A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I went to the library to get one of the 2026 Newbery books, but instead got ambushed by Kate DiCamillo’s Lost Evangeline, which features a TINY GIRL standing on a SPOOL OF THREAD. How was I to resist?

Sadly the book did not focus on tiny Evangeline repurposing objects for her tiny world: spool of thread as stool, etc. But it DID feature a scene where Evangeline rides a cat, which seems like atonement for Kate DiCamillo’s The Tiger Rising where there’s a girl riding a tiger on the cover and then no one rides a tiger in the book at all, except in a dream which I think we can all agree does NOT count.

littlerhymes and I have also finished H.M.S. Surprise! (How many “surprise” puns did we make while reading this book? Many.) Jack does indeed start the book by losing the massive fortune from the Spanish treasure ships, although the Admiralty gives him nearly ten thousand pounds to make up, which would be a pretty tidy fortune in itself if (a) one were not comparing itself to hundreds of thousands of pounds of prize money, and (b) it didn’t all go to pay off Jack’s eleven thousand pounds of debt.

So he and Sophia STILL can’t marry, and indeed even though Jack has made another fortune by the end of this book, it ends with them still unwed… The next book had better open with a wedding, my god.

In news of Stephen’s matrimonial endeavors, Diana Villiers almost promises to marry him, then elopes with a rich American. Stephen is heartbroken but tbh I think Jack has a point when he says that this is the best thing that could have happened to Stephen, given that the man fights a duel for her in this book and would inevitably have to fight many more should they ever wed.

I see this is the book where the movie got the scene of Stephen operating on himself, which in the book occurs even though there are other surgeons available. Stephen doesn’t trust them! (Probably fair.) He will operate on himself in the mirror, moving his own ribs aside to get out the bullet lodged in his chest! Agonizing. This man is so metal. I could never.

What I’m Reading Now

Mikhail Zygar’s The Empire Must Die: Russia’s Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917, which I found on my Kindle marked as unread but clearly did read at some point, because I marked the passage where a young Nicholas II (not yet Nicholas II as his father is still alive) attempts to say something about politics at the dinner table, only for said father to start throwing bread rolls at him. Ah, the perfect way to train the heir to an empire: discourage any and all attempts to take an interest in politics.

Anyway, since I’m enjoying the book and have clearly forgotten it completely, I’m traipsing through it again. The defunct Narodniks, now regrouped as the SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries), have begun assassinating ministers again.

What I Plan to Read Next

Yesterday at the library I was simply unable to resist Katherine Applegate’s Pocket Bear.

After a long hiatus, littlerhymes and I swung back for one last crack at C. S. Lewis before moving on in our buddy read. (We’re doing Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising quintet next.) We wrapped up with The Screwtape Letters, which blew the top off my head when I first read it in college. I keep the book on my bedside bookshelf.

I keep it there, first, because it’s so funny. Lewis’s Screwtape voice, the voice of a pompous devil mentor writing to his protege (only protege is the wrong word, isn’t it, because Screwtape wouldn’t lift a finger to protect Wormwood from anything) is pitch perfect in all its particulars; the model, it occurs to me now, for the voice that I adopted in “How to Be a Better Dictator,” except of course Lewis does it ten times better.

Secondly, I keep it at my bedside because so many of Lewis’s observations about human nature are spot on. He’s so good at recognizing the little evasions that people use to convince themselves that their own behavior is good and righteous, the fuzzy-mindedness that allows them to believe six contradictory things before breakfast.

Thirdly, I like to keep the book handy because just when you are sinking mostly luxuriously into the soothing bath of Lewis’s prose, he will say something so completely barmy that you sit up shrieking, “What?” Nothing in The Screwtape Letters comes quite up to the level of the bit in That Hideous Strength where Lewis is all “There are seven space genders! Also, women should give up their dreams and have babies instead,” but generally whenever he gets started on gender you know something about to blow up.

This is a useful quality in a spiritual teacher, because it reminds you not to swallow everything whole. Just because Lewis (or someone else) said it doesn’t mean it’s right! You have to think for yourself, consider the evidence, make up your own mind.

Although Lewis might prefer that I would agree with more of his actual opinions, I think he would also understand that serving as a spur for critical thinking is also a valuable service. He comes back again and again, like Orwell, to the importance of clear thought, precise language, because fuzzy formulations and cant phrases allow people to blind themselves to the true moral nature of our actions—not just when we are perpetrating horrors, but also to the smaller unkindnesses of our lives.

And some of Lewis’s specific ideas have affected my own thought profoundly, most particularly what Lewis calls the Historical Point of View. “The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true… To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.”

The Historical Point of View is closely allied with what Lewis elsewhere (in Surprised by Joy) called “chronological snobbery, the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” Or, as Screwtape crows: “Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge,” and in doing so, have made it difficult to criticize any change except by sputtering that the change is a move backwards.

The theory of chronological snobbery took such deep root in my mind that it eventually sprouted The Sleeping Soldier. Some changes are good! Some changes are bad! But a lot of changes are just changes, neither good nor bad. One era may love gingerbread, and another chocolate cake, but that doesn’t mean that gingerbread has been discredited. Fashion just moves on, because that is what fashion does.

My Anne of Green Gables odyssey continues! On Wednesday I went to the Anne of Green Gables Museum, partly because the gift shop was far less tchotchke oriented and, indeed, had copies of many of Montgomery's books! Not to mention the Megan Follows' Anne of Green Gables miniseries on DVD! Which of course I bought, so now I have a copy of my very own, plus copies of Pat of Silver Bush and A Tangled Web, which are the two books that they had in the edition I wanted (a.k.a. the edition that I grew up with, and I foresee many happy hours in used bookstores as I track nice copies down).

Also, the museum itself is more book oriented: there's a glass case containing first editions of, I believe, every Montgomery novel (I didn't actually count), and another case containing novels that Montgomery inscribed to her cousins, the descendants of whom still own this house - which also means that there are some fun Montgomery artifacts here, like the crazy quilt she made. PLUS there is a museum cat! Her name is Jilly and she just showed up one day and she likes to sleep in a cradle in one of the rooms, and to my great delight she was sleeping in her usual spot when I passed through.

After the museum, I headed down to Dalvay-By-the-Sea. Miniseries aficionados will know this as the White Sands Hotel. I am so sorry I didn't book at least a night there, because it is so beautiful and also it is possessed of absolutely the perfect lounge, full of soft comfortable chairs and a fireplace with an actual wood fire which would be the perfect place to sit and read on a rainy day...

Of course the trick would be managing to book for a rainy day, now wouldn't it. When I came to PEI the forecast suggested rain every day of the week, and today is the first day that we had sustained rain of any kind, and even that was only for a bit in the afternoon! Which of course is great, I'm so glad that my vacation has been mostly non-rainy, but it does undermine one's belief in the forecast, now doesn't it.

Unable to stay at Dalvay-By-the-Sea, I did the next best thing: dinner in their round dining room overlooking the water, gazing out the window and reading The Blue Castle in between courses, as I ended up ordering a succession of appetizers and then dessert.

First, a bread basket with little strips of focaccia, perfectly salted. Then a single fresh Island oyster, with mignonette and horseradish. Smoked duck crostini, with goat cheese and caramelized onions. "Square" soup (no idea why it's called that), butternut squash & pear soup lashed with creme fraiche. And the piece de resistance, the Platonic ideal of a sticky date pudding, rich and yet light, with the rich layered caramel sweetness of toffee sauce and the softening influence of vanilla ice cream; and a pot of Earl Grey tea, a dangerous indulgence so late in the evening, but I drove back to my B&B and slept like a top.

Today I went to Charlottetown, grumpily prepared to spend all day reading in the library if it rained, but in fact the rain held off, so I visited the exhibit about the 1864 Conference of Confederation in Charlottetown, which eventually led four provinces (not including PEI) to confederate in 1867. (As it turns out, the conference occurred in Charlottetown because PEI was so uninterested in the whole idea that they refused to attend if they had to actually travel anywhere. PEI didn't join till 1873.)

And the rain still held off, so I drifted down to poke around St. Dunstan's Basilica. And the rain still held off, so I wandered through Confederation Landing, where I learned that the original Confederation Conference was completely upstaged by the fact that the circus was in town. Then up through the downtown area, and hit up three (!) bookstores all on one street - and then it did begin to rain a bit, so I repaired to the library to catch up on my correspondence, and by the time I was caught up the rain had stopped again, so I set out in search of Red Island Ciders, for I had been informed that they sold hand pies.

(Also, get a load of this Reader/Cider fic. "This Golden Russet cider will take you by the hand, walk you through an apple orchard in autumn, and when an unexpected rain shower appears, this cider will give you a warm hug.")

When I walked in, there were four chaps sitting at the bar, and they all looked up like the regulars of a pub in some show like Ballykissangel: not hostile at all, just astonished that an outsider should appear. Meekly I explained my yearning for a handpie, and the proprietor explained that they were mostly frozen but they had one warm, braised beef and mozzarella, would I like that? Yes I would, and could I buy this Golden Russet cider too, and the handpie popped out of the oven just as I was paying, which leads me to believe that I more or less took it out of the mouth of one of the regulars - but after all he would be there all evening, they could just heat him up another one.

And my god, it's the handpie of all handpies. A flaky crust, a melting filling, the beef tender and soft with the right amount of onion. A delicious warm thing to eat as you drift through the faintest spit of rain on a trail through Charlottetown, pausing at a sign that explains there is a round-the-island trail that takes a mere 32 days to walk, and sighing wistfully at the thought. (One envisions, of course, handpies at every stop.)

And now I am drinking my cider and catching up my DW on all these exciting happenings. Hoping to finish Pat of Silver Bush tonight. Finished Kilmeny of the Orchard a couple days ago; review perhaps forthcoming? I would like to write systematic reviews of Montgomery's work, as I did of Betsy-Tacy, but I'm afraid that a road trip is perhaps just not the time...

In under the wire, I have completed the Newbery Honor books of the 1940s! *spikes football*

Genevieve Foster’s Abraham Lincoln’s World, like her earlier book George Washington’s World, is not, as you might imagine from the title, about daily life in the immediate environs of the future president in question, but about what was happening all around the world during his lifetime. In Lincoln’s case: Steamships were being invented! Italy was being united! Canada was fretting over whether the United States was maybe going to invade, since it had this whole standing army left over from the Civil War and everything, and after all it wasn’t that long ago that the US conquered half of Mexico…

A very lively read. Foster can’t resist going a bit beyond Lincoln’s death to touch on the endings of the various ongoing sagas: the unification of Italy, the rise and fall of Napoleon III, the execution of emperor Maximilian I of Mexico by firing squad. Then she circles back to Lincoln’s own death, ending with the observation, “only then could the people of Abraham Lincoln’s world realize how great he was. He was too tall when he walked beside them.”

Stephen W. Meader’s Boy with a Pack is a lively historical novel, studded with adventures as a fruitcake is studded with plums. Our hero, seventeen-year-old Bill, has just set out from his Connecticut home with a pack of notions on his back. He aims to walk out west, peddling to support himself as he sees the world.

He sees a bit of life indeed! This book starts out Boy Meets Dog, continues to Boy Meets Girl, saunters over to Boy Meets Horse, and then the Horse has a delightful high-stepping foal, the son of a horse who won an exciting race earlier in the book! In between assembling this ragtag band, Bill narrowly escapes robbery (twice), nearly gets mauled by a bear before a convenient trapper saves him, and helps an escaped slave along the Underground Railroad. Not bad for a summer’s work!

And finally, Eleanore M. Jewett’s The Hidden Treasure of Glaston, which is a stealth Arthurian riff! (Okay, maybe not so stealth given the Arthurian connections of Glastonbury, but it surprised me.) In the twelfth century, young Hugh and his best friend Dickon discover a secret treasure chamber in a cave under the abbey, and set out on a hunt for the Holy Grail that hasn’t been seen since the mythical days of Camelot.

These two novels are both fine, but I didn’t find either of them very memorable; the details are already slipping out of my mind.

And that’s all the Newbery books of the 1940s! Although I’d like to read the 2023 winners before 2024 dawns, I may wait on diving into the 1930s books until 2024? Or at least until after my road trip. Which begins tomorrow!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

W. E. Johns’ Biggles Makes Ends Meet, in which Bertie lands on the bad guys’ island and manages to get back off again by pretending that he is merely a daffy collector of shark’s teeth. AMAZING. A strong adventure story, tightly plotted.

Also a couple of Newbery books. Carolyn Treffinger’s Li Lun, Lad of Courage is about a boy from a fishing village who fears the ocean and thus refuses to become a fisherman. His father, angry and ashamed, sends him to cultivate rice on a mountain top, which Li Lun manages with great travail. (Hard to carry enough water to grow rice on a mountain top!) A very Newbery tale about how courage comes in many forms.

I expected Genevieve Foster’s George Washington’s World to be about daily life in colonial Virginia, but in fact it’s about world history (mostly European history, although China gets a look-in) during his lifetime, including this amazing anecdote about the Russian admiral Alexei Orlov, who defeated the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Chesma. He was so thrilled by his success that he hired an Italian painter to paint a commemorative painting of the battle.

“But I’ve never seen a ship blow up,” objected the Italian painter.

“Is that all?” said Orlov. “I’ll have one blown up for you!”

And I wrapped up James Herriot’s Every Living Thing, the last of his memoirs about being a vet in Yorkshire. The end of an era… But not really the end; these are books that one could revisit again and again, and enjoy just as much each time.

What I’m Reading Now

Hana Videen’s The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English, a delicious geeky collection of Old English words, discussed in chapters according to theme: food and drink, time, animals, etc, with special discussion of words whose meanings are uncertain, often because they appear only once in the existing sources. A fascinating glimpse of a lost world!

What I Plan to Read Next

All the Worrals books are now available on fadedpage.com! So of course I downloaded the last one that I haven’t read yet, Worrals Goes Afoot, although I’m torn whether to read it now or save it for my road trip… Well, I have it for when I want it!

Only the first and third books of Gerald W. Johnson’s 1959 trilogy about American history, A History for Peter, won the Newbery Honor, but it seemed silly for me to skip directly from the American Revolution to Woodrow Wilson, especially given that the middle volume is most useful for Sleeping Beauty reasons, offering a sixties-eye-view of the Civil War and aftermath.

Johnson propounds the then-current view that Reconstruction failed because Congress was too harsh on the South. The pendulum has since swung in the opposite direction, to the view that Congress was too lenient, and if Congress had hit on a Goldilocks level of just-right sternness, they could have convinced Southern whites to go, “You know what, let’s give racial equality a try!” (Maybe if that just-right sternness involved decades of military occupation.)

The books are America Is Born, America Grows Up, and America Moves Forward, and they start with Columbus and go right up through the Korean War. I’ve read about various parts of this history at various times, but history is so protean that you almost always pick up interesting new tidbits, especially about things like Spanish explorers that you haven’t studied since elementary school. (This is probably incorrect, but my recollection is that we covered those explorers in at least three grades, and they got more boring every time.) A few interesting facts:

- Johnson notes that the Spanish explorers were probably not more wicked than the English ones. American history books just tend to portray Spanish explorers in an especially dim light because they draw on accounts written by the English, who were intensely anti-Spanish. (This was the era of the Spanish Armada, after all.)

- During the Constitutional Convention, the representatives of small states were genuinely concerned that the large states might invade their territory and gobble them up, partly because of the entire history of the European continent and also because there had been armed clashes between the colonies before. The eventual solution was equal representation for every state in the Senate. As with many highly effective solutions, this one worked so well that the original problem it was intended to solve now seems mildly comical (what? Like New York is going to invade Connecticut?), while we are left with the unintended consequence that sparsely populated states punch far above their weight in the Senate.

- Speaking of unintended consequences: the fact that every permanent member of the UN Security Council has a veto over action was originally intended as a sop to the US Senate, to ensure that the Senate allowed the US to join the UN, as they had not joined the League of Nations. If the US has a veto, went the reasoning, then the US can’t be forced into action against its will! Unfortunately, and although this was clearly unintentional one would think it must have been very foreseeable indeed, this has the side-effect of making it almost impossible for the UN to act.

My dad retains his borrowing privileges at the Purdue Library, so naturally that was my next stop in my quest for obscure Newbery Honor books. Upon arrival, I discovered that they have moved their children’s section, and it now resides in a dimly lit second-floor annex tucked behind the bound periodical stacks. It would be a tremendously atmospheric setting for a Possession-style movie about literary detective work…

Anyway: the fruits of my plunder!

Mary & Conrad Buff’s Big Tree, a short book about the long, long life of a redwood tree. I loved the conceit of this book, the point of view of the tree standing sentinel over the centuries, but for obvious reasons (the book is from the 1940s) the natural history is out of date - very much of the “predators are BAD” mindset. To be honest I think the Newbery committee should eschew giving awards to science books: their information will inevitably become outdated like this.

Genevieve Foster’s George Washington, one of THREE (!) George Washington books to win the Newbery Honor. (One of the others, George Washington’s World, was also written by Genevieve Foster.) A short and snappy biography with rather lovely illustrations in a style reminiscent of Katherine Milhous’s The Egg Tree.

Anna Gertrude Hall’s Nansen. Before I read this book, I had only the vaguest idea that Nansen was an arctic explorer, but it turns out that he was so much more than that! One of those nineteenth century dynamos who apparently doesn’t need to sleep, Nansen led an expedition across Greenland, revolutionized oceanography with his groundbreaking theories about polar currents, designed a ship to withstand polar pack ice to follow those currents and prove those theories, attempted to reach the North Pole only to be defeated by the terrain and spend nine months basically hibernating in a tiny hut lit only by seal blubber, with nothing to eat but bear stew and bear steaks…

(Unsurprisingly, he was quite depressed for a few years after this adventure, not that it slowed him down one jot.)

He also wrote a steady stream of books about his adventures and his scientific theories, became a leading voice in Norway’s separation from Sweden, and headed a diplomatic mission around Europe to ensure that this separation didn’t blossom into all-out war. During World War I he used his diplomatic experience to help maintain Norway’s neutral stance; after the war he headed a commission to resettle refugees and exhorted the League of Nations to send aid to starving peasants in Russia.

This time, his efforts failed: the League refused to send famine relief. Many of the member nations would have watched every peasant in Russia starve rather than aid the Bolsheviks in any way.

(This book was published in 1940 and there is something deeply poignant in the author’s wistfulness for the League project. It had definitively failed at that point, but you feel that she empathizes deeply with Nansen’s yearning that it could work, that we might stop war.)

Nansen worked with the American relief committee instead, only to be partially stymied by the catastrophic damage to Russia’s railroad system, which meant that the donated food often couldn’t make it to the starving people. But he never gave up, and basically worked himself to death at the age of 68.

An absolute powerhouse of a man. I probably never would have encountered him without the Newbery project as impetus, and I’m so glad to have made his acquaintance.

“All times and all ages overlap, and the ideas of succeeding generations play tag with each other.” - Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Story of Mankind

I actually ended up enjoying The Story of Mankind, which I was not expecting, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve put off reading it for twenty years. I expected that this first winner of the Newbery Medal would be a dry tome, chosen more for Weightiness (in the literal as well as moral sense: it’s five hundred pages long) than literary value. But in fact it’s a lively, well-paced read, although inevitably dated; after all, it is literally one hundred years old.

But it’s not exactly a caveat to tell the reader to take the book with a grain of salt, when, van Loon himself instructs the reader to do so. He gives a brief sketch of his own life and tastes, and explains, “I state these few facts deliberately that you may know the personal bias of the man who wrote this history and may understand his point-of-view. The bibliography at the end of this book, which represents all sorts of opinions and views, will allow you to compare my ideas with those of other people. And in this way, you will be able to reach your own final conclusions with a greater degree of fairness than would otherwise be possible.”

I’ve seen this sort of “laying my cards on the table” note from modern historians, who often seem to think that their particular generation invented this sort of thing; but no. Van Loon got there a hundred years ago in a popular children’s book. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

On that note, I was particularly fascinated to discover the persistence of certain historical myths, despite all attempts at debunking. When I was growing up, history books patiently explained that, despite popular misconceptions, most educated Europeans in Columbus’s day did know the Earth was round. And here’s van Loon, a hundred years ago, patiently explaining the exact same thing!

As he says in another context, “Every generation must fight the good fight anew or perish.” Old misinformation lives, and lives, and lives - in this case because it tells us something we want to hear about people in Ye Olden Days: they were stupid. (And, by implication, we are smarter, and will not make the same mistakes they did.)

But van Loon is not immune to such stories, either. He repeats a tale, which I first heard from my father, that the director of the US Patent Office once claimed that “the Patent Office [should] be abolished, because ‘everything that possibly could be invented had been invented’” - except my dad dated it to 1900, while van Loon says it happened in the 1830s! The irony is apparently most delicious when you envision this incident happening about a hundred years ago.

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

“What was it all about?” muses Walt Boomer. “It bothers me that we didn’t learn a lot. If we had, we would not have invaded Iraq.”

Thus ends Max Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975, a book that absolutely lives up to its subtitle. I think the absolute nadir was the part where Lt. Calley (of My Lai massacre fame) got arrested for war crimes and the White House was inundated with indignant messages demanding why he was being prosecuted for doing his duty, by God, although the absolute cynicism of Nixon and Kissinger’s plans for withdrawal from Vietnam also harrowed the tattered shreds of my faith in humanity.

Despite protestations to the contrary, they knew very well that the government of South Vietnam would fall to the North soon after US withdrawal. All they cared about was making sure it happened “a decent interval” (they repeated this phrase over and over) after the US left, because they figured that the American people would forget all about Vietnam in a year or two, on the usually safe grounds that the American people have the attention span of hamsters. However, as it turned out the American people ABSOLUTELY remembered Vietnam when Saigon fell, but by then Nixon was out of office anyway so for his purposes it didn’t matter.

As Hastings notes, however, Vietnam was always a game where the US’s only winning move was not to play. By the time Nixon inherited the conflict, the ending was always going to be messy, and almost certainly going to end with the government of South Vietnam falling, because it had no credibility with the vast majority of people in Vietnam. “In the absence of credible local governance, winning firefights was, and always will be, meaningless,” Hastings notes.

I also read Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, a memoir about Machado’s emotionally abusive ex-girlfriend, told in vignettes with titles like “Dream House as Gothic Fiction” or “Dream House as Creature Feature,” some of which are straight up memoir, some of which are musings about abusive relationships in fiction (Gaslight, that one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard gets tortured), a whole Choose Your Own Adventure section where the reader navigates a morning with the girlfriend who has woken up Cranky because the narrator flailed in her sleep…

I picked this up on a whim when it came in at the library and it’s REALLY effective. I dipped into it at the desk reading bits and pieces, and then read it straight through that evening. Trigger warnings out the wazoo, of course.

On a lighter note, I read Nancy and Plum, written by Betty MacDonald (author of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books), a delightful tale of two plucky orphans who escape their deliciously Dickensian orphanage after much travail and many sassy exchanges with the cruel keeper of the orphanage and her spoiled tattletale niece Marybelle.

This is based on the bedtime stories that MacDonald told her sisters when they were all little, and although it’s clearly been streamlined from its original form (bedtime stories having the tendency to wander off on tangents like “What if Nancy and Plum entered the Olympics/got kidnapped by pirates/ran away to the Yukon?”) some of that original madcap bedtime story energy remains.

What I’m Reading Now

Absolutely delighted to inform you that Nancy and Plum includes a scene where Nancy and Plum’s librarian friend shares the titles of ALL her favorite books when she was a girl, many of which I had already read, but I noted down the ones I hadn’t and now I have a thrilling list of twentieth century children’s books to check out! Options include Timothy’s Quest by Kate Douglas Wiggin (always glad for recommendations of books by the author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm!) and Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus. Circus!!!

Among this smorgasbord I lighted on Carroll Watson Rankin’s Dandelion Cottage as my first treat. (These are all available on Gutenberg.org, by the way.) Four girls have come into possession of a semi-derelict cottage and are making it their very own, and I strongly suspect they will accidentally matchmake their kindly landlord Mr. Black with their sweet neighbor, the widowed Mrs. Crane.

What I Plan to Read Next

The forward in Nancy and Plum noted that MacDonald’s sister Mary Bard ALSO wrote books, most notably a Best Friend trilogy, and as I LOVE best friends I have of course put the first book (Best Friends) on hold.