A Certain Slant of Light

Third: I read a really awesome children's book at the library yesterday: Anne Fine's The Tulip Touch, which is a beautifully written, loosely plotted meditation about the nature of evil.

( Now normally if someone told me that a book was a meditation on evil I would smile politely and edge for the exit... )

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ETA: In other news....IT'S SNOWING!

Yes, of course I'm going to go get hot chocolate. Why do you even ask?

I DO NOT WANT to write this paper. It's nothing to do with the topic - I love the virgin martyrs generally, and I love St. Katherine (although my favorite is St. Juliana, who whipped the devil with her own chains) - it's just the end of term, and close to Christmas, and I either want to go home or go to Paris or go anywhere (my medieval history professor made the mistake of showing us pictures of medieval wall paintings of St. Katherine in a church in Pickering, not to far away. Do want) - anything, except study.

I wish I had some chains to beat my restlessness. Where's St. Juliana when you need her?

Does anyone know how to fight off this sort of failure of will?

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In other news, I've been reading Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey in preparation for going to Haworth this weekend.

So far, the heroine is mostly bemoaning the fact that she can't beat the children she's governessing as they deserve, the little brats. This is hilarious (in a horrible sort of way - it was a different time), but does not incline me to the sympathy that I think I am supposed to feel for her predicament. Children who don't hop to obedience instantaneously! Imagine that!

I've basically finished my eighteenth-century history class. We have one more seminar but we've already turned in the final paper, so basically things are done.

These are my favorite books from the reading list: the ones I thought were excellent, insightful, and well-written. It's mainly for my own reference, but if anyone has a sudden hankering to read about eighteenth-century social history than I highly recommend all of these.

1, John Brewer's The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century is an exhausting, yet entertaining look at high culture in the eighteenth century. He covers music, dancing, the theater, literature, the arts (both painting and sculpture) and finishes off with short biographies of cultural figures of the time who have since been somewhat forgotten.

I meant to read a chapter. Four hours later, nearly midnight, my eyes finally gave out and I had with great regret to put the book away. It's engrossing.

2. Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter was probably my favorite book all term, and is incidentally one of the most popular books we read: it's available in a lot of public libraries. All sorts of interesting information about the lives of 18th century genteel women, drawn from scads of primary sources, with an interpretive framework that provides structure to the book without forcing the evidence into a preconceived pattern. (Writers of feminist history - or Marxist - or, indeed, anyone going into history with a sausage casing into which they wish to stuff their historical narrative - seem to be bothered when their subjects are happy, or exert some power over their lives. I suppose the historians think it weakens their argument.)

But Vickery is not just possessed of fascinating facts and a judiciously and sparingly applied interpretive framework. She's also a good writer, often quite dry and always entertaining. "We should not presume without evidence that women (or men) mindlessly absorbed a single didactic lesson like so many pieces of unresisting blotting paper"; no, we should look at as much evidence as possible from as many angles as are available, and see what it might teach us. Good history.

3. I've already written about Hitchcock and Shoemaker's Tales from the Hanging Court, which is, as it says on the tin, stories about trials at the Old Bailey. Lots of interesting insights, not just into the English justice system at the time, but into London life in general.

4. Brian Cowan's The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. The title is misleading. I think Cowan called it that because everyone loves eighteenth-century coffeehouses and no one has even heard of his real topic, the eighteenth-century virtuosi. The virtuosi were nothing to do with what we would today call virtuosos; they were instead young men, who generally had done the Grand Tour, who were curious about pretty much everything and amassed huge collections of curiosities.

Cowan's got chapters about auctions, booksellers, zoos, freak shows (they were evidently a pretty high class entertainment at the time), the dangers of foppishness, and the eighteenth-century ethic of sociability generally. The ethic of sociability ties back to the whole coffeehouse thing, the coffeehouse being, and I quote, "a key site of masculine social discipline," and there's some interesting stuff about coffee too. But really that's just the window dressing. Come for the coffee, stay for the conversation.

5. And, finally, D. Cannadine's Class in England, which actually stretches from the eighteenth century to essentially the present (the book was published in 1998, which explains why he says so many nice things about Americans. Honest to God, I almost teared up. Someone loved us once!). It more or less diagrams the eighteenth-century class structure, and also talks about the essentially artificial nature of any diagram of a class structure: the lines are arbitrary, there are always people who don't fit, don't wed yourself to your system, etc.

I think that's enough to be getting on with.

I have a problem with Shakespeare's comedies.

I really like Shakespeare's history plays: I think we've already covered How Much I Love Julius Caesar, and I'm reading Richard III and enjoying it a great deal. And although his tragedies usually leave me cold, I don't dislike them. (Except Romeo and Juliet. All-consuming love is silly whether it's Shakespeare writing it or Stephanie Meyer.)

But I don't like his comedies, and in particular I don't like As You Like It. I do not think Rosalind and Orlando make a cute couple. I don't think they make an interesting couple even when Rosalind is pretending to be a boy called Ganymede and Orlando is pretending that Ganymede is Rosalind and fake-courting him/her, which by all rights ought to be entertaining - but no. It's mostly an excuse for Rosalind disguised as Ganymede to have interminable discussions with Orlando about how awful women are.

I'm sure Elizabethans found this hilarious, and as a historical artifact I'm sure the play is fascinating. But I hate it. I hate Rosalind (no one else in the play develops enough individuality to be worth hating). I hate the LOL!misogyny. And I hate the play.

About fifteen years ago – my goodness, I’ve gotten old – I saw the Wishbone version of George Eliot’s Silas Marner, and it left me such a lasting impression that I spent most of the time reading the book murmuring, “Okay, when is insert next plot twist here going to happen?”

So that probably colored my reading of the book somewhat.

It’s a nicely written book, but I can’t love George Eliot the way I love Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte. She’s too sentimental, which is funny given that her novels deal with serious, ugly issues (infanticide, opium addiction, anti-Semitism…) which Austen ignores and Bronte rather skims over, but there it is. In Austen and Bronte, you have to work for your happy ending. In Eliot, it comes to you.

Quite literally, in the case of Silas Marner.

And that makes for less than satisfying reading.

Finished Jane Eyre! It's a lovely book - the prose is graceful and fluid, and the story engaging even when it meanders, as it does for the first hundred pages or so. Charlotte Bronte could probably give a discourse on dust bunnies narrative pull.

I really enjoyed it, and I would recommend it unreservedly to pretty much everyone - especially anyone who is fond of older books, because the narrative style is somewhat antiquated. (I don't mean that in a pejorative sense; I mean it in the sense that every era has its own narrative conventions, and getting used to another eras' can be difficult.)

( Spoilers for, like, everything )

On the one hand, I enjoyed Julia Alvarez's Finding Miracles. I thought that the second half was especially well done; the mystery of Milly's parentage becomes engrossing, and while her love story was somewhat perfunctory it never became gag-worthy. The book also did a good job showing the horrors of dictatorship without either numbing the reader or downplaying the horrors; it probably helped that the horrors were stories told to the heroine, rather than inflicted on her directly.

On the other hand, my God, how much do I want to drown Milly in a bucket? She's the main character, so this is kind of a problem. Her greatest fear is that her friends will find out that she was adopted from an unnamed Latin American country. While it seems overblown - is there some kind of anti-adoption prejudice rampant in Vermont? - there is an explanation of sorts: Milly's grandmother still hasn't forgiven her parents for adopting Milly, and she makes her feelings known at every possible occasion.

So okay. But still, it's hard to sympathize with the girl so lacking in empathy that she strenuously avoids the new boy at school, who is a refugee from her birth country, because being around him is sort of uncomfortable. Never mind that he's probably drowning in discomfort every minute of every day, and never mind that in order to properly avoid him Milly has to avoid all of her own friends too.

Milly gets much more bearable by the end. She visits her land of birth, realizes how big her problems are not, and becomes more sympathetic accordingly. But it happens over two-thirds of the way through the book, which is too late to redeem her entirely.

Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is an excellent book. Easily the best of the books I've read so far for 50books_poc - heartbreaking, funny, a great first-person narrator, illustrations (little cartoons, supposedly drawn by the narrator, which are funny and sketchy and sad), very human.

It's unflinching: some things that are broken can't be fixed. But it's a sad book, not a depressing one - the pain is all necessary. (Oh, God, I'm making this sound like a book no one in her right mind would read except for a school assignment. No, really, it's sad but it's good, you hurt for the characters but it doesn't hurt to read, and there's a lot of dark humor to leaven things.)

It's wonderful, and I would recommend it without reservation.

Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife has all the things I've come to expect from an Amy Tan book - well-formed characters, graceful prose, a solid grasp of history - but it adds, finally, a cracking good plot to tie the whole thing together. Her other books are delightful but light; this is a meaty book.

The bulk of the book takes place in the 1930s and 40s in China, during and after the Japanese invasion, which certainly provides a good framework for the story. The descriptions of China are effortlessly evocative - there's no sense, as there often is in historical fiction, that Tan is attempting to shoehorn in references to all the main events of the time. (It's the historical fiction equivalent of a fantasy writer who wants her heroes to hit all the cool places on her map.)

But the story doesn't use the excitement of its setting as a crutch. The main character, Weiwei, and her relationships with her cruel first husband, her difficult friend Hulan, and (eventually) her second husband are the heart of the narrative and the driving force of the book. The result is occasionally (and quite realistically) depressing, always compelling, and sometimes unexpectedly beautiful.

This story is book-ended by a modern day interlude involving Weiwei's American born daughter, Pearl. In fact, Weiwei's story is presented as a story that she's telling Pearl. I'm of two minds about the framing device; on the one hand the first, modern-day chapters are easily the worst part of the book (really, the only boring part of the book), and it saddens me to think of readers turning away before they get to the good part.

But on the other hand, by the end the framing device has become so exquisitely intertwined with the story proper, and so necessary to the book's emotional resonance, that I really can't wish any changes in it except perhaps harsher editing of the first few chapters.

In short: an excellent book, highly recommended. There is some violence, sexual and otherwise (this is World War II, after all), but it's not graphic.

I think I mentioned that I brought a pile of children’s books home from the library. These three are the ones with authors of color; I figured I’d catch up on that part of the genre, so that next time I have the chance to recommend books to kids I’ll have some non-white authors to hand.

( The Samurai and the Long-Nosed Foreigners )

( Pacific Crossing )

( And the best for last: Jazmin’s Notebook )