A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read Bill Peet: An Autobiography in hope of picking up some tidbits about Indianapolis in the 1920s and 30s for Tramps and Vagabonds - and not only did I pick up some tidbits for that project, but also loads of interesting information about making it as an artist in the mid-twentieth century that I might just be able to use in another book.

Peet got his start doing paintings and department store ads, found a stable but stultifying job coloring greeting cards, and then ended up at Disney animation (where he based the character of Merlin in The Sword and the Stone on Disney himself!) before breaking free to write and illustrate his own picture books, which he did to great acclaim, as this one won a Caldecott honor.

I also finished Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, which is such an unusual book. It focuses not on any specific character as an individual - in fact, any individual nun whose head bobs above the surface of the narrative is pretty sure to see her ambitions and desires frustrated - but on the persistence of the community of nuns at Oby, and on the lives that intersect with the nunnery, like the wandering clerk who shows up during the Black Death, passes himself off as a priest more or less on a whim, and then just… stays… for decades.

In a way it’s kind of a downer, what with all these individual hopes and desires being thwarted left and right, but it’s also a hypnotic read: the wheel of the seasons, the passing of the years, all these things have happened before and will happen again, and yet there are a few events that break the passage of time, like the Black Death, and their aftereffects ring and ring and ring through the books like the ripples on a pond. It is a book where you can see time passing, and the shape of history.

What I’m Reading Now

After a long hiatus, I’m back at work on Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman! John and Phineas’s golden boyhood friendship - they call each other David and Jonathan, because of course they do - is about to be interrupted when John Holifax falls in love with a girl. Phineas recalls a glorious Sunday ramble together, and then muses, “that Sunday was the last I ever had David altogether for my own - my very own. It was natural, it was just, it was right. God forbid that in any way I should have murmured.”

Complaining about one’s friend’s romantic attachments never does anyone any good, I suppose - it only drives the friend away - but OH MY GOD DUDE.

I’ve also begun Violet Jacob’s Flemington, a tale of the ‘45 in which young Archie Flemington, masquerading as an itinerant painter, has undertaken to spy on James Logie. Only they have become FAST FRIENDS, and James has told Archie the tragic tale of the treachery that cost him his wife and baby son, and of course Archie is now EATEN ALIVE with guilt for his own treacherous spying on James…

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been reorganizing my book tag and it reminded me how much I like series, so I am giving new thought to three serieses that I have long meant to read! James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small books (I suppose those aren’t technically a series…), Horatio Hornblower, and the Aubrey-Maturin books.

The 2018 Caldecott medal winner, Wolf in the Snow, is just as adorable as I expected. A small child - wearing a giant red coat with a peaked hood, a callback to Little Red Riding Hood - finds a wolf puppy that has lagged behind its pack. She picks up the puppy and carries it through the thickly falling snow toward the sound of howls until she finds the pack…

But it turns out that all this tromping through the snow has worn out her strength! She starts to totter home, and then collapses! WILL SHE DIE OF HYPOTHERMIA?

Actually the wolf pack comes to her aid, forming a protective ring around her in the snow until her parents and her faithful dog find her. Happy end for everyone!

I quite enjoyed Brian Floca’s Locomotive! It’s about the transcontinental railway and you know I’m always up for anything involving trains. (There are train tracks just past the library where I work. I don’t run to the library window and cry “Train! Train!” like the little kids do sometimes when it passes, but it’s always a pleasant break to hear the whistle and the rattle of the wheels rolling past.)

I realize that the Caldecott is awarded for the sake of the pictures, but the thing that really struck me about this book is the use of typefaces, which you can only see a little bit in the Amazon preview, unfortunately. But there’s the general narrative of the book, which is a sort of free verse poem about trains, and then you’ve got words that are sound effects, basically - the sound of the hammers pounding the spikes into the track, the clang of the wheels and the whistle of the steam - and these are bigger and bolder and sometimes in that old-timey saloon font - and it just gives the book a lovely sense of atmosphere, so that you can almost hear the train as you’re reading.

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And now I’ve got just two more books to go in the Caldecott project! I read the 2016 & 2017 winners as the project was ongoing, so there’s just the 2015 winner, The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend, which is about an imaginary friend who doesn’t have a child and sets out on a quest to find one - I see no way that this book could be anything but 100% charming - and then the 2018 winner, Wolf in the Snow, which frankly looks engineered to appeal directly to my interests.

What next? I’ve been toying with the idea of reading the Newbery Honor books - probably not all of them; there are an awful lot and I suspect most of the older ones will be hard to get a hold of, because after 1923 the iron portcullis of US copyright law falls and therefore they’re not available online. Why are you like this, copyright law? (This is a rhetorical question; IIRC it’s something to do with Disney.)

But I’ve had really good luck finding books I love among the Newbery Honor books in the past (more so than the winners themselves, actually, although one must bear in mind that there are simply more honor books overall), so it seems like it would be worthwhile to give it a go anyway.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ellen Kindt McKenzie’s Drujienna’s Harp, which I hoped I would love but did not, sadly. I guess sometimes books just don’t click for whatever reason.

What I’m Reading Now

Mary Downing Hahn’s Stepping on the Cracks, which is set on the American home front during World War II and is about two girls, Margaret and Elizabeth, who live next door to each other and are best friends, which all in all ought to be crack for me but in fact I just can’t get over how mean Elizabeth is. She’s always teasing Margaret for being a ‘fraidy-cat to make Margaret do whatever Elizabeth wants, and when ( Spoilers, if anyone cares )

So right now I’m team “new friends for Margaret.” Unfortunately there don’t seem to be any new friends in the wings, unless I suppose she befriends the mean neighbor boy. But frankly it seems more likely that Elizabeth will befriend him, in that “not dating because they’re too young but you can totally tell they’re going to get together once they grow up” way which is an actual relationship category in children’s books. They have so much in common! They’re both so mean.

I’m also keeping on with Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk, which has settled into a discussion about the Psalms, which I find far less aggravating than Norris’s musings about The Poet’s Calling. In fact some of it is quite interesting! I’m at the part where she’s talking about the anger of the Psalms, which is making me want to read the Psalms themselves.

What I Plan to Read Next

THE ALA JUST ANNOUNCED THE 2018 NEWBERY & CALDECOTT WINNERS. Awww, the Caldecott winner looks super adorable: just look at this cover. It’s called Wolf in the Snow and it’s about a wolf cub and a girl who rescue each other and it has strengthened my long-held belief that the Caldecott people are obsessed with snow. There are five Caldecott books that reference snow directly in the title and two others with illustrations all about snow (The Polar Express and Owl Moon).

The Newbery Winner doesn’t ring my chimes the same way, largely because the description is so vague (what do they mean when they say “the characters are the definition of creative agency”? That could mean anything), but we’ll see how I feel about it once I’ve read it.

A Sick Day for Amos McGee is about Amos McGee, a zookeeper in an alternate reality where being a zookeeper means playing chess with the elephants and running races with the tortoises, who gets a cold and has to stay home from work one day. His animals friends are all worried about him, so they leave the zoo, take the bus to his apartment, where they entertain him and make him tea.

It's kind of striking how many picture books about zoos let the animals just up and walk out whenever they want to. (And not just picture books, or even just in America; the Soviet cartoon Cheburashka features an alligator whose day job is "zoo animal.") I suppose it's sort of in the same spirit as stories about toy shops where the toys come alive at night, where the fun comes from the reversal, except the reason toys don't actually wake up and have adventures (OR DO THEY) is that they're inanimate, whereas the reason animals can't leave the zoo is us. They're trapped because we locked them up.

The House in the Night starts off with a bit of a Goodnight Moon-ish feel: you have the child going to bed, the soothing repetition of objects associated with bedtime, a light and a bed and a book - and then the bird in the book bursts right off the page and the child rides off into the night in a lovely evocation of the power of bedtime stories. Black and white illustrations with occasional touches of yellow - which works beautifully when suddenly the bird and the child are flying among the yellow stars.

David Wiesner won his third Caldecott medal for Flotsam, which honestly seems like more Caldecott medals than anyone needs - spread the love around, Caldecott committee! - but at the same time I can’t really blame them, because how were they supposed to resist a book that features steampunk fish?

In fact, there is an entire steampunk underwater world. And steampunk is actually probably a reductive word for it, because while there are mechanical fish, there’s also a town made out of seashells on the back of a giant turtle and a trio of enormous starfish with islands on their backs. Our hero catches a glimpse of it when an underwater camera washes up on shore, and he sees the photographs it has taken - as well as a photo that shows all the camera’s other owners over the years.

Owners is probably the wrong word, though. They don’t seem to own the camera so much as have the luck to find it for a bit, and give it back to the sea when it wants to go. But first they all took selfies with it, each one holding the photograph of the kid who came before, so that with a magnifying glass - and then a microscope - the protagonist can look back and see who has had the camera before.

Kevin Henkes must work some kind of magic on awards committees, because he won the 2004 Caldecott Medal with a book that is, admittedly, adorable – Kitten’s Fire Full Moon is about a kitten who believes that the moon is a saucer full of milk and goes to increasingly cute lengths to get it – but somehow I expect something more of Caldecott book than “adorable.”

Maybe they were won over by the black and white illustrations. Everything looks more serious and important in black and white.

He also won a Newbery Honor medal for Olive’s Ocean, which, again, is a perfectly fine book, but also basically the book equivalent of Oscar bait. It’s about death! But in a hopeful, uplifting, live-life-to-the-fullest kind of way! And there’s some pretty nature, although not to the extent that anyone would gush “The ocean is practically another character!” as movie reviewers are sometimes wont to do. (I’m not sure if anyone says that about the ocean, actually. I’ve seen it about cities and about mountains. I recall quite a few Brokeback Mountain reviewers flinging themselves onto the mountain shots with glad cries, presumably because mountains have no sexualities to speak of.)

Anyway: a cute book about a kitten. Possibly trying a little too hard to make you go “Awwwwwww,” but still cute.

Eric Rohmann’s My Friend Rabbit is a bit like one of those songs where you’ve got a flea on a feather on a bird in a nest in a tree in the hollow down in the bog (each new iteration getting added lyric by lyric), except instead you have Rabbit piling a squirrel on a duck on a bear on an alligator on a stag on a hippo on a rhino on an elephant in order to retrieve a small plane that flew into a tree after his friend Mouse fell out of it.

You will I am sure be shocked beyond measure to hear that this sterling plans falls apart - literally. I suspect that this book is popular with small children: who doesn’t like a tall tower of animals coming down in a dramatic but ultimately harmless collapse? At which point the disgruntled animals turn on Rabbit, only for him to be saved in the nick of time by Mouse, who managed to grab hold of the airplane and flies to the rescue?

The illustrations are charming, although not obviously ground-breaking in the way that Caldecott illustrations sometimes are. I did quite like the bit where you have to turn the book sideways to see the taaaaaall tower of animals marching up the page.

I have been low-key dreading Judith St. George's So You Want to Be President? ever since I noticed it on the Caldecott list, because I strongly suspected that it would be full of bitter unintended irony at this point in time - which is, indeed, true; there is a part where the book explains that "The President has to be polite to everyone," and, well, yeah.

But it's also full of delightful presidential trivia! I love presidential trivia. Some of it I had heard before - the female reporter who sat on John Quincy Adams' clothes while he was skinny-dipping, say - but some of it was new: did you know that Ulysses S. Grant got arrest for speeding while he was president?

Also, once someone through a cabbage a William Howard Taft while Taft was giving a speech, and he quipped, "I see that one of my adversaries has lost his head." How's that for sangfroid? I aspire to be that cool under pressure.

Anyway. David Small illustrated this book with illustrations in the style of political cartoons, and I at least had great fun trying to pick out who was who, although I definitely did much better with the twentieth century dudes. Who remembers Millard Fillmore these days?