.

As if this weren’t enough - loads of women working together! Herb lore! Renegade nuns! - there’s also a scene where Marian has to save Robert’s life by climbing into his bed to warm his fevered flesh with her own body heat. Yessss.

( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve been reading Albertus T. Dudley’s At the Home Plate, which I inherited from my great-great-uncle. In fact I have a whole set of A. T. Dudley’s books, given to different great-great-uncles over the years, as one aged out of the Dudley bracket and another grew into it.

This one is from 1910, and moderately amusing, although let me be real I was hoping for excessive wholesomeness a la William Heyliger, whose characters think things like “The patrol leader, [Don] thought, should be a fellow who was heart and soul in scouting - a fellow who could encourage, and urge, and lend a willing hand; not a fellow who wanted to drive and show authority."

THE SHEER BEAUTIFUL EARNESTNESS OF IT ALL. I have the feeling that Mr. Heyliger must have a deeply slashy novel somewhere in his immense oeuvre, if only I can find it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m heading out on my road trip today, so it’s TIME FOR DOROTHY SAYERS’ STRONG POISON!!! I hope I haven’t overhyped myself about it at this point.