A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’ve been so busy with house stuff that I finished nothing new this week! (Well, okay, I finished Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions, but Peasprout demanded her own post.)

What I’m Reading Now

Meandering along in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Becky Sharp has just received a proposal of marriage from a baronet, which she has been forced to turn down because… she’s already married! This is as much a surprise to the reader as to the baronet, and I for one am wondering if this is the firmest and most polite way she could think of to turn him down on the spur of the moment. Although let’s face it, it wouldn’t be very Becky Sharp to turn down a rich man, no matter how odious, so probably she IS married and we’ll discover the groom in the next couple of chapters.

What I Plan to Read Next

The 2025 Newbery awards have been announced! And they’ve given yet another medal to Erin Entrada Kelly, WHY, both of her previous Newbery books have been astoundingly mediocre, I just don’t get it.

Oh well. The other authors are all new to me, so that will be an exciting adventure!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands! It reminded me of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books in its unusually grounded and realistic approach to romance, albeit in a world with elves and mermaids. The romances are not driven solely by grand sweeping feelings - Elliot actually does start out with a grand sweeping crush, and this doesn’t work out for him, and it’s very painful but not the end of the world - but by a complex calculus of who the characters are attracted to, and whether they actually like that person (a lot of books don’t bother to draw this distinction), and if so how much and if their feelings are returned and in what degree etc. etc. etc.

( Spoilers )

I also finished Bell Irwin Wiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy, which I don’t think is as strong as his later book The Life of Billy Yank. He worked harder to understand the Yanks because he had less natural sympathy with them (he states this right out in the book) and I think it ultimately resulted in a more thoughtful book - plus of course he had ten years more experience as a writer and researcher by the time the second book came out.

And I zipped through Michaeleen Doucleff’s Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, because I love books about what you might call cross-cultural life: “and THIS is how people in X country eat/sleep/play/exist!” This is one of those nonfiction books where the subtitle is at odds with the actual content of the book, wherein Doucleff points out that the cultures she’s writing are not fossilized remnants of the past, but living breathing current cultures where children watch TV and play on Xboxes and so forth and so on.

There’s a particularly good chapter at the beginning about the history of American child-rearing advice, which is fascinating and depressing in the same way as reading about the history of American dieting advice: both are replete with so-called experts blaring out with great authority advice that is based on shaky evidence (if any evidence at all!) and either does not work or actively works against the goal it’s supposed to achieve. For instance, in the intersection of dieting and child-rearing advice, a lot of advice that was intended to teach children healthy eating habits actually tends to create disordered eating behaviors, in part by focusing an unhealthy amount of attention on the child’s eating habits.

The other thing that struck me is that many of the child-rearing practices Doucleff describes could come straight out of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. I particularly had this feeling about the chapter about involving children in the work of the household at whatever level is appropriate to the child’s maturity and skill: sometimes the child can stir the bubbling pot of pumpkin, other times the child just looks on and watches as the parent melts lead for bullets.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Tom Brown’s School Days! Tom’s friend George Arthur has just been Dangerously Ill, and frankly I thought he was going to die because he is clearly Too Good for this World, but no, he’s been spared (for now! Wouldn’t be surprised if he dies before the end, though) to beg Tom to start actually doing his Greek homework instead of using cribs. Tom is aghast, but obviously he’s going to knuckle under and probably have an epiphany about how there might be something to these ancient Greek chaps after all.

What I Plan to Read Next

Does anyone know of any books that focus specifically on the experience of being a World War I amputee? Not just the medical experience during the war, but the lived experience after - what it was like to live with the prosthetic limbs of the era, and that sort of thing.

I’ve decided that I will, in fact, publish David and Robert (I’m thinking an October release date), so it’s crunch time on my World War I research.

What I’ve Finished Reading

At long last I have finished Richard Rubin’s Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count! I started reading this… over a year ago… it’s one of those books that is interesting while you’re reading it, but eminently easy not to pick back up once you’ve put it down.

It was particularly interesting for its depiction of the physical toll the war took on the French countryside: the farm fields that still turn out ordinance every time they’re plowed, the blockhouses that litter the countryside and are sometimes used as garages or garden sheds, the trenches still visible in the earth…

I also learned that the Germans made their trenches out of concrete. With drainage. I feel the British and the French could have emulated this technological advance with great profit, instead of making their troops wade through mucky dirt trenches for weeks on end till their feet started to rot.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days! Tom and his chums are being forced to do chores (fagged) by the fifth-formers, when only the sixth-formers are allowed to fag the lower forms, but the current sixth-formers have abdicated their duties and allowed the fifth form to run rampant… so Tom and his friend East have barricaded themselves in their study in revolt, and the biggest bullies of the fifth form are currently breaking the door down. Ah, schoolboy larks!

I’m also reading Elizabeth Brooks’ The Whispering House, which feels sort of like something Mary Stewart might write if she were still writing books today. You’ve got the gothic English country house with the mysterious family, the plucky first person girl narrator who is going to explore mysteries! fall in love! and maybe narrowly escape murder! (I’m not far enough in the book to be sure of that one, but I’m getting some vibes.)

It’s a little more “literary” than Stewart - alternating POVs, and the heroine is perhaps a little more mired in grief than a Stewart heroine ever gets about her dead family members. But still, as I said: there are vibes.

What I Plan to Read Next

Last week I vowed to make progress on my books in progress, and have I? Well, I guess finishing Back Over There counts, but for the most part, no. No I have not!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I tried to read this book in high school, and bailed at about the part where Esther’s boyfriend I guess? but she doesn’t seem to actually like him Buddy Willard strips off and she mentally compares his dangly bits to a chicken gizzard. It just struck me as unreadably depressing - not just that particular bit (that was more of a “straw that broke the camel’s back” moment), but the way that it encapsulates Esther’s general feelings about people in general, the faint weary distant disdain.

I found it less crushing reading it now, possibly because I don’t identify with book characters as instinctively as I did as a teenager (whether or not I actually had anything in common with a character), and so Esther’s way of thinking felt less sticky to me this time around. Because it did feel sticky - like walking through cobwebs - you walk away from it and it clings to you long after you walked through.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m still reading along in Marie Brennan’s Turning Darkness into Light. The translation of the ancient text is heating up! It took me a while to get into it (it’s a translation of an ancient epic, and generally I struggle with ancient epics, even made-up ones) but all of a sudden I’ve gotten invested not only in the epic itself but in the political background to its translation. Why, given his history of anti-Draconean sentiment, is Lord Glenleigh paying Audrey and Kudshayn to translate this epic - right before a conference that will discuss the legal status of the Draconean people worldwide? His scheme is unclear but probably dastardly.

I’ve also read onward in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. A lynching has just been narrowly averted (but the white man who actually committed the crime - in blackface, in order to pin it on a family retainer - has escaped scot free), and now Mrs. Carteret is contemplating whether to share her inheritance with her half-black half-sister, as per the terms of their shared father’s will. Will justice prevail?? UNLIKELY.

What I Plan to Read Next

Finishing The Bell Jar means that I’ve finished my most recent book list, so after some thought I’ve decided that my next booklist will be the Newbery Honor books of the 2010s. My eventual goal is to read all the Newbery Honor books, but there are two to four books per year for going on a century, which makes… three hundred or so books, give or take…Oh my God.

So I’m doing it by decade so that each individual book list seems more feasible. In the 2010s, I’ve actually read all the books from 2014 onward, plus a smattering from earlier years, so I’ve got only eight books to go! First up: Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I wrapped up Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, which has the distinction of being the first 18th century novel I’ve enjoyed. (No, wait, there was The Castle of Otranto.) Perhaps I am at last prepared to dive into The Mysteries of Udolpho and Evelina??

...On second thought maybe I should stick with the shorter 18th century novels for now. Both of those are Very Long.

I also finished Shirley Jackson’s The Road through the Wall, which means I’ve now read all the Shirley Jackson novels! (Oh no. Maybe I should have spread them out more?) The Road through the Wall was Jackson’s first novel, and tells the story of a neighborhood rather than following a small group of people, as most of her other books do. (I wished for both a cast list and a map of the neighborhood: there are so many characters that it’s hard to keep them all straight and their houses in the right place in my head.)

And I zoomed through Jenny Han’s Always and Forever, Lara Jean, which is an adorable and fitting end for the series. I particularly love the family relationships in this series - not just Lara Jean and her sisters (although I do love Lara Jean and her sisters!), but also her relationship with her dad, and her dad’s girlfriend, and the way the book negotiates both the difficulties and the pleasures of welcoming a new person into the family. As Lara Jean puts it:

“Families shrink and expand. All you can really do is be glad for it, glad for each other, for as long as you have each other.”

( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summertime and the Baxter Family Especially William, a comic novel about a seventeen-year-old boy in the throes of first love. Tarkington is excellent at portraying the self-important aspects of adolescence - in fact, possibly just self-importance in general; there’s also a little dog with a Napoleon complex who routs a much larger mongrel through sheer force of self-belief.

I’ve also just started George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Currently Orwell has just arrived at the trenches, where he has been issued a rifle so old that it probably can’t fire (he didn’t get one earlier because the Reds have so few rifles that they just keep the ones they have at the trenches and pass them off as new troops arrive), but that’s okay because the Fascist trenches are out of rifle range anyway. Mostly he is contending with the cold and the ever-present stench of excrement.

What I Plan to Read Next

I am repining because I am out of Lara Jean books. Jenny Han has written other books, I know, and perhaps I should give them a try, but the covers suggest they don’t have the same baking-in-your-pajamas aesthetic the Lara Jean books do, and that’s really what I want. But perhaps the covers are misleading? Or perhaps there are books by other authors with a similar aesthetic? Help me find them, DW friends!

For many reasons, (mainly slothfulness), I didn’t get the Wednesday Reading Meme done in a timely manner this week, so here it is on Saturday again.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

evelyn_b raved about Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther earlier this year, so I read it for my reading challenge “a book recommended by someone with great taste,” and it was An Experience.

My previous experience with Werther consisted of Thackeray’s poem, Sorrows of Werther, which while funny is not really accurate: it makes Charlotte sound insensitive, but actually she’s quite distressed by Werther’s agonizingly intense feeligns for her and his suicide at the end of the book, not least because he arranged it so that he shot himself with Charlotte’s husband’s pistols. Werther WHY. Not in a “trying to make this look like murder” way, more of a “the existence of your husband has destroyed my life” symbolism, but actually that might make it worse for Charlotte. At least if Werther was trying to frame her husband she could be mad at him for acting with such venom and malice, you know?

I also read Sam Eastland’s Red Icon, which involves art theft AND religious cults, which are two of my favorite things, especially in a murder mystery. (If art theft mystery without murder was its own genre, I would totally read that too. One of the most disappointing reads of my life was a nonfiction book about a rare book thief, which I would have thought couldn’t help being good, and YET.)

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve become unexpectedly enthralled by a subplot in E. M. Delafield’s Gay Life. Private secretary and general sadsack Denis has fallen in love with the young novelist Charlotte Challoner. I was briefly afraid that Charlotte might be studying him to create a shy, lonely, self-conscious nobody for some future novel, but in fact she seems to be just as keen on him as he is on her and I’m really hoping that having met with sympathy and companionship for the first time in his life, Denis will blossom - if not like a rose than at least like some country wildflower growing up by the roadside.

I’ve begun Susanna Kearsley’s The Shadowy Horses, which has a Mary Stewart-ish charm so far: a plucky heroine far from home (in Scotland, this time) becomes embroiled in a mystery. There begin to be suggestions of ghosts and I will be thrilled if this comes to fruition.

I’m keeping on with Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This week she comments, “In my life I’ve seen one million pictures of a duck that has adopted a kitten, or a cat that has adopted a ducklings, or a sow and a puppy, a mare and a muskrat. And for the one millionth time I’m fascinated.”

I had thought this “unusual animal friends” trend began with the internet, but evidently some human fascinations are perennial.

What I Plan to Read Next

Sam Eastland’s Berlin Red, which I was bereft - BEREFT - to learn is the final Inspector Pekkala book. What mystery series will I read now???

Actually, I’ve had my eye on Sarah Caudwell’s Hilary Tamar quartet for some time, so probably I should take this opportunity to give it a try.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, which has made me want to read his other books, of which there are many… because if there’s one thing I need, it’s a new author to follow, right?

I put off reading Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place because I got the impression somewhere that it was a self-righteous tract about how lying is always a sin, even if you’re lying to the Nazis to protect the Jews hidden in your attic. But now that I’ve read it I’m pretty sure this is actually just the way some Evangelical readers interpret the book, because Corrie had some relatives who followed this philosophy and it worked out for them, through either divine intervention or luck, depending on your view.

Corrie herself lies when necessary, although with pangs of conscience, because she had been raised in the belief system that lying is always wrong. But she doesn’t only lie when forced to it, but actually practices lying: the family shakes her awake at midnight to simulate a possible arrest by the Nazis, so she’ll have practice answering “We have no Jews here” rather than mumbling, groggy and disoriented, “Oh, they’re behind the false wall.”

Willa Cather’s My Antonia is another book I put off reading, in this case because I had the impression that Antonia gets raped at some point in the book, which also turns out to be incorrect. Maybe I should try to stop gathering impressions of books that I haven’t read, although probably it’s not entirely avoidable.

But actually in this case the delay worked out well, because I don’t think I would have appreciated the book as much when I was younger. It’s a slow book, with a lot of description of the Nebraska prairies and the different immigrant groups settling the country and not a lot of action: the narrator, Jim Burden, is often an onlooker rather than a participant, a little bit in love with Antonia and some of her friends (also strong immigrant girls), but not so much that the book ever becomes a love story. Or rather, it’s about love of a time and a place rather than a person.

What I’m Reading Now

The very first chapter of Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women burnt up my hope that maybe the heroines would remain friends for the entire book, but it also got me all invested so I kept reading. All of See’s books seem to have this ur-scene where the heroines’ friendship shatters when they confront each other over some great betrayal - I don’t know why she feels the need to repeat it over and over, but I should probably just accept it and stop hoping for something else.

And although it does share this tic with See’s other work, this book is one of her best - perhaps not quite up there with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but then that is the first See book I read so it may have an unfair advantage. The Island of Sea Women is set on Jeju Island, where women deep sea divers are traditionally the main support for their families, and this portrayal of a traditional society where women have a lot more power and freedom than in many traditional societies is so interesting.

I’ve also been reading Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, which is an unexpectedly delightful look at office culture in interwar Britain. Lord Peter has taken a job as a copy writer for an advertising firm in order to investigate a murder, using his two middle names, Death Bredon, and yes Dorothy Sayers did in fact give her detective the name Death, Lord Peter is the Most Extra and I love it.

What I Plan to Read Next

evelyn_b, we had talked about maybe reading Kristin Lavransdattar in tandem. Are you still interested? I’ve acquired a copy, so we could start whenever is convenient for you.

I’ve also realized that Andrea Cheng’s The Year of the Book, which I read last year, is in fact the first book of a five-book series (although alas there will be no more after that: Cheng died a few years ago), so now I want to read them all.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Emmy-Lou: Her Book and Heart, which ends when Emmy-Lou (who has reached the exalted state of a high school student) quits the school literary society in favor of a new dancing society that has started up. Now normally I am not in favor of characters forgoing intellectual development in favor of romance, but this is probably the only early twentieth century children’s book I’ve read that puts a positive spin on flirting, so that’s interesting, at least.

I also finished up the Odyssey, which ended quite abruptly: the father of one of the suitors Odysseus killed leads a crowd of townsfolk against him, but Athena intervenes and tells both sides to stand down, and bang, that’s it. I guess it’s nice to know that people have been struggling with endings almost as long as they’ve been telling stories.

In more exciting news, I’ve discovered that my alma mater - actually, let me back up a minute here. My alma mater owns a retreat on the shores of Lake Michigan in Door County, where they give weeklong seminar classes over the summer which alumni (indeed, presumably anyone who can pay the fee?) can attend. Next fall, they’re holding one about Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, which I could pay for using the proceeds of Briarley (provided I stop spending all the proceeds of Briarley on stationary), and… I’m tempted.

What I’m Reading Now

Beryl Markham’s West with the Night, which is reminding me strongly of Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series, even though the first is a memoir set in British East Africa and the second is a series of children’s books set in Australia. But both books are set in British colonial possessions in the first half of the twentieth century, and both involve children (en entire section of Markham’s memoir is devoted to her childhood) on remote farms pluckily facing the perils of the local wildlife. Young Markham got mauled by a supposedly-tame lion.

They’ve also both got the same sudden pops of racism, which I suppose it to be expected but nonetheless is jarring.

I’ve also begun Shaun Tan’s Tales of the Inner City, which is actually tales - often very short tales, the perfect size to read while you wait for your tea to steep - of magical or surrealist animals in the city.

What I Plan to Read Next

The 2019 Newbery Awards have been announced! There are only two honor books this year, Veera Hiranandani’s The Night Diary and Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s The Book of Boy, and the big winner is Meg Medina’s Merci Suarez Changes Gears.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, about which I babbled AT LENGTH in a comment to a previous post, which I won’t copy here because otherwise it will take over my entire Wednesday Reading Meme. But it’s there if you’re interested.

Katherine Applegate’s Crenshaw, which is good as all of Katherine Applegate’s books are. (I think I probably missed out by not reading Animorphs. Not enough to actually read Animorphs now, though.) This one is about an economically insecure family that may be on the verge of homeless - not something that you see very often in children’s books - but in a way that is light enough to be readable without glossing over the difficulties of homelessness.

Crenshaw is the hero’s imaginary friend, a giant cat who likes to stand on his head, a la the giant bunny in Harvey. In fact, Applegate references the movie in the book’s epigraph.

What I’m Reading Now

Keeping on with The Odyssey! Odysseus has arrived back in Ithaca and will at any moment rain down unholy vengeance on the suitors. (I remember this part from the Wishbone version. I’m looking forward to the bit where Odysseus shoots his arrow through twelve axes.) Although right now he’s chatting with his son Telemachus while pretending to be just some random beggar dude, which I’m sure is killing him inside.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. One of the things I find particularly interesting about this book is that Ulrich not only has Martha Ballard’s diary, but also the remarks of commentators from later in the nineteenth century, and it’s so interesting to see what these readers considered worthy of note. They’re surprised, for instance, that Ballard spent so much time gadding about to visit her neighbors.

I wonder if it’s actually that nineteenth-century women actually spent less time gadding - or if it was actually pretty comparable, but the ideal was that women should be the heart of the home and rarely stir from the hearthside, and so people just kind of failed to see how much time women (even respectable married women) spent outside of the home. But the written record of Martha Ballard’s movements made it plain and impossible to ignore.

I’ve also begun Dorothy Sayers’ Unnatural Death. I find the way she talks about spinsters kind of annoying, especially considering that she married late herself - but maybe that just makes increases the temptation toward condescending magnanimity.

Oh! And I’m working on Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island (having run out of Mallory Towers for the moment), which has a very Boxcar Children-type appeal: four kids on their own figuring out how to provide themselves with shelter and food and so forth.

AND FINALLY (deep breath) (I’m reading a lot of books this week) (too many maybe?) I’m reading Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, about Smarsh’s childhood among poor white farmers in Kansas, which I can only read in small doses because it’s so infuriating reading about how thoroughly the government has undermined the middle and working classes.

Not least by pretending that the working classes don’t exist. Everyone is middle class in America! What do you mean you’re working 60 hours a week not to get by? Everyone is middle class in America. If we say it enough times that will make it true even as we enact policies that dismantle worker protections and favor large companies and factory farms.

It occurred to me - this is not a point Smarsh makes, just something that came to mind - that maybe part of the reason the “fake news” narrative has gained traction is that the media has in fact systematically ignored or misrepresented working class experiences for decades, so there are a lot of people in this country who don’t trust the media because… why would they? What has the media done to deserve it?

What I Plan to Read Next

The library for some reason has loads of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books in Spanish. I’ve been thinking I should polish up my Spanish, and the Famous Five is probably about the difficulty level I can take after letting my Spanish go to seed for so long, so maybe I’ll give them a go.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Josephine Daskam Bacon’s Smith College Stories. These never quite came together for me, I’m afraid; Bacon doesn’t have the skill, so important in a school story, of swiftly differentiating loads of characters. Even in the last story I was still getting characters confused with each other.

Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages, a lighthearted domestic memoir about life with her young children (sort of like Cheaper by the Dozen, only from the mother’s point of view), which is a rather odd reading experience when you’re coming to it from her novels. The two share some common themes - houses that have a mind of their own, for instance - but the treatment is totally different. It’s like an illustration of the idea that if you give two writers the same starting point, they’ll come up with totally different stories, except in this case the two writers are actually… the same writer.

I also finished the 2018 Reading Challenge just under the wire with Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Unfortunately I don’t have much to say about this book otherwise: I enjoyed it but it didn’t leave a huge impression. But I guess you never know beforehand whether something will or not.

What I’m Reading Now

Now that I’ve wrapped up the 2018 Reading Challenge, it’s time… to start the 2019 Reading Challenge! And I’ve come out of the gate running with Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, for “a book you’ve been reading to read.” It’s been on my list, uh, since I read Angelou’s poem of the same name in my high school English textbook. I just started yesterday, but so far the writing is beautiful, as you might expect from a poet.

Oh! And I’ve begun to listen to Dan Stevens reading The Odyssey, which so far I’m enjoying much more than the Iliad. Telemachus is trying to convince his mother Penelope’s suitors to leave her alone and stop eating all the cattle, and the suitors are like “HA, or we could continue eating you out of house and home, that sounds like fun.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got a hold on Jeff Speck’s Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.