A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

James McPherson’s Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War, which is a collection of short essays about, well, what it says on the tin. I think my favorite is the one where he attempts to explain to academic historians that military history is important because wars, like, change things, which seems so self-evidently obvious that you shouldn’t have to write a whole essay about it, but I once attempted to convince my grad school classmates of the same thing and no one was buying it. Who cares about guns when there’s discourse loose in the world?

I suspect that historians’ discourse obsession grows out of the fact that historians may, if they are very lucky, actually affect the discourse. Don’t we all like to think that we’re doing the most important work in the world? It’s a bit awkward therefore if “changing the discourse” is only the first step, and leads to nothing at all if no one amasses guns or money or votes to make changes to physical reality instead of just the paper universe. Who would remember Thomas Paine if George Washington and the Continental Congress hadn’t acted on “Common Sense?” He would have been nothing but a crank.

I finished Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, which unfortunately I never really warmed to. It’s very much “this happened then this happened then this happened,” and many of the things are happening to men: so-and-so gets sent off on a mission to Hong Kong and we follow him there and back even though he accomplishes nothing and the whole thing has very little to do with the supposed topic of the book, except insofar as plural marriage made it much harder for Mormonism to win converts. Lots of people thought that was just too weird.

The most interesting parts, I thought, where the nuggets of information of how people in nineteenth-century America dealt with marriages that went sour. They didn’t necessarily plod on in misery together forever: legal divorce was hard to get, but partners would nonetheless go their separate ways and often marry other people, technically bigamously, but who’s going to know if your first marriage was in Maine and your second is in Utah?

The Mormon church became popular among women in part because it had a more liberal stance on divorce than much of American society at the time: Brigham Young held that married couples living together without love were committing a kind of adultery. Some of his own wives were woman who legally were married to someone else.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve finally made some progress on Tamora Pierce’s Tempests and Slaughter! But honestly the main impression I have gotten from this book is that I have outgrown Tamora Pierce, or possibly that this book needed a harsh editor, because I’m over a hundred pages in and nothing is happening.

I’ve also begun Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Gates Ajar, which was a runaway bestseller about a girl who lost her brother in the Civil War (this was published in 1868) and is inconsolable with grief until her cousin comes and teaches her a new, cozier vision of heaven, where you get to meet your loved ones again, rather than just standing about stiffly in robes singing eternally with choirs of angels.

I would have made more progress in this, but Mary’s grief is so keen that it keeps making me sort of sniffly and I’m reading it at work so clearly we can’t be having with that. Nineteenth-century writers are truly ruthless when they want to make you cry.

I’ve also begun a reread of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, preparatory to watching the movie. One of my friends loved it and another loathed it, so we’ll just see, I guess. The book is still a delight and a half.

What I Plan to Read Next

“If only there was a book about women in the silent film industry,” I lamented not too long ago. “Not just the actresses but the directors, the screenwriters, the women behind the scenes.”

It exists! It is Pink-slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries and I am going to read it.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Fellow fans of mid-twentieth-century British literature! I have a treat for you! I have just finished reading D. E. Stevenson’s Miss Buncle’s Book, which is about a sweet English spinster who writes a book about her fellow townsfolk and thus ignites scandal in her little country village.

If you’re a fan of Stella Gibbons’ books or Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day - even some of Ngaio Marsh’s country village murder mysteries - this is an absolutely splendid book in much the same vein. It has wry humor and vivid characterization and that wonderful command of language that makes British books from the 1930s and 40s such a joy to read.

(A more modern book that captures a similar style - on account of being set in the period - is The Guernsy Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which I also love. My mother and I have very different tastes in books, but we both enjoyed this one.)

What I’m Reading Now

Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. I was sitting around, going “What French books can I read that are not one thousand pages long?” - answer: NONE, all French novels worth their salt are that long; and then I remembered Jules Verne! He wrote perfectly respectable novels! I have been meaning to read some of his work!

In fact I attempted to read Journey to the Center of the Earth last spring, and didn’t even make it into the volcano. But doubtless the experiment will be more successful this time! I have just finished the first chapter, and Passepartout-the-new-manservant seems promising.

What I’m Reading Next

My parents are coming to visit this weekend, and Mom has promised to bring down the box set of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, so I’m finally going to get around to that.