A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This week I finished two books that I’ve been working on for ages: Judith Flanders’ Christmas: A Biography, which I started last Christmas, and Brian Switek’s My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs, which I’ve been reading intermittently since… possibly before the pandemic, God help us all.

I’ve loved some of Flanders’ other books (Inside the Victorian Home was my gateway drug to the nineteenth century), but I found Christmas: A Biography a slog. However, I was interested to learn that possibly the oldest extant Christmas tradition is “complaining that Christmas is too secular these days.” Apparently churchmen have been complaining about that essentially since the beginning of Christmas, whereas almost all the other age-old Christmas traditions (Christmas trees, carols, mummers’ plays, even Yule logs) are of more recent origin.

In contrast, I enjoyed My Beloved Brontosaurus while I was reading it… but once I put it down I never felt any impetus to pick it back up, hence the fact that it languished for months at a time. However, it is a good update on What’s New in Dinosaur Science since I was seven. (Probably a bit outdated now, as the book was published in 2013.) I was particularly delighted when Switek name-checked my younger self’s very FAVORITE dinosaur documentary, the 1992 PBS four-parter The Dinosaurs!, featuring such luminaries as Jack Horner and Bob Bakker. (The latter of whom gave a talk at the local university when I was eleven or so, which I of course attended spellbound.)

I also read Howard Caldwell’s The Golden Age of Indianapolis Theaters, partly as research for my Depression-era tramps book (thus discovering that my heroes could not have attended a summer matinee at the Indiana theater in 1937, as it was closed that summer, clearly a question which will animate MANY readers) but also as more general research for a possible Indianapolis book. Plans for this still extremely nascent!

What I’m Reading Now

skygiants' wonderful review of Aoka Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are reminded me what a good job the translator Polly Barton did, so I thought I’d check if the library had any of her other translations. It does, sort of! Izumi Suzuki’s Terminal Boredom is a collection of seven stories, translated by six different translators, so potentially this is a good way to find more translators I like?

I must admit that the first story does not bode well for the rest of the collection. It’s called “Women and Women,” and the heroine lives in a society where the dwindling supply of men are kept locked away in prison-like hospitals, but one night she sees a ~boy outside her window and even though she’s never seen a man before she can tell he’s a boy because of his ~ineluctable masculinity~, etc. etc., and also technology and infrastructure are crumbling because the men used up all the resources before going into decline (isn’t that just like them?) and also maybe women just don’t know how to repair roads. Has anyone read this book? Are the other short stories worth it or should I cut my losses?

I’m also about halfway through James Otis’s Toby Tyler: Or, Ten Weeks with a Circus, which is heavier on “running away to join the circus is awful, actually,” than I was hoping, although there are a certain amount of madcap circus hijinks. Young Toby has been befriended by the Living Skeleton and his wife, the circus’s fat lady, an adorable couple.

What I Plan to Read Next

In my final Wednesday Reading Meme of 2020, I mused, “I need to attend more to what I want to read at this moment, and trust that the time will come for any book I really need to read,” and this philosophy has really worked out for me in 2021. It’s been truly a gem of a reading year and I hope I can keep that momentum going in 2022.

Authors at the top of my mind for further exploration: Mary Renault, Kazuo Ishiguro (I loved Klara and the Sun but have yet to follow up on his other books), D. K. Broster, D. E. Stevenson. I also intend to return to Japanese novels in translation. As well as Terminal Boredom, one came through the library just the other day: Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Has anyone read it? Did you like it?

My very first fandom - before I was aware of fandom as a social phenomenon, or indeed knew the alphabet well enough to write stories down - was Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, a series of five books about tiny people who live in the walls of old houses and get their sustenance by borrowing from the humans who live there. (Later on, they leave the house and live out in the fields, which is also enchanting.)

I LOVED the idea of Borrowers and beguiled many happy hours of kindergarten imagining tiny people living in the walls of the school, and of course moving into nearby Happy Hollow Park during the summer months when there were no schoolchildren from whom to borrow food.

So you can imagine that I was delighted to discover a hitherto unsuspected Borrower book! In the mid-sixties Mary Norton wrote Poor Stainless, which is really a short story and not a novel, but nonetheless I gobbled it right up. Arrietty and her mother Homily are sitting by the grating picking some sequins off some chiffon, and to pass the time as they do chores Homily tells Arrietty a story of the old days, when many Borrowers still lived in the house - and Stainless, a young boy from the Knife-block family, went missing for a week. (The title is ironic; Stainless is a cheerful little monster.) The nostalgic joy of reading a new Borrowers story, and enjoying a new set of beautifully detailed Borrowers illustrations by the incomparable Joe and Beth Krush…

Naturally I popped over to Mary Norton’s Wikipedia page to see if there are any OTHER Borrowers books that I may have missed. Sadly there are not, but there is one last Mary Norton book I haven’t read, Are All the Giants Dead?, which naturally I intend to correct at once.

Both troisoiseaux and skygiants recently reviewed Christianna Brand's Cat and Mouse, a gothic thriller written in 1950, and they agreed that it was entertainingly bananas with more plot twists than you could shake a red herring at, so of course I had to pick it up.

Is it good? Reader, look into your heart and ask yourself what "good" means. If it has something to do with literary quality or the likeliness of the plot, then no, I can't really say that it is, but if you're just looking for a sheer wild roller coaster of a read, this book commits to its nuttiness with a verve and dash rarely seen. Our heroine is Katinka Jones, a young advice columnist who gets involved with the mystery when she shows up at an isolated house in Wales to meet the young woman who has been inundating her with letters about her crush on her guardian... only to discover that everyone in the house insists they've never heard of this Amista!

And then we're off to the races. Katinka "injures" her ankle so she can stay and investigate - this is the most reasonable of the escalatingly strange stratagems that enable her to stay in the house, investigate, and fall ever more deeply in love with the house's owner, Carlyon. She accuses four or five different people of being Amista, nearly falls off a cliff a couple of times (AS ONE DOES), quarrels continually with a police inspector named Mr. Chucky (I just can't with this name), and continually spins breathless, convoluted stories in her head about the possible solutions to her mystery. Why have a writer for your heroine if she is NOT going to make up ridiculous explanations for the mystery?

(skygiants commented that it is criminal that Katinka's fellow advice columnist, the brassily cynical Miss Let's-Be-Lovely, did not accompany her on her mystery-solving spree, and I can only agree. Miss Let's-Be-Lovely probably would have come up with even MORE baroque explanations, not, like Katinka, because she actually believed them, but for sheer jaded love of melodrama.)

I will not recount the plot in any more detail, as I suspect this book is even better unspoiled. I went into it already knowing almost all the plot twists from these reviews and it didn't enormously impair my enjoyment, but I suspect it would have been even better if I could have gasped at every reveal - and then gasped again when it is revealed that this reveal is in fact merely yet another red herring! A wild ride indeed.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

When I read all the Newbery Medal winners years ago: I left two off my list: the 1922 winner Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, and the 1940 winner James Daugherty’s Daniel Boone, on the grounds that nonfiction books that old were surely outdated and probably racist.

But as I’ve been reading all the Newbery Honor books, it’s been nagging me that I really ought to complete the project, and as Daniel Boone is a svelte 90 pages I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, it’s actually really good! Given the time period, it’s surprisingly respectful and culturally sensitive…

HA HA HA, sorry, I just can’t keep it up any longer. In actual fact, Daniel Boone is somehow even worse than I expected, never mind that I thought my expectations were rock bottom. The back cover depicts what Daugherty repeatedly calls an “Indian varmint,” a distortedly muscular figure in a style reminiscent of Thomas Hart Benton. (Daugherty did his own illustrations for this book). Similar figures adorn the endpapers (where they are, of course, wrassling with backwoodsman) and the illustrations within, which accompany a text which is exactly what you would expect given the illustrations.

At troisoiseaux’s recommendation, I read Anne Boyd Rioux’s Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, an eminently readable book that I zipped through in two days and occasionally disagreed with vehemently. In particular, I thought her final chapter about The State of Girls’ Books today takes too dim a view of things (and also seemed outdated even for its own time of publication; the book came out in 2018, but the books it discusses are mainly 2000-2010). Yes, Little Women is great, but it doesn’t need to be better than everything else to be great, you know? It can be one of many fine books now available.

I did absolutely agree with Rioux’s assessment of the discourse about "Boys won't read books about girls," though. American culture has somehow managed to become more sexist on this topic than it was in the 1870s, when boys and men eagerly devoured Little Women (including our buddy William Dean Howells, by the way). It’s ridiculous.

What I’m Reading Now

Continuing my Alex Beam journey with American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church. Joseph Smith had just declared himself a candidate for president because of course he has.

Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese has arrived through interlibrary loan! It has TWO introductions, one by Pearl S. Buck, who hopes that this book will convince American housewives to stop rinsing their rice after they cook it. I don’t know if Chao’s book was personally responsible, but the idea of rinsing cooked rice shocked my roommate and me TO OUR VERY SOULS, so someone must have gotten through to the American public.

What I Plan to Read Next

I am distressed to inform you that, despite my trials with Daniel Boone, I still feel that in the interest of completeness I ought to read The Story of Mankind. The library, conveniently but unhelpfully, has the original text - all six hundred odd pages of it! - in ebook form. Lord preserve us.

However, I will resist as long as possible! My hold on Amor Towles’ new book, The Lincoln Highway, has come in at last. (Still waiting with baited breath to see if Rosamunde Pilcher’s Winter Solstice makes it to me before Christmas.)

I read Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books as if it were a box of bonbons. The whole story is just peak mid-twentieth century America: the boy wonder college president, the brain trust (largely his classmates from Yale!) who picked out the works for the Great Books of the Western World, their absolute self-assurance that this was the best that had ever been written and thought and the almost messianic belief in the power of Art and Culture to save us all.

”I’m not saying that reading and discussing the Great Books will save humanity from itself,” Hutchins said, “but I don’t know anything else that will.” Later in life he became obsessed with creating a one-world government to control the threat of the atom bomb, for which he felt a tormenting guilt, as the first tests that eventually led to the bomb occurred on the University of Chicago campus during Hutchins' tenure as president (on the grounds of the old football field, available for testing because Hutchins had disbanded the football team).

Given this incredibly high ambition, both Hutchins (the boy wonder college president) and Mortimer Adler, his right-hand man, died convinced that they were failures. Beam mentions discussing this with Charles Van Doren, who knew them both, and Beam commented, surely that's not the case?, and Van Doren replies gently, "No, I think they were right." Certainly in both cases their reach far exceeded their grasp.

(And yes, this is THAT Charles Van Doren, who acquired national infamy as a quiz show cheat. After his disgrace, Mortimer Adler stood by him and gave him a job as an encyclopedia salesman to help him get back on his feet, which is a lovely and human moment from the famously abrasive Adler.)

In general, though, most people connected with the creation of the Great Books were phenomenally successful. My favorite is Beam's commentary on Benton, who in 1945 became “assistant secretary of state for what the United States would never call propaganda - he oversaw the United States Information Agency, among other things…”

The Great Books were enormously popular (in the sense of sales if not, perhaps, in the sense of actually being read) through the 1960s, but as the counterculture gained steam they fell out of favor. However, Beam points out, they have had a long, long afterlife, during which they remained a hobby for a fervent though graying part of the population - he describes his attendance at a weekend Great Books conference, where the book discussions sound delightful - and the curriculum (with some emendations) ​at the tiny college of St. John's.

I find St. John's enchanting. A year or two before I went to college, Smithsonian magazine published an article about St. John's, and its eccentricity thrilled me so much (the Johnnies' game of choice is croquet!) that I actually considered applying. But upon further consideration, the book list defeated me. I could have gotten on board with the ancient Greek classics, but I just couldn't with reading Newton and Lavoisier and various other centuries-old scientific thinkers.

(This was apparently a stumbling block for Hutchins' Great Books, too: many, many people, including a large portion of the committee!, thought the inclusion of outdated scientific works was ridiculous, no matter how ground-breaking they had been at the time. Other parts of Aristotle's work might be for all time but his physics certainly were not.)

I still find it enchanting, though, and I did feel a bit wistful about the might-have-beens as I read it. When some Johnnies got arrested during the Civil Rights Movement, they scrawled ancient Greek graffiti inside the jail cells. How cool is that?

This is, of course, more or less the kind of college that Hutchins wanted to turn the University of Chicago into; he had only a very peripheral involvement in St. John's. It is certainly an irony of his life that his vision was realized so fully by someone else. But there is something beautiful about the fact that this vision was realized by someone.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

GUESS WHO FINISHED MARY RENAULT’S FIRE FROM HEAVEN, IT’S ME, A REVIEW WILL BE FORTHCOMING BUT FOR NOW *SPIKES FOOTBALL*

Otherwise! This week I read Viv Groskop’s The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature, which reminds me of a blog in the best possible way: informal yet erudite, hilarious and yet hitting notes of poignancy, as when she muses on unrequited love in Turgenev’s life and work, as well as her own unrequited passion for a certain Bogdan Bogdanovich, which translates as “God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift.” (She muses on an oversize sweater she liked to wear the year that she knew him: “it made me look like a bag lady. You can see now why the passion of God’s Gift, Son of Gift’s Gift, was not ignited.”)

This book also absolutely exploded my reading list, adding not only many of the Russian classics that it discussed, but also J. A. E. Curtis’s biography Manuscripts Don’t Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov, A Life in Letters and Diaries, and...

Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the End of a Beautiful Friendship, a book about Nabokov and Wilson’s friendship-ending quarrel over Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. Wilson wrote a 6,000 word essay panning the translation, and then he and Nabokov argued about it across at least three different literary magazines, with articles on either side contributed by such luminaries as Robert Graves, Paul Fussell, and the Harvard professor Alexander Gerschenkron, who panned Nabokov’s translation so eruditely that Nabokov, who usually sailed into battle with each and every critic, ignored the letter completely, presumably because he couldn’t refute it. (Then he meekly incorporated most of Gerschenkron’s suggestions into the next edition.)

In short, this is an account of an incredibly highbrow fandom wank in the pre-internet age, and I ate it up with a spoon. An absolute delight.

What I’m Reading Now

Another Alex Beam book, of course: A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, which unexpectedly, like The Feud, turns out to center on a friendship, although in this case the friendship does not turn sour, as only one of the friends (Mortimer Adler) is impossible. The other, Robert Hutchins, Boy Wonder, dean of the Yale Law School at the age of 27, was beloved by all who knew him: “Hutchins ‘made homosexuals of us all’ was his friend Scott Buchanan’s memorable comment,” Beam notes, after quoting a different friend who raves that Hutchins was “humorous, ironic, brave, beautiful, unflappable, dismissive of cant…” and then runs out of adjectives, not because there are no more adjectives but because no mere word can capture the glory and the wonder that is Robert Hutchins.

Beam includes a photo of Hutchins, and the man looks like an Arrow Collar ad. A 1935 Time magazine story gushed that Hutchins, “once the youngest and handsomest big-university president in the land, is now only the handsomest.” Hutchins teased Adler about teaching too much Thomas Aquinas, “lest auld Aquinas be forgot.” I’m thinking about falling in love with Hutchins myself.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have one last Newbery Honor book from the 1980s! It’s Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword, which I tried valiantly to read in my youth (one of my friends really liked it) and bounced off of repeatedly. Perhaps the third time’s the charm?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“What was it all about?” muses Walt Boomer. “It bothers me that we didn’t learn a lot. If we had, we would not have invaded Iraq.”

Thus ends Max Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975, a book that absolutely lives up to its subtitle. I think the absolute nadir was the part where Lt. Calley (of My Lai massacre fame) got arrested for war crimes and the White House was inundated with indignant messages demanding why he was being prosecuted for doing his duty, by God, although the absolute cynicism of Nixon and Kissinger’s plans for withdrawal from Vietnam also harrowed the tattered shreds of my faith in humanity.

Despite protestations to the contrary, they knew very well that the government of South Vietnam would fall to the North soon after US withdrawal. All they cared about was making sure it happened “a decent interval” (they repeated this phrase over and over) after the US left, because they figured that the American people would forget all about Vietnam in a year or two, on the usually safe grounds that the American people have the attention span of hamsters. However, as it turned out the American people ABSOLUTELY remembered Vietnam when Saigon fell, but by then Nixon was out of office anyway so for his purposes it didn’t matter.

As Hastings notes, however, Vietnam was always a game where the US’s only winning move was not to play. By the time Nixon inherited the conflict, the ending was always going to be messy, and almost certainly going to end with the government of South Vietnam falling, because it had no credibility with the vast majority of people in Vietnam. “In the absence of credible local governance, winning firefights was, and always will be, meaningless,” Hastings notes.

I also read Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, a memoir about Machado’s emotionally abusive ex-girlfriend, told in vignettes with titles like “Dream House as Gothic Fiction” or “Dream House as Creature Feature,” some of which are straight up memoir, some of which are musings about abusive relationships in fiction (Gaslight, that one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard gets tortured), a whole Choose Your Own Adventure section where the reader navigates a morning with the girlfriend who has woken up Cranky because the narrator flailed in her sleep…

I picked this up on a whim when it came in at the library and it’s REALLY effective. I dipped into it at the desk reading bits and pieces, and then read it straight through that evening. Trigger warnings out the wazoo, of course.

On a lighter note, I read Nancy and Plum, written by Betty MacDonald (author of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books), a delightful tale of two plucky orphans who escape their deliciously Dickensian orphanage after much travail and many sassy exchanges with the cruel keeper of the orphanage and her spoiled tattletale niece Marybelle.

This is based on the bedtime stories that MacDonald told her sisters when they were all little, and although it’s clearly been streamlined from its original form (bedtime stories having the tendency to wander off on tangents like “What if Nancy and Plum entered the Olympics/got kidnapped by pirates/ran away to the Yukon?”) some of that original madcap bedtime story energy remains.

What I’m Reading Now

Absolutely delighted to inform you that Nancy and Plum includes a scene where Nancy and Plum’s librarian friend shares the titles of ALL her favorite books when she was a girl, many of which I had already read, but I noted down the ones I hadn’t and now I have a thrilling list of twentieth century children’s books to check out! Options include Timothy’s Quest by Kate Douglas Wiggin (always glad for recommendations of books by the author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm!) and Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus. Circus!!!

Among this smorgasbord I lighted on Carroll Watson Rankin’s Dandelion Cottage as my first treat. (These are all available on Gutenberg.org, by the way.) Four girls have come into possession of a semi-derelict cottage and are making it their very own, and I strongly suspect they will accidentally matchmake their kindly landlord Mr. Black with their sweet neighbor, the widowed Mrs. Crane.

What I Plan to Read Next

The forward in Nancy and Plum noted that MacDonald’s sister Mary Bard ALSO wrote books, most notably a Best Friend trilogy, and as I LOVE best friends I have of course put the first book (Best Friends) on hold.

If you are interested in the history of China in the first half of the twentieth century, or you’re intrigued by the idea of a memoir where the translator and the author (who are husband and wife) sometimes bicker affectionately in the footnotes (with occasional interjections by their children as the book goes on), or you just enjoy memoirs, then I highly recommend Buwei Yang Chao’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman.

Chao seems to be one of those absolute powerhouse people who has gone everywhere, done everything, and made tons of friends while she’s at it. She was born in Nanking (she mentions how much she’s looking forward to visiting Nanking now that the war’s over… as the book was published in 1947 I hope she got right on that), was raised mostly as a boy for the first decade of her life (the family called her Little Mister Three), during which time her family moved frequently from city to city in China.

After breaking an engagement that had been made before her birth, pausing briefly at the age of nineteen to serve as headmistress of a women’s vocational school, and then fleeing to Shanghai when the Kuomintang government of Nanking fell, Buwei moved to Japan to study medicine for six years. (This was also the point at which she acquired the name Buwei: a friend chose it for her, not-yet-Buwei declared that she hated it, and then the friend died of scarlet fever and Buwei decided to use the name henceforth in her honor.)

You might imagine that fleeing Nanking as a refugee would have been a low point, but in fact the one part of her memoir that Buwei recounts without joy are her years in Japan. She recalls that the Chinese medical students (who were shunted together in one group, with a single horrified Japanese girl) discovered that their cadaver was an un-sterilized tubercular patient, and adds that this was typical. “Incidents, big and small, were part of the regular fare of Chinese students in Japan: you would find insufficient quantities of chemicals; you would be given defective historiological specimens. Sometimes you would meet with promoters of Sino-Japanese friendship, but they usually wound up reminding you of the war of 1894, when Japan annihilated the Chinese navy… And yet the Japanese wondered why Chinese who had studied abroad in Europe and America always spoke well of the country they had lived in, while the majority of those who studied in Japan learned to love the country less than before they went there.”

However, Buwei held the course, completed her studies, and went back to China to set up her own hospital with a friend. However, after a year or two she met Yuenren Chao, an all-around polymath who eventually became most famous for his contributions to linguistics, and gave up the practice of medicine when they married, as henceforth the family moved almost every year.

They lived in multiple cities in China, in London, in France, in Hawaii, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Cambridge in the mid-twenties, they lived on the middle floor of a three-story house, with Black families on the other two floors. “Some American friends said that we should not live with colored people,” Chao records. “I did not understand what they meant until I learned that yellow and red were not colors, but that black was.”

As a footnote, she adds a story recounted by a Chinese friend: “when he visited the South, he purposely sat in the sections in buses and cars marked ‘colored’ to see what would happen. The conductor would not listen to him when he insisted that he was colored.”

The Chaos’ friends, like the Chaos themselves, are all the kind of indomitably curious people who take this sort of “wonder how this works! Let’s fuck around and find out!” attitude toward weird foreign customs like Jim Crow. This makes for a bracing read although there are moments, like that particular footnote, where the reader gasps OH GOD I’M GLAD YOU’RE OKAY.

Among these more or less yearly moves (which speed up to almost monthly while they’re fleeing the Japanese invasion of China), the Chaos brought up four daughters. Buwei Chao notes proudly, “When one or two of my daughters said they wanted to go into medicine, I said:

‘No, my dears, you look almost as pretty as I did at your ages. The country needs more women doctors, to be sure, but leave it to the less marriageable ones.’

Thus, thanks to my advice, Nova is still able to work in a chemical research laboratory after becoming Mrs. Huang P’eiyung.”

One of the other daughters grew up to be the children’s book author Lensey Namioka, most famous these days for Yang the Youngest and His Terrible Ear, but most beloved by me for her Zenta and Matsuzo Mysteries, about two ronin (masterless samurai) who wander Japan solving mysteries. I read them in my teens and recall that they were deliciously slashy in a Sutcliffian loyalty kink kind of way. In fact, it was through researching Namioka (read: reading her Wikipedia page) that I discovered the existence of her mother’s memoir, although I’d already heard of Buwei Yang Chao’s earlier cookbook How to Cook and Eat in Chinese in a discussion of mid-century American food culture.

At the time I was intrigued (I actually namecheck How to Cook and Eat in Chinese in Honeytrap: Daniel’s mother has a copy), but now I have moved from “intrigued” to “I have to read it.” I’m not sure I’ll cook out of it (I suspect American and Chinese cooking have both changed a lot in the intervening eighty years!) but I bet it’s fascinating all the same.

I meant to read Nella Larsen’s Passing slowly so as to discuss it with asakiyume, but once I started reading I grew so absorbed that I accidentally devoured the book in a morning. In my defense it is very short. The book grabs you by the throat from the very first page, when Irene receives a letter from an old childhood friend: Clare, who is now passing for white.

Although Clare is married to a deeply racist man, which makes any connection with her old life fraught with danger, she yearns to be among Black people again… at least on an occasional basis. Irene remains embedded in the Black community, but, light-skinned herself, she occasionally takes advantage of her ability to pass to use white-only facilities - which is how she runs into Clare, after not seeing her for over a decade: both women are drinking iced tea in a rooftop hotel restaurant in Chicago.

Irene is scornful of Clare’s choice to pass permanently, but she can’t help admiring the moxie it takes to do it… as well as Clare’s sensational, magnetic beauty, on which Irene comments every time that she sees her, which generally happens after Irene has sworn that she will never see Clare again and then goes to see her anyway, because Irene just can’t seem to resist her.

When I bought the book, the used bookstore clerk commented, “I’ve heard really toned down the sapphic overtones in the movie.” I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I can’t comment, but I intend to report back once I do.

( Spoilers )

On the whole, though, an excellent book. Larsen milks the premise for both drama and sociological insight, and it's a pleasure to see a premise so absolutely wrung dry.

What I’ve Been Stymied in Reading

On Google Books, I tracked down volume 36 of The Atlantic Monthly, which has the first two numbers of William Dean Howells’ Private Theatricals. I wanted to compare the serial against the version published fifty years as Mrs. Farrell: Howells often revised his serials before publishing them as books, and I was super curious whether perhaps he toned down any of the gay bits for the 1921 audience. But actually, it seems that nothing changed but the title, which makes it easier to resign myself to the fact that volume 37 (which presumably holds the rest of the serial) does not appear to be available online.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Wikipedia claims that Mary Stewart’s novella The Wind Off the Small Isles was never published in the United States, but I managed to get a copy from Ohio through interlibrary loan, so perhaps some enterprising Ohio librarian imported a copy from Great Britain. I loved the Canary Islands setting, and there’s a wonderfully effective scene where the heroine gets trapped in a sea cave, but on the whole it does feel slighter than Stewart’s full-length novels - as if it’s a wonderfully detailed outline for a chunk of a novel, rather than quite a full thing in its own right.

I’ve also caught up on the latest BSC and BSC Little Sister graphic novels, Kristy and the Snobs and Karen’s Kittycat Club. Kristy and the Snobs turns out to be the origin story of Shannon Kilbourne, the associate member of the BSC, who as far as I was concerned parachuted into the club out of the ether. As it turns out, she got into the club after trying to sabotage Kristy’s baby-sitting efforts after Kristy moved onto Shannon’s baby-sitting turf! I kind of want to read the original novel now to see if it played up the mafia turf war aspect of this a bit more…

I surprised myself by quite enjoying Karen’s Kittycat Club! Perhaps I have at last seen the light on Karen Brewer? Perhaps I’m just easy for anything with such a high concentration of cats.

What I’m Reading Now

I picked up Max Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 because I wanted to learn more about the evolution of the American public’s response to the Vietnam War over the 1960s, which in fact I don’t think this book deals with very much, but that’s all right: I’ve been meaning to learn more about Vietnam and the Vietnam War ever since I read Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again. (However, I am in the market for a book that DOES focus on the American public’s response to the war, if anyone has a book to recommend.)

Anyway, the French have just created an isolated position at Dienbienphu which has no overland supply routes. They can only be resupplied by air, like the German forces when they were encircled at Stalingrad, except that the Germans got encircled because they overextended themselves whereas the French have put themselves in this precarious position on purpose. Truly human folly is boundless when people feel national prestige is on the line.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m kicking myself slightly for not thinking of E. W. Hornung’s Witching Hill in October, but I don’t want to wait another year and early November still feels spooky, so I’m going to read it anyway.