A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Winifred Holtby’s South Riding, which I enjoyed so much I now want to read Holtby’s other novels (particularly Anderby Wold, which is also set in Yorkshire)… which are no longer readily available, so it may take me some time to track them down. But then the general critical opinion seems to be that South Riding is Holtby’s masterpiece, so it may be just as well not to rush on to other books right after reading it.

I’m also thinking about rewatching the miniseries South Riding to compare the two - my recollection (based on watching the miniseries years ago) is that the overall effect of the miniseries is much grimmer than the book, possibly because the focus is not so wide-ranging as in the book - so when tragedy strikes, there are fewer other stories to offset the sadness.

William Heyliger’s The Big Leaguer. Heyliger wrote epically earnest fiction for boys in the mid-twentieth century; I like his work both because it is so very earnest (I recognize this is not everyone’s cup of tea) but also because he’s willing to give his characters some pretty major flaws, more so than a lot of authors are. This one I think is a bit repetitive - Marty’s big flaw is that he’s a know-it-all (without actually knowing very much) and nearly ruins his team’s pitcher with his bad advice, which is an interesting flaw but doesn’t need to be hammered home quite so many times.

I also read Marie Brennan’s “Daughter of Necessity,” which is a short story rather than a novel, but I thought I would mention it here because it’s a Penelope story - Penelope from the Odyssey - Penelope weaving and unweaving not only to put her suitors off, but because a drop of divinity runs in her veins and she can weave the future - only she keeps weaving futures she doesn’t want. I quite liked this.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started The Nine Tailors and MY GOD, YOU GUYS, THE BELLS. It at once seems totally random and yet also deeply in character that Lord Peter totally used to ring church bells as a hobby.

I’ve also begun Maria Thompson Daviess The Road to Providence, in which a singer with frazzled vocal cords has been sent to recuperate in a small Kentucky town under the aegis of Doctor Mayberry and his mother, the folk healer, whose warm heart and common sense bid fair to heal more people than all of Doctor Mayberry’s doctoring (although of course Mother Mayberry is fit to burst with pride in her son). I feel that the Pollyanna-ish strain really ought to grate on me, but instead the whole thing is growing on me the more I read.

What I Plan to Read Next

The library is finally - finally! - getting me Ben MacIntyre’s The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. I loved MacIntyre’s book about Kim Philby (frankly I would have thought that was the greatest espionage story of the Cold War), so hopefully this one is just as good.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read Mary Boewe’s Beyond the Cabbage Patch: The Literary World of Alice Hegan Rice as research for the blog post I’m writing about Annie Fellows Johnston and her writing group (the Authors Club), and it was perfect, exactly the kind of information that I wanted about the interconnections within the group.

And also - although this is beyond the scope of the post - Rice’s connections with the wider writing world: she corresponded with Ida Tarbell the muckraking journalist and Kate Douglas Wiggin (the two writers were often confused, as Rice’s most famous book was Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch) and even Mary Mapes Dodge, the editor of St. Nicholas Magazine, a grand doyenne of the American literary world. I love this kind of tracing of social & professional connections - like a literary family tree.

Alice’s husband Cale Young Rice was also a writer, a poet, of the insufferable not-very-talented “my poetry isn’t popular because the masses only want dreck!” kind. He sent a lengthy letter to Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine to demand to know why she didn’t publish more of his work or review his books and Harriet Monroe - presumably driven beyond endurance by his endless stream of poems - she responded that she found his work derivative and dull and didn’t publish it because she didn’t want to, and I feel a little bad for him because that would be crushing, but at the same time - I can’t feel too bad when he literally asked for it. WHY, CALE.

I also read Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone, which I think suffers somewhat from a surfeit of characters - I was having some trouble keeping track of who’s who - but the world-building is as charmingly whimsical as in the A Corner of White trilogy, and I’m looking forward to the sequel. Which probably will not be published in the US for ages.

What I’m Reading Now

Winifred Holtby’s South Riding has arrived at last! It’s still early days (which in a book of this size means I’m over a hundred pages in) but so far I’m impressed by Holtby’s ability to introduce a vast cast of characters so vividly that I haven’t had any trouble keeping track of them. (Of course it helps that a few years ago I saw a miniseries based on the book - so far as I can tell, pretty faithfully.)

I am a little put out that we haven’t gotten to spend more time with my favorites, though. But I’m sure Midge and Sarah Burton will show up again soon.

I’ve begun Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, His Joyful Water-life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers, which is approximately 75% landscape description, and unfortunately landscape description is one of those things where I’ll suddenly realize that I’ve reached the bottom of the page and have no idea what I just read. But I’m persevering: a chapter a night.

What I Plan to Read Next

I wanted to continue with the Lord Peter books, only to discover that the library only has The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club on audiobook, but I listened to Whose Body on audiobook and hated the narrator so much that it almost put me off Sayers for life - he just made Peter sound so insufferable! So I’ll have to find another way to get this book.

In the meantime I’ve got The Nine Tailors on hold; I don’t suppose (outside of the Harriet books) that it matters too much which order I read the books in.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Enid Blyton’s The Naughtiest Girl in the School. I feel VERY put out, because the library has only the first book in this series and I want to read the rest of Elizabeth Allen’s adventures! Oh well. Perhaps if I haunt used bookstores long enough, I might find the rest.

In particular, the picture of Elizabeth Allen’s school is fascinating: Whyteleafe is a progressive co-educational boarding school ruled by the students along socialist lines: the children all put their pocket money in the school kitty, and each gets to withdraw two pounds a week; if they want more they have to apply to the student council for it, and the council is a body with actual power, not basically decorative like the student councils in my day.

I wonder if this general powerlessness of modern student councils contributes to the difficulty getting young people to vote. In student council elections, they’re voting for a governing body that has no actual power. We’re basically training kids that voting is useless.

Anyway! Whyteleafe is a very different school than the traditional girls’ boarding schools Blyton wrote about in Malory Towers and St. Clair’s, and it’s interesting to me that she wrote so impartially; her characters find good friends and fun things to do at both kinds of school. You don’t get the sense that Blyton is arguing that one type is better than the other - they’re just different.

I finally finished Martha Finley’s Elsie at the World’s Fair, which lost focus on the World’s Fair at the end, alas, although I did garner a certain amount of good detail before then. My ideas about the World’s Fair book have been evolving: I hadn’t realized so many women artists worked on the fair and now I’d like to focus on the novel on one of them. And there is the possibility of a fantasy element - so many people compare the fair to a fairyland - and couldn’t there be an actual court of the fairy on the Court of Honor?

But I don’t think Faerie as written in urban fantasy these days would be suitable for the World’s Fair, so I’ll have to think abuot this more.

And also I finished Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s A Fabulous Creature. MY FEELINGS. MY FEELINGS. HOW CAN YOU STOMP ON MY FEELINGS LIKE THIS? ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Josephine Daskam Bacon’s Smith College Stories, which continues to be moderately interesting but not engrossing. Possibly I shouldn’t have read it so soon after rereading Shirley Marchalonis’s College Girls? I feel that she quoted from most of the most interesting stories.

I’ve also begun Remember, Remember: The Selected Stories of Winifred Holtby, which begins with a selection of autobiographical stories, including one about a man who never really appreciates life till he receives a fatal diagnosis, at which point he starts gazing upon the apple trees wondering if he’ll live to see them blossom in the spring, etc. It sounds rather trite, but knowing that Holtby wrote it after her own diagnosis it’s almost unbearably sad.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been struggling to decide what to read for my final reading challenge (“a book by an author of a different race, ethnicity, or religion than your own”) - so many possibilities! But then one of my friends gave me Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (with a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, who did the covers of Monica Furlong’s Wise Child and Juniper), and I’ve long meant to read something by Allende, so there we are.