A Certain Slant of Light

Merry Christmas! I thought I might break tradition and post Wednesday Reading Meme on Thursday on account of Christmas, but no, here I am.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves, which is not technically a Christmas book, but I feel that all Jeeves and Wooster stories are Christmas-adjacent in that they are very jolly.

Also Annie Fellows Johnston’s Miss Santa Claus of the Pullman, which is about two small children (Libby and William, seven and four) who are riding a Pullman car to be reunited with their father and meet their new stepmother… and while on the car, they meet a girl who they are convinced is Santa Claus’s daughter! She tells them a story that helps them bond into a real family. A sweet Christmas story.

And Sara Crewe; or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s original serialized story that she later expanded into A Little Princess. No Becky, no Lottie, a good deal less Ermengarde, but the bit about the starving beggar girl outside the bun shop to whom Sara gives five of her six buns is still the same, and the ending where the bun shop lady has adopted the beggar girl.

What I’m Reading Now

In The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte has just begun attending Roe Head school, where Mary Taylor just told her that she was very ugly which somehow cemented their friendship for life.

What I Plan to Read Next

Alas, I did NOT manage to read Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal in time for Christmas. However I have decided that I would rather read it relatively close to when I read The Appeal rather than wait for next Christmas, so as soon as it returns to the library I’ll check it out this winter.

Although we began our voyage with high hopes, after three months littlerhymes and I have at long last limped to the end of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.

Some of this is our fault, or rather the fault of our method of buddy-reading. As is our wont, we tried to read the book a chapter at a time. But this is a book made to be gulped, not sipped, and we would have done better to read it section by section or even to speed through the whole thing and reconvene only at the end, book club style, to yell “Can you BELIEVE what Danton/Camille/Robespierre did??”

Reading it chapter by chapter simply gives you too much time to dread the characters’ next appalling life choices (especially Camille’s, as he routinely makes six appalling life choices before breakfast), plus of course the inevitable awful ends of, well, pretty much everyone. I developed a certain aversion to picking up the book again to find out who was going to suffer horribly this time.

Part of it is perhaps a fault of the book, in that it expects the reader to be able to fill in a ton of background knowledge about the French Revolution. Now perhaps we could have been expected to bring to the book a bit more knowledge than we did, but all the same, we both spent much of the book at sea about just what exactly was going on.

And part of it is perhaps the fault of Robespierre. (He’s been blamed for everything else, so why not this too?) This is the second giant tome that I’ve read that deals largely with the character and actions of Robespierre (the other was Colin Jones’ nonfiction work The Fall of Robespierre), and they both have this same central problem that you never really feel that you understand the man.

A Place of Greater Safety gets closest when a feverish Robespierre daydreams about his vision of the perfect cottagecore future, where grave and contented citizens emerge from pleasant but non-luxurious lives on self-sufficient farms to reasonably debate the issues of the day on marble colonnades. He despises bloodshed, but if bloodshed is the only way to achieve this beautiful future, well, isn’t it his duty to set aside his personal abhorrence of bloodshed in favor of the good of the country? For he believes fervently in civic virtue, the selfless devotion to one’s country above all petty personal considerations.

But he is not so fervent in this belief as Saint-Just, who plays in this book the part of the devil masquerading as the angel on Robespierre’s shoulder, pushing him toward ever more violence by appealing to his highest ideals. How, Saint-Just demands, can you truly claim to have the Revolution’s best interests at heart when you continue to protect your friends Danton and Camille? They are both corrupt men who have taken bribes, and both are calling for moderation right when moderation will lay us open to invasion from counterrevolutionary powers.

(Robespierre is often cast in histories of the French Revolution as The Worst. Mantel suggests that perhaps, in fact, Saint-Just is The Actual Worst.)

( spoilers )

However, in one thing the book was an unqualified success: I now want to read more nonfiction about the French Revolution. Does anyone have recs?

A couple months ago, littlerhymes and I read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes. My library copy was an omnibus edition also containing Warner’s Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, and for no better reason than this I decided to read this second book as well.

(Mr. Fortune’s Maggot is usually published in the US as Mr. Fortune, presumably because we don’t tend to use maggot in the sense it’s used in the title, which means something between “hobbyhorse” and “obsession.” Do the British still use it this way?)

To be honest, I assumed the two books were published as an omnibus because they were both about the same rather short length, and therefore made a pleasingly sized book together. In fact, as it turns out, they make a sort of diptych: What If You Just Abandon Society and Social Expectations, female and male versions.

In Lolly Willowes, Laura leaves London for the country town of Great Mop, where she becomes a witch. In Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, Mr. Fortune sails all the way around the world to an idyllic Pacific island, where he becomes a Christian missionary.

He’s quite bad at being a missionary. In fact, in his whole time on the island, he only makes one convert, Lueli, who is not so much a convert as a boy fascinated by all forms of novelty. Mr. Fortune’s weird stories about a god who was a man who died on the cross are just as strange and interesting as Mr. Fortune’s harpsichord, and Lueli sees no reason why listening to them should stop him from also hanging onto his own carved wooden god (for each islander has their own god).

At last, the unobservant Mr. Fortune realizes that Lueli is still worshipping his own wooden god in secret. They have a confrontation, where Mr. Fortune orders Lueli to burn his idol, and Lueli can neither bring himself to refuse or comply, and it seems that at very least their friendship is about to go up in smoke when the volcano at the center of the island erupts, forcing Mr. Fortune and Lueli to flee, leaving the idol behind to be burnt to a cinder by the lava.

Which might seem like the act of a jealous God, insisting that Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me. But in the aftermath, it’s Mr. Fortune who loses his faith in God. Lueli, as faithful to his burnt god as ever, collapses into a depression, because surely he can’t long survive its destruction.

First, Mr. Fortune attempts to heal Lueli by teaching him calculus. When this fails and Lueli tries to drown himself (only to be saved by the girl he soon after decides to marry), Mr. Fortune carves him another idol, which cheers Lueli far more effectively than writing equations in the sand. Having given Lueli this new wooden god, Mr. Fortune leaves the island, and we last see him sailing away in a launch.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I was beginning to feel crushed beneath the gloom and doom of the books I’m reading. (A Place of Greater Safety: everyone’s gonna die. The Honourable Schoolboy: not everyone is going to die, but someone is sure going to die horribly. Simon Sort of Says: everyone already died in a school shooting. Okay, not actually, there are no literal ghosts in this book. The hero’s tragic backstory is that he’s the only child in his classroom who survived, though.)

So I picked up How Right You Are, Jeeves from the library. Important to introduce variety into one’s reading diet! This one had a bit less Jeeves than is perhaps ideal (he’s gone for at least half the book), but no one AT ANY POINT was in danger of death, dismemberment, total psychological dissolution, etc., and there was an extremely funny sequence where Bertie bonds with Sir Roderick Glossop, the eminent brain specialist.

I also reread Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree, the sequel to The Good Master, which is less about the Problem of Tomboys (although there is a great scene where Kate beats all the boys in the horse race… having promised that she will give up riding astride thereafter) and more about the Problem of War, which is especially poignant when you realize it was published in 1938. The subplot about how the Jews are, in fact, very nice people! and an integral part of Hungary! (and, by extension, all of humanity!) feels depressingly relevant again today.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started my semi-annual reread of Jostein Gaarder’s The Christmas Mystery, a book about an advent calendar which unfolds in 24 chapters. I find this book-as-advent-calendar structure enchanting and long to emulate it, but have discovered it’s quite hard to do, actually, which makes me appreciate the book even more on this reread.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been contemplating how many more Smiley books to read. The next one, Smiley’s People, is the final book of the Karla Trilogy, so of course I have to read that, and after that there are just two more (The Secret Pilgrim and A Legacy of Spies), but published long afterward which always makes me rather doubtful… Has anyone read them? What did you think?

I technically didn’t need to reread Kate Seredy’s The Good Master for my Newbery project, as I already read it as a child and liked it so much that it survived repeated cullings of my childhood book collection… but I didn’t actually remember anything about it, aside from the vague sense that “This might be a good book for my Problem of Tomboys post.”

And how. The book begins when Jancsi’s Cousin Kate arrives on the train from Budapest. Over the course of the next few chapters, Kate:

- throws a temper tantrum when she realizes she’ll have to ride in a horse cart rather than a proper taxi;
- pushes Jancsi and his father off the cart, takes hold of the reins, and whip the horses home while standing in the cart like a charioteer in Ben Hur;
- climbs into the rafters to eat sausages (which are stored in the rafters);
- cuts her skirt with a pair of shears so Jansci can give her a riding lesson;
- and then, at the end of the first riding lesson, screams like a banshee just for the fun of seeing Jancsi’s horse try to buck him off.

After this, Kate becomes slightly less of a danger to life and limb, but not less of a tomboy. In fact, after the skirt cutting incident, Jancsi’s mother dresses Cousin Kate in Jancsi’s cast-off clothing (which Kate has already anathemized as looking like girl’s clothes, with those wide pleated trousers). If she’s going to run wild, might as well have the proper clothes for it!

In general, if you wish to read about children behaving badly for no particularly good reason, the 1930s are a fruitful decade in which to look.

I finally finished Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley! There’s a good book in the middle of it, but unfortunately it’s surrounded on both sides by two significantly less good books, which makes getting started and getting to the end rather a slog.

Reading it right on the heels of Jane Eyre, I noticed a similarity in structure: you have the somewhat slower first section, the middle section where the book catches fire around a single central relationship, and then again a slower third section wherein that central relationship is torn asunder. However, although (IMO) the middle section is the best part of Jane Eyre, it’s highly readable all the way through (if only for “OMG St. John have you considered falling into the fire?” reasons in certain parts), whereas the beginning of Shirley in particular is so boring. So so so boring. I gave up the first time I tried to read this book because the beginning was so incredibly dull.

The story picks up when Caroline Helstone appears on the scene, but it doesn’t really catch fire till she meets her best friend Shirley Keeldar, and then we get a number of chapters of marvelous friendship. And then they simply never appear on the page together again.

There is no rupture to their friendship. It’s just that Bronte has abruptly remembered that she still hasn’t sent up Shirley’s endgame romance, so suddenly that takes over. We even learn secondhand near the end that Shirley and Caroline just had a sleepover where they exchanged heartfelt confidences… but we don’t get to see it! Maddening.

Shirley’s romance also feels oddly cut off at the end. She and her suitor get engaged, but after the initial rush of excitement, Shirley starts to behave like a caged bird. The chapter ends with an excerpt from her fiance’s diary, which concludes, “She breathed a murmur, inarticulate yet expressive; darted, or melted, from my arms—and I lost her.”

Smash cut to the wedding. Well, okay, not directly to the wedding; first we smash cut to the fates of the three extremely boring curates we first met at the beginning of the book. Then Caroline’s beloved proposes to her. THEN smash cut to the double wedding. How did Shirley overcome her doubts about giving up her independence to marry? We’ll never know!

Shirley Keeldar is evidently based on Emily Bronte, which is FASCINATING to me, because the more recent interpretations of Emily that I’m familiar with tend to portray her as a cranky gremlin with no social skills. This is not Charlotte’s vision of her sister at all. Shirley, an Emily Bronte to whom Charlotte has gifted the health and wealth Emily lacked, is a vivacious, witty tomboy who charms everyone who knows her.

I’m planning to round out my Bronte project with some biographical reading about the Brontes, starting with Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte and Daphne Du Maurier’s The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte, and then finishing up with least one more recent biography. (Any recs?) I’ll be curious to compare all the different versions of Emily.

First, however: onward to Villette!

My mother gave me Kathleen Flinn’s The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks because she knows I’m a fan of food and cooking memoirs, and indeed I gobbled this book right up.

For once, the subtitle of a nonfiction book is an accurate reflection of what’s inside: the book is about Flinn’s decision to give cooking lessons to nine volunteers who are reliant on ultra-processed package foods but want to be able to cook for themselves and their families. Over the course of just a few lessons, they learn how to cut apart a whole chicken, tell when meat is done, measure ingredients for baking, season their food to taste, and just generally cook dinner without having to slavishly follow a recipe.

A couple things struck me as I was reading. The first is that, culturally, there seems to be an assumption in America (perhaps other places?) that most skills are hard to learn, when in fact the basics are often quite easy. I found this myself when I began learning the dulcimer: I have the musical talent of a potato, but nonetheless within the month I could play a recognizable rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Similarly, a novice cook probably won’t jump straight to baked Alaska, but you can teach an eight-year-old to turn out passable chocolate chip cookies.

The other realization, which builds on the first, is that a lot of industries are built on convincing people that it would be sooooo hard to learn the skills to do the thing for themselves. The car industry has gone one better by making cars you literally cannot repair at home, which the food and garment industries can’t manage, but they do rely on the idea that cooking and garment repair are sooooo difficult and time-consuming and hard to learn.

I think AI is creating a similar dynamic with writing and art generally, where people come to see skills that are really pretty simple as completely beyond their grasp. I’m in a class to train advisors, and we had an assignment to write an advising philosophy, and the instructions went from “No AI” to “Well, maybe AI to brainstorm” to “Well, actually I ChatGPTed the whole philosophy! But I edited it myself, so that’s fine, right?” And indeed it was fine, apparently. I’m not sure, at this point, what wouldn’t be fine. ChatGPTing the thing and then not editing, one fondly imagines, but maybe that would have been okay too. Once you let the camel’s nose in the door, the whole camel is coming into the tent.

In my youth I was an avid reader of children’s fantasy, and I fully intended to segue into adult fantasy as I grew older. However, somewhere along the way I stumbled off the path, and every once in a while I stop and wonder why.

Then I read an adult fantasy book and I remember: it’s all the rape.

Now obviously there are contemporary adult fantasies where no one gets raped at all, but still, I’ll pick up a perfectly pleasant-looking book and be reading along happily and then WHAMMO, we’ve hit rapetown.

Case in point: Phyllis Ann Karr’s Frostflower and Thorn

( Spoilers )

On a different note, I remember that someone (troisoiseaux?) mentioned that one of Karr’s other books has a big theme about forgiveness, and that is definitely something that shows up here. Frostflower also is forgiving people right and left, and I felt like, you know, it’s nice not to have to carry the anger around I guess, but also maybe occasionally it’s fine to stay mad for a bit?

My Smiley readthrough has at last brought me to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was in fact one of the roots of this readthrough, as I read this book in high school and did not get it even slightly. I could see that it was good! But as to what actually happened at any point in the narrative? Who knows.

I thought rereading it as an adult would help clarify, as would reading the other Smiley books first. But while the first definitely helped, the second helped less than you would think. In fact, it made some things even more inexplicable, like Smiley’s marriage to Ann, who is constantly, publicly cheating on him. The earlier books do give more context for this, but the context only makes it weirder, as in every single book Ann appears to have just left Smiley, usually in the company of a much younger and hotter man, in an extremely public fashion that everyone knows about. Smiley keeps going back to her.

This may be a metaphor for the Circus, since every book also involves the newly-retired and/or fired Smiley coming back for One More Mission.

When Smiley hears that Karla calls Anna “the last illusion of the illusionless man,” he wonders if Karla truly thinks that love is an illusion, but let’s face it, Karla doesn’t need to think that all love is an illusion to believe that what’s going on with Ann and Smiley is mostly smoke and mirrors. As is, of course, the Circus.

( Spoilers )

Le Carre suffering scale: perhaps three-quarters of a The Spy Who Came in from the Cold? Not quite as bleak, but ouch.

If I had read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Very Far Away From Anywhere Else as a teenager, which I believe would have blown the top off my head. It’s not magical or SFnal, but a slim contemporary novel, YA before the Twilightification of YA.

In his senior year of high school, budding scientist Owen meets his classmate Natalie, a serious musician with aspirations to become a composer, and for the first time in their lives the two of them find someone they can talk to—but really talk to, about the real things that deeply matter to them, truth and art and thinking and feeling and life. “We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn’t the answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.”

It’s like Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light, not so much in the content – although A Ring of Endless Light is also about very much about art and science and the relationship between both those things and the creative urge, so perhaps to a certain extent in content too. But both books are shaped by their main characters’ struggle with ideas, are about teenagers grappling with the big questions, in a way that real teenagers often do but that books for teenagers often don’t.

I thought it chickened out a bit at the end, though. There’s a big section in the middle where Owen muses for a while about how we’re all engineered by “movies and books and advertising and all the various sexual engineers, whether they’re scientists or salesman,” to think that “Man Plus Woman Equals Sex,” then explains that he nearly ruined things by deciding he was in love with Natalie: “I hadn’t fallen in love with her, please notice that I didn’t say that; I had decided that I was in love with her.”

And this ends up almost destroying their relationship. They return to the beach where they had a wonderful day earlier, only this time Owen kisses Natalie, and Natalie rejects him. “If what we have isn’t enough, then forget it. Because it’s all we do have. And you know it! And it’s a lot! But if it’s not enough, then let it be. Forget it!”

And then they are Torn Asunder for months. Only then Owen sees an advertisement for a concert where a few of Natalie’s compositions will be performed for the first time. Of course he has to go—and they meet up afterward—and it turns out that they are, in fact, in love.

Well, okay. That sorts of pulls the rug out from under this whole critique of the sexual engineers, but sure.

But maybe the point is that all that sexual engineering forced Owen to jump immediately to the conclusion that This Must Be Love, and therefore try to bend their relationship into the shape that movies and books and advertising call Love, and in doing so almost break it? Whereas they might not have been torn asunder if he hadn’t tried to force its growth, but let it develop naturally.

Honestly, mixed feelings. Thematically, I think this ending was a mistake, because it undercuts the middle, and in particular that powerful beach scene. But also, they are so in love. Do I really want them torn asunder permanently for mere thematic reasons?