A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Twelve Great Black Cats, and Other Eerie Scottish Tales, a delightfully spooky set of ghost and ghost-adjacent stories. My only criticism is that the title is Twelve Great Black Cats and there are only ten stories and the mismatch offends my sense of the fitness of things.

Also Gerald Durrell’s The Fantastic Flying Journey, in which three children go on a round the world adventure in a hot air balloon! after taking a powder that allows them to speak to animals!!! with their fat and lovably foolish uncle Lancelot who I am almost certain is Durrell’s self-caricature. (He keeps getting himself in dangerous situation - chased by a rhino etc - and then sternly warning the children that they need to be more careful, as they attempt not to giggle.)

Not quite as good as his memoirs, but still fun. It obeys to a T the cardinal rule of children’s fantasy: asking yourself “What would I have liked to read about when I was eleven?” and then writing it.

The 2024 Newbery Honor books continued strong with Pedro Martín’s Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir, a graphic novel about a trip to visit his parents’ hometown in Mexico that the whole family (nine kids!) took sometime in the 1970s. (Young Pedro’s favorite TV show is Happy Days, and he yearns to be as cool as The Fonz.) Lots of fun! I especially loved the sequences about Pedro’s grandfather’s work as a mule driver during the Mexican Revolution, which Pedro envisions in superhero style.

What I’m Reading Now

Not much progress on Shirley this week, as I was traveling over the weekend. Shirley and Caroline have planned a romantic getaway trip to Scotland, and also started a plan for the relief of the poor of the parish who have been thrown out of work by the war and the new cloth-making machines.

What I Plan to Read Next

This Saturday I have a date with John Le Carré’s The Looking Glass War.

I’m leaving for my trip to Massachusetts tomorrow! So I’m posting my Wednesday Reading Meme today to sweep the decks clean before I go.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I finished Mary Stewart’s The Last Enchantment, the final book of the original Merlin trilogy, although Stewart went ahead and published a fourth book a few years later. The Last Enchantment nonetheless feels like a conclusion - I’d be certainly very surprised if Merlin narrates the next book - for it takes us through the end of Merlin’s story, and indeed beyond the usual end: he’s buried alive in his crystal cave, as is his usual end, but here he’s rescued and at the end of the book is living in retirement, an old man tired yet content, frequently visited by the king.

We were particularly interested in the book’s ambiguous treatment of Nimue. Is she truly in love with Merlin? Pretending to love him to steal his power? Not stealing his power at all, but learning all his skills so she can take up his mantel as Arthur’s sorcerer, just as Merlin bade her?

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the third book in the Regeneration trilogy, alternates between Billy Prior, who is headed back to the front now that he’s been released from Craiglockhart, and his counselor Rivers, who spends most of the book ill to the point of delirium, recollecting his fieldwork among the headhunters of Melanesia. The colonial rulers of Melanesia had forbidden headhunting, and because their entire culture had been organized around the headhunt, they were basically pining away in despair.

Rivers doesn’t draw a direct parallel, but there’s clearly a meditation here about war as a bearer of cultural meaning - whose cultural meaning is perhaps divorced from anything that a reasonable person might consider a “war aim.” The point of the headhunt is the headhunt. It’s not meant to win territory or settle a point of politics by other means or Defeat Autocracy; the point is to take heads. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

( Spoilers )

Nghi Vo’s When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is a sequel to The Empress of Salt and Fortune, also featuring a cleric who travels the countryside collecting knowledge/stories, also very concerned with how stories change depending who tell them. In this case, Chih is telling the story of a human-tiger romance to a trio of tigers who may eat them… or might leave Chih alive to go home and correct the record with what the tigers consider the real version, although they are grumpily aware that Chih will probably just put it down as a competing version, equal in weight with the clearly incorrect human story!

Finally, there’s a new Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel out! Jessi’s Secret Language is one that I read as a kid (in general I read all the Very Special Episode books about disabilities), and it was fun to revisit it now, especially because I’ve actually seen a production of Coppelia, the ballet that Jessi stars in. In fact, I think my desire to see that ballet stems from this book! (Almost all my other ballet feelings come from Princess Tutu. Someday I WILL see Swan Lake and Giselle.)

What I’m Reading Now

In Dracula, Dracula has end-run our heroes! They have now split up to chase him, one team by land and one by waterway… Will they be able to kill him before he reaches his castle stronghold??

What I Plan to Read Next

To my distress, I have discovered that I weeded Jane Langton’s The Diamond in the Window from my collection! So I’ll only be taking The Fledgling and the recently-acquired The Astonishing Stereoscope to Massachusetts with me.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read the latest Baby-sitters Club graphic novel, Good-bye Stacey, Goodbye, and in further Baby-sitters Club news, I am devastated to inform you that Netflix has canceled the series after a mere two seasons. Why, Netflix, why???

I also read Ann Patchett’s new essay collection These Precious Days, which really hit it out of the park. Patchett writes so movingly about friendship, which American culture generally gives short shrift in favor or romance; the standout essay of the collection is perhaps the titular “These Precious Days,” about her friendship with Sookie Raphael (honestly it says everything that I even liked this essay, because it’s about Sookie getting cancer and I usually HATE cancer stories).

But she also writes beautifully about romance (as in “Flight Plan,” her essay about her husband’s flying hobby), and family - like “Three Fathers,” about her father, stepfather, and her mother’s third husband (married after Patchett was grown, so not exactly a father figure), which is written with both love and a clear-eyed vision about the men’s foibles, and writing, and… okay, really everything that she writes about. I haven’t enjoyed an essay collection so much since Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris. Highly recommended!

What I’m Reading Now

I decided to bite the bullet and read the very first Newbery Medal winner, Hendrik van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, which I expected to be extremely dated and dull. I am pleased to inform you that only one of these two things is accurate! It IS extremely dated, by which I mean Eurocentric, by which I mean that van Loon informs the reader that “the wild barbarians of western Europe” are “our own ancestors.”

But it isn’t dull. It’s a long book, but it has extremely short chapters, so we have moved at a breathless clip through the first appearance of living cells on this earth, dinosaurs and mammals, Paleolithic Man, ancient Egypt, Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt, the Sumerians, ancient Greece, and Alexander the Great conquering everything. Right now, Rome is destroying Carthage and salting the earth!

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve decided it’s time to read down my pile of unread books! Both in the form of physical books on my unread bookshelf, and books that have waited long and patiently on my Kindle!

Unfortunately, I was unable to resist getting James Herriot's All Things Bright and Beautiful from the library, so as you can see I'm having some difficulty settling down to fulfill this vow.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’ve been on a bit of a graphic novel kick recently, which I continued with Besties: Working It Out, cowritten by Kayla Miller & Jeffrey Canino and illustrated by Kristina Luu. I’ve complained about some of Miller’s choices in her past books (although it hasn’t stopped me from reading each new book as it comes out!), so I was surprised that I just straight up liked this one. Possibly bouncing ideas off a cowriter and illustrator softened some of the weirder edges off Miller’s ideas about How Friendships Work.

The best friends in this are Beth and Chanda, two friends who get a dogsitting job so Beth can buy her mother a birthday present and Chanda can convince her parents that she’s responsible enough to get a pet cat. Naturally, things don’t go quite smoothly… I love this snapshot of a pre-teen friendship: they have so much fun together, and their friendship is strong enough to mend after they get into a big fight.

I also finished my Alex Beam journey with his first book, Gracefully Insane: Life and Death in America’s Premier Mental Hospital, which chock full of interesting anecdotes about the history of psychiatry. It focuses particularly on anything related to the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts (the last resort of Boston Brahmins in mental distress), although Beam ranges more widely at times, as in telling the tale of Freud’s disciple Dr. Horace Frink, who also became Freud’s patient, which resulted in a spectacularly botched psychoanalysis.

Frink had fallen in love with one of his own patients, a wealthy married woman named Angie Bijur. Frink himself was also married, but Freud nonetheless encouraged the pair to leave their respective spouses, marry each other, and then give a large amount of money to Freud, as he explains in this arrestingly bizarre letter to Frink (Freud, you understand, had diagnosed Frink with unconscious homosexuality): “Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right [that is, if Frink and Mrs. Bijur marry] let us change the imaginary gift into a real contribution to the psychoanalytic fund.”

What I’m Reading Now

After MUCH TRAVAIL I figured out how to play audiobooks on Overdrive through my iPod, so now I’m listening to Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer, which the library CRUELLY refused to buy as a regular ebook. Mrs. Pollifax’s friend Kedi has just been ATTACKED IN THE PALACE GARDEN!

I’ve also begun Sylvia Townshend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a book about nuns in the Middle Ages. The Black Death has just passed and now the remaining peasants want better wages for their labor! THE AUDACITY.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been organizing my book tag and stumbled on a recommendation for another nun book, Gail Godwin’s Unfinished Desires. Has anyone read this? How did you feel about it?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Alex Beam’s Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight over a Modernist Masterpiece is not quite as delightful as The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship, but that’s a very high bar to beat and the book is still pretty fun. Edith Farnsworth was a doctor specializing in kidney research, for whom Mies van der Rohe designed the Farnsworth House, an ethereally beautiful summer cottage which turned out to be practically unlivable because (1) the walls are mostly windows made of single-plane plate glass, so the house is a greenhouse in the summer and an icebox in the winter, and (2) van der Rohe situated it on the flood plain.

I looked at pictures of the Farnsworth House and I regret to inform you that it is every bit as beautiful as every fawning architectural critic ever gushed. It does, however, raise yet again the question of whether modernist architects were designing houses or beautiful sculptures that people regrettably lived in.

(Farnsworth eventually got tired of dealing with Farnsworth House and moved to Italy, where she resided in a sumptuous villa and translated Italian poetry.)

Also Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and Her Unicorn and Unicorn on a Roll: Another Phoebe and Her Unicorn Adventure, which I’ve meant to read for ages now and it just seemed like the right time. It’s sort of Calvin and Hobbsian, except about a girl and her unicorn instead of a boy and his tiger, and it’s light and delightful and I will probably read the next eleven books of it.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m struggling with Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave. I didn’t know it was possible to struggle with a Mary Stewart book! But Merlin keeps meeting so many mean people (his new tutor just turned out to be a member of a cult that practices ritual human sacrifice, LIKE YOU DO), and there’s so much casual misogyny. I know it’s the characters and not Stewart’s, because I’ve read so many of her other books and it’s not present there… but I’m still just not in the mood for it right now.

I hate to abandon a book when I’m almost halfway through, but reading it in this mood is just not doing it justice. I’m going to put it aside and tackle the quartet another time.

In cheerier news, I’ve begun Charles Boardman Hawes’ The Great Quest, which I approached with dread because his book The Dark Frigate is probably the most boring book that ever won the Newbery Medal. But to my surprise, The Great Quest has been reasonably entertaining so far! Astonishing. Of course Hawes still has two-thirds of the book to get boring, but perhaps he’ll manage to stay interesting!

What I Plan to Read Next

Planning to burn through the rest of the Phoebe and Her Unicorn series.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

When I was in elementary school my friend Micky and I bonded over our mutual loathing of Cynthia Voigt’s Dicey’s Song, so it was with some dismay that I realized I was enjoying the sequel, A Solitary Blue. Who even am I as a person? Maybe it’s just that I’m an adult now; maybe Voigt is one of those children’s book authors adults tend to enjoy more than children.

A Solitary Blue gives us the backstory of Dicey’s boyfriend, Jeff Greene. Jeff’s mother Melody abandoned the family when Jeff was seven, leaving Jeff with his emotionally distant absentminded professor father and a boatload of abandonment issues. A few years later, Melody invites Jeff to come stay with her for the summer, and at first Jeff is bowled over by her warmth and charm and ability to make him feel like the center of the universe just by looking into his eyes. Slowly, however, as instances of Melody’s selfishness and unreliability mount, Jeff realizes that the ability to make someone feel seen and loved in the moment is not the same as actually seeing and loving them as a whole person, and that Melody does not and perhaps cannot love him that way.

The rest of the book is about Jeff slowly learning how to trust and reach out to other people again. It’s also about Jeff’s father realizing that he’s been emotionally absent from Jeff’s life, and learning how to be present. He has a dramatic wake-up call when he almost fails to notice that Jeff has come down with a virulent fever, but his reformation afterward is understated. He simply begins making an effort to be present, to pay attention to Jeff, and he does this so calmly and quietly and reliably that slowly both Jeff and the reader come to understand that this change is here to stay.

I also knocked off Wayne Vansant’s The Red Baron: A Graphic History of Richthofen’s Flying Circus and the Air War of WWI, which was meant to be research for… a book I am not writing right now after all… but time spent reading about World War I fighter pilots is always time well spent, I suppose.

What I’m Reading Now

Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic! I’ve had a long Mary Stewart hiatus, because I save Mary Stewart books for trips (that way I know I’ll have something enjoyable, fast-paced, and reasonably light to read on the journey) and of course there haven’t been many trips for the past year and a half… but over Labor Day weekend I went to Tennessee to visit a penpal, so Mary Stewart has returned! This book is set in Greece, and I always think that Stewart’s books in Greece (The Moon-Spinners, My Brother Michael) are particularly strong. She must have found the country inspiring.

For a few months I took a break on Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad, because I couldn’t handle anymore about the poor civilians of Stalingrad (the evacuation, such as it was, was extremely late and half-hearted), but now I’m back in the saddle. The tide of battle has turned: the Soviet armies have encircled the Germans, who are clinging to the thought that Hitler will save them by Christmas, unaware that Hitler doesn’t even intend to try.

What I Plan to Read Next

On my trip I spent a happy hour trawling a used bookstore, and found Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s And Condors Danced. A Zilpha Keatley Snyder I haven’t read yet! So excited.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I love childhood memoirs, so when asakiyume wrote about Little White Duck: A Childhood in China, a graphic novel memoir about the author’s childhood in China in the late seventies, of course I had to read it. It’s a short book with a distinctive artistic style (it reminds me a little bit of propaganda posters from the time period) and a child’s-eye-view of a distinctive moment in history - super interesting, although if you are especially sensitive about animal harm, there’s a chapter in which schoolchildren are assigned to Do Their Part in eliminating the Four Pests (mice, cockroaches, mosquitos, and… I forget the fourth one… this is after sparrows had been taken off the list).

I also finished Maeve Binchy’s Evening Class! skygiants, thank you for reccing this one. The book introduces such an interesting and wide-ranging panoply of characters, all with such interest and care that I really enjoyed getting to know them all, even though I also spent a good portion of this book arguing with its attitudes about love. (Should you stay with someone who makes you miserable just because you love them? Should you really?) But it was a productive and thought-provoking disagreement rather than an exasperating one.

I also read Jacqueline Woodson’s Before the Ever After, a novel in verse about a boy whose football player father is suffering from memory loss and mood swings caused by repeated head trauma. It’s less depressing than this description makes it sound - ZJ’s three close friends are a source of light and happiness as his father’s worsening health casts a heavy cloud of worry over his family life - but still very sad.

And I read the latest Baby-sitters Little Sister graphic novel, Karen’s Worst Day because apparently I am going to read all the Little Sister graphic novels as they come out. Maybe I will eventually Stockholm syndrome myself into an appreciation for Karen Brewer?

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve just finished part four in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale, and Lydia Gwilt’s plan to pass herself off as Allan Armadale’s widow has run into difficulties when Allan Armadale turned up ALIVE after his yacht supposedly wrecked at sea. Will Lydia and her confederates manage to intercept him and stash him in an asylum before he makes his continued existence known to his lawyers? Will Lydia’s actual husband, the OTHER Allan Armadale, realize Lydia’s perfidious scheme before it’s too late to save his friend? TUNE IN NEXT WEEK TO FIND OUT.

What I Plan to Read Next

The combined enthusiasm of the entire internet has finally battered me into putting a hold on the first Murderbot novella, All Systems Red.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read Gerald Durrell’s The Drunken Forest, about his collecting trip in South America which was cut unfortunately short by a revolution in Paraguay. Durrell seems to be one of those people who lives more in six months than many people do in their entire lives: he’s just gotten together a good collection when the revolution makes it impossible to get most of his specimens out of the country, so he has to release the animals and leave on a rickety little plane… but within a few days he throws himself into collecting rheas (ostrich-like birds) on the pampas in Argentina. I aspire to react to setbacks with such sangfroid.

I also zoomed through Gale Galligan’s graphic novel adaptation of the Babysitters Club book Logan Likes Mary Anne!, which I don’t think I ever read in novel form. In fact, I’m not sure I ever read any of the first ten or so books in the Babysitters Club series, which is weird because I read so many of the others. Why, younger self??

I don’t know if M. F. K. Fisher herself revised How to Cook a Wolf, or if some later editor got a hold of her marginal notes and then inserted them into the main text, always [closed off with brackets] to show where the edits have been made. This makes for an annoyingly choppy reading experience, especially as the effect of the notes is almost always to diffuse the power of the original passage.

Otherwise I enjoyed the book, but boy do I wish I had a copy with the original unrevised text, or at very least a less disruptive way of adding in the revisions.

And finally, I galloped through Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s A View of the Nile, about the years that she and her family spent in Egypt in the early 60s. The book is a bit slow to get started (I galloped partly because it’s an interlibrary loan with a tight turnaround time), but it hits its stride once Fernea and her husband leave Cairo for Nubia to complete an anthropological study before the Aswan Dam floods all the traditional Nubian villages.

I knew almost nothing about Nubia before reading this book, and Fernea paints such a fascinating picture of the Nubian community where she lives with her husband and two young children that I was left rather sorry that the book didn’t include an epilogue; I would have loved it if the book checked back in to see how the community fared after the Egyptian government transplanted it above the Aswan Dam.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m back in the saddle with Svetlana Aleksievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, although I have to take it slow: too much at once and you drown. The mother of a girl who was badly injured in a terrorist bombing on the Moscow Metro tells Aleksievich, “You’re a writer, you’ll understand what I mean: Words have very little in common with what goes on inside of you.” And yet she keeps talking, and Aleksievich keeps recording: words are insufficient, but they are all we have.

Also, a quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope, her memoir about her husband (the poet Osip Mandelstam)’s arrest and the Stalinist era more generally. She’s musing, here, about a fellow that she thinks might have informed on Mandelstam: “But he scarcely matters. He was just a poor wretch who happened to live in terrible times. Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m pining away for Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning. I’m first in line on the holds list! Hurry up and read the book, person who has it checked out!!!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in preparation for reading The Testaments. This is actually a reread: I read the book in high school as a possible book for my term paper, which I ended up writing about A Tale of Two Cities because I figured that would be easier.

I was almost certainly right about this, not least because I super loved The Handmaid’s Tale and it’s often harder to write about things that you love. It wasn’t quite the same bolt from the blue this time (but then, how could it be, being a reread?) but I still loved it. It’s a look at a character living in an oppressive society and trying to eke out a little happiness despite the odds stacked against her, and that’s something that I really love in books and in fact often miss in dystopian novels: so many of them involve people directly rebelling against oppression, not just trying to live their lives.

I also read Jen Wang’s Stargazing, in which Christine befriends Moon, who she thinks is way cooler than she is - so much cooler that she’s afraid Moon will inevitably abandon her for other friends. This is a dynamic that I had with a friend growing up and I thought Stargazing absolutely nailed it, to the point that it swept away my usual dislike for a certain plot twist: ( Spoilers for the plot twist )

And finally I finished Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch, which I really liked. I’ve heard that Goudge’s adult fiction is preachy, and certainly this book was written with a heavier hand than her books for children, but ultimately I felt that this book managed to deal with heavy themes without crossing over into preachiness.

I’ve often found it puzzling, given that I’m not religious myself, that I’m drawn to books by religious authors with religious themes - like Goudge, or C. S. Lewis, or Rumer Godden - but I think ultimately what draws me to them is this willingness to grapple with heavy themes, to look directly at the inevitability of death or the problem of evil and say “Well, wanna make something of it?”, which I rarely find in secular books. Which is not to say that secular authors don’t deal with weighty themes - see above The Handmaid’s Tale - but often it’s a different set of themes. The religious authors give the kaleidoscope another twist.

What I’m Reading Now

Things are heating up in William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance: Bartley has just published a story that he stole from a friend, which may prove the tipping point for Marcia to realize that her husband is not a good man who makes mistakes, but an unprincipled man who mostly manages to convince people he’s good because he’s got a charming way with words. Will she divorce him and marry his old college friend Ben Halleck, who clearly has an enormous crush on her?

“What could be worse than marriage without love?” Ben Halleck demands of a friend, with whom he has been discussed the Bartley/Marcia problem without directly mentioning that he’s in love with Marcia.

“Love without marriage,” the friend replies.

This exchange may be the key to all nineteenth-century Anglo-American novels.

What I Plan to Read Next

Perhaps Jen Wang’s The Prince and the Dressmaker?

Oh! Oh! And the 2020 Newbery winners should be announced shortly!!!

I waffled about whether to post my Wednesday Reading Meme as usual even though it's Christmas, but in the end the siren song of habit simply proved TOO STRONG, as did the fact that I read Donna Tartt's The Secret History and I simply had to share.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which was An Experience, a little bit like Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, another book full of whip-smart college students in beautiful surroundings having crackling intellectual discussions full of allusions to a thousand books they all read and can quote at the drop of a hat - except that The Secret History is like if Tam Lin took place inside its own insular classics department, and also the magic was… possibly nonexistent? There’s an important (off-page) incident in The Secret History that could go either way.

Or you could also compare this book with Brideshead Revisited, in that both of them begin with a sort of college idyll, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” beautiful well-off young people (and their less well-off admirer) hanging out in the country and drinking far too much and whiling away the happy days as if they have all the time in the world. But in both books, this is an illusion: this is only a golden bubble in time before darkness bears down to crush the characters. (Both books also have an atmosphere saturated with homoeroticism.)

It’s also - well, it’s just an experience. I was also really impressed by Tartt’s use of, hmm, inevitability? The book centers around an event, an murder, that most books would make a great mystery of, but Tartt lays out the basic facts about it in the prologue, and then the first half of the book is just laying out how it came to that point, a march of doom toward a predetermined end - while the second shows what came after.

I also finished William Bowen’s The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure, which, as you may recall from my post last week, is bananas. When last we left Freddie and his friends, they were being menaced by pirates from the reign of King James, who were at length banished with the churchwarden’s Odour of Sanctity (an evil-spirit-banishing perfume that he keeps in a little stoppered bottle) once it finally occurred to him that two-hundred-year-old pirates had to be spirits and not mortal men.

But before the churchwarden realized this, the pirates (with Freddy and company in tow as their prisoners) retired in High Dudgeon, which is their castle stronghold. There’s a certain Phantom Tollboothishness about all this that makes me wonder whether Norton Juster read this book in his youth.

I also finished Aminder Dhaliwal’s Woman World, which I would have liked more if I went into it with the understanding that it’s a gag comic rather than a high concept one. The basic premise is that it takes place in a world where men have gone extinct, so you can see why I expected some in-depth worldbuilding.

But all the world-building questions are dealt with perfunctorily, as in the early comic where Gaia announces to an assembled crowd, “The men are extinct! What will the straight women do?” She ponders a moment, then asks, “How many of you skewed bi anyway?” and then almost all the women raise their hands, and that’s the end of that. We never come back to the question.

It’s not that I wanted the comic to navel-gaze specifically about the difficulty of being a straight woman in a world that no longer has men, but this is the level on which Woman World deals with everything and I found it disappointing.

What I’m Reading Now

The introduction to Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North states specifically that the book is not about amputees, which I suppose is fair enough, but as I got the book specifically because I’m working on a novella where the hero is a Civil War amputee… well, I put it aside for most of the week in a fit of pique. However, I’m sure it has lots of interesting information and I should read it anyway.

Oh! And I also began reading Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch! But then I got distracted by The Secret History, so I haven’t finished it yet, although I’ve gotten far enough to strongly suspect that this book has a truly off-the-charts woobie concentration.

What I Plan to Read Next

A few days ago I realized that I was six books away from reading all the Newbery Honor books of the 2010s (have since whittled this down to three), and my goal is to knock those last three out before 2020. Heart of a Samurai! Splendors and Glooms! (This one has puppets on the cover, which intrigues me. Magic puppets?? And was written by Laura Ann Schlitz, who wrote Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, which I liked a lot.) Bomb: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon! CAN I MAKE IT???

I have also decided that I should read Donna Tartt's other novels, of which there are only two, The Little Friend and The Goldfinch. My impression is that The Goldfinch is more highly regarded than The Little Friend, although possibly this just reflects the fact that I've heard more about it because there was a recent movie adaptation?