A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last Literary Letters has wrapped up The Lightning Conductor! I started this book with great enthusiasm, and Molly’s voice remains enchanting throughout, but unfortunately as the book goes along we get more and more letters from her suitor, a gentleman who has disguised himself as a chauffeur in order to get close to her, who is not half as charming. Plus, on this thin wisp of a mistaken-identity plot the authors hang an awful lot of sightseeing, and unfortunately it’s quite difficult to write about sight-seeing in an interesting way and they just don’t have the knack.

I quite enjoyed Mary Stolz’s The Bully of Barkham Street, which overlaps with the events in A Dog on Barkham Street, only this time telling the story from the part of view of Martin Hastings, the bully who terrorized Edward Frost in A Dog on Barkham Street.

The book does an excellent job making Martin feel like a real three-dimensional person, an inveterate daydreamer with poor temper control, without excusing his actions. One particularly nice touch is that Martin tends to feel that everyone is picking on him, which is SUCH a characteristic child attitude, and perhaps even more so a characteristic attitude for a kid who lashes out at other kids to make himself feel better.

Like the other books in the Rosemary Sutcliff’s Arthurian trilogy, The Road to Camlann is a straightforward, classic retelling, featuring slyly evil Mordred, brave and noble Lancelot, Gawain driven mad by grief. (Sutcliff, who likes Gawain more than Malory does, lays a lot of emphasis on his repeated head wounds as an excuse for his obsession with vengeance.) But it has a propulsive forward motion that I felt the other books lacked, as if Sutcliff got to the tragedy of Camelot and felt that here, in this tale of epic tragedy and OT3s, was something she could really get her teeth into.

(Although Sutcliff loves a tragedy and an OT3, I think this is perhaps her only book where these two themes are intimately connected. The Shining Company has an OT3 and an epic tragedy, but narratively these two things are unrelated, whereas here you have epic tragedy because OT3.)

What I’m Reading Now

In David Copperfield, that rat Steerforth seduced little Em’ly on the eve of her marriage, and they’ve run away together! I KNEW IT. (Admittedly Dickens foreshadowed it hard, but NONETHELESS.) That rat Steerforth, he’s probably going to abandon her in some foreign port, where her uncle (who has set off to search the world for her) will find her just in time for her to breathe her last and perhaps bequeath her newborn child onto him.

In cheerier news, David is engaged to Dora Spenlow! But his aunt has lost all her money, thus placing the engagement in jeopardy. Will Agnes figure out a way for David to make enough money to get married after all? PROBABLY.

Meanwhile, in D. K. Broster’s The Yellow Poppy, the duc and duchesse AT LONG LAST have met, at dusk, among the standing stones near the sea, and the duchesse was so overcome that she fainted.

What I Plan to Read Next

The 2023 Newbery awards have been announced! I’m excited to read Christina Soontornvat’s The Last Mapmaker, and curious about Lisa Yee’s Maizy Chen’s Last Chance. I’ve read some of Yee’s earlier books and they never struck me as awards material, but perhaps her latest has leveled up.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I finished Mary Stewart’s last Arthurian novel, The Prince and the Pilgrim, which is based on the medieval Arthurian legend of Alisander, who sets out to avenge his father’s death and go to Camelot… and neither avenges his father’s death nor ever makes it to Camelot, but instead marries the Pretty Pilgrim, who takes one look at him and informs him, “I love you.”

In Stewart’s version, Alexander is the one who takes one look at Alice and instantly announces he loves her - not twelve hours after he last rose from Morgan La Fay’s bed. OH ALEXANDER. There’s a bit where his mom is like “Thank God he’s pretty because he’s not very smart,” and it’s fortunate that Alice will be in a position to do his thinking for him forthwith.

I also read J. R. R. Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas, which is a collection of the letters that he wrote for his children from Father Christmas and Father Christmas’s various helper, like the North Polar Bear and the elf secretary Ilbereth. As they were written over a period of almost two decades, there isn’t an overarching story per se, but rather the ongoing happenings of life at the North Pole, such as North Polar Bear’s various scrapes.

The copy I read includes facsimiles of the letters (each character has his own distinctive handwriting: Father Christmas’s is shaky because he’s old, North Polar Bear writes a blocky hand because he’s writing with his paw, etc.), plus Tolkien’s beautiful illustrations. A Christmas feast.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve been struggling to keep up with my email reading commitments! Whale Weekly has suddenly become Whale Almost Daily (and a chunk of chapters each day, at that! Ishmael and Queequeg are already sharing a bed like newlyweds), the letters from The Lightning Conductor are flying thick and fast, AND the first chapter of A Study in Scarlet arrived from Letters from Watson, which wasn’t supposed to start till January 1st! Oh my.

The daily Christmas Carol installments, however, continue just the right size. Scrooge has just bid farewell to the Ghost of Christmas Present, but not before being introduced to the Ghost’s terrifying hangers-on, the wretched children Ignorance and Want. One of the few scenes that didn’t make it into The Muppet Christmas Carol! Perhaps the filmmakers thought it interrupted the Ghost’s leave-taking.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been enjoying A Christmas Carol so much that I’m taking the plunge on David Copperfield.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Naomi Mitchison’s first novel, The Conquered, in which Meromic the son of a Gaulish chieftain is captured and sold into slavery during Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. When Meromic is about to be killed for insubordination, the Roman centurion Titus Barrus saves his life, and after that, well, even when they go back to Gaul to help Caesar finish his mopping up operations:

“There’s half of me aching to get off, to be fighting on my own side, the side I ought to be on; and there’s the other half - oh God, Lerrys, I’ld give my life for him, I would truly; he’s all I’ve got, he’s wife and child and home and everything. I don’t care what he does to me - not really. There’s nothing I can be sure of except friendship, but that’s true, that’s a god; how can I throw it away?”

Strongly suspect that Rosemary Sutcliff read this book at some point. There are even dog metaphors! After Meromic runs away (to revenge himself upon a man who betrayed his family) and then comes back to Titus, his fellow slave Dith tells him scornfully, “when you [came back] you went jumping about and kissing his knees like a dog - oh, Meromic, don’t!”

For Meromic has started battening on Dith, as one does when someone says something that is perhaps not literally true, but figuratively too true for comfort.

But Meromic is much more conflicted about his loyalty than your average Sutcliff character, and in any case this is only one aspect of the novel. Like the other Mitchison novels I’ve read, this one is bursting at the seams, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach where Mitchison throws in all the things that she happens to be thinking about. This often means that her novels are messy, but it’s often a glorious mess, and in this case it all comes together into a coherent whole.

Here Mitchison is writing about conquest (the title may have given this away), the difficulty of forming a critique of imperialism when your position is really “Mad about being conquered because my people ought to be the ones going a-conquering,” the difficult lot of women in the ancient world, the way that personal and political loyalty intertwine and undermine each other (the various groups of Gauls can’t come together to effectively oppose Caesar because they can’t set aside old personal animosities), the power and limitations of friendship and human kindness, and also glimmers of magic here and there because why the hell not?

What I’m Reading Now

REALLY enjoying the Christmas Carol readalong. Dickens is having so much fun as he writes (“There’s more of gravy than of grave about you!” Scrooge storms at Marley’s ghost) and it’s just a nice pick-me-up to have a couple of pages of Christmas Carol to read in the morning. Scrooge has just met the Ghost of Christmas Past! Glad that the Muppet Christmas Carol didn't go along with the thing where the Ghost of Christmas Past fluctuated, so that it was "now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head..."

My interest in The Lightning Conductor, on the other hand, is flagging. The book has devolved into LONG sight-seeing sections, and it’s the rare author who can make unalloyed sight-seeing interesting to me.

What I Plan to Read Next

A few months ago I was CRUELLY STYMIED in my quest to read John McPhee’s The Ransom of Russian Art, which the library owns… but it's in the art museum library, which is closed except by appointment. And it’s impossible to make an appointment because no one answers emails, the phone number on the website is wrong, and the phone number on the art museum library door automatically hangs up after two rings.

WELL, it turns out that The Ransom of Russian Art is collected in The Second John McPhee Reader, which I CAN get my hot little hands on. So TAKE THAT, art museum library!

A wild entry of Books I Have Abandoned appears! In the interests of completism I decided to read Mary Renault’s North Face, which I have heard is her weakest book, and on the basis of the fact that I barely dragged myself through two chapters, I certainly agree. I skimmed the rest, and it appears to tell the story of two middle-aged women competing over a sad mountaineer, who is so utterly indifferent to their interest in him that at the end of the book he and his dishy young lover agree to invite them to the wedding, as they’ll surely take an interest!

The joke being of course that these women will both be crushed, only our lovers are too indifferent to realize. It seems mean-spirited and curiously airless - as much minute psychological detail about every chess move in every conversation as a Henry James novel.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’ve gotten my sticky paws on another William Heyliger novel! For those of you who were not yet around for previous installments of the Great Heyliger Quest, William Heyliger was a writer for boys in the first half of the twentieth century who wrote epically earnest sports stories, Boy Scout stories, and stories about boys trying to find their vocation, as in today’s book Quinby and Son, wherein young Bert, dissatisfied with working at his father’s clothing store, tries to start a new store with his father’s clerk (a steadfast disciple of the book The Secrets of Business Success), only to swiftly find himself in far over his head.

Generally I think Heyliger’s school sports and Boy Scout stories are stronger, but I did enjoy the subplot about Bert’s friend Bill, who loses his leg while jumping the trains on a lark, but discovers a path forward in life as an artist of natural history sketches.

What I’m Reading Now

I made the grave mistake of reading through Dracula Daily’s list of other books that are being serialized on email, and now on top of Whale Weekly (a weekly installment of Moby-Dick in your inbox!) and Letters from Watson (the Sherlock Holmes short stories, in roughly chronological order), I’ve signed up for Literary Letters, which serializes obscure epistolary novels of the past, starting with The Lightning Conductor: The Strange Adventures of a Motor Car. As you know, I can’t resist an obscure old book…

Our heroine Molly (with Aunt Mary breathlessly in tow) has just descended on England, bought a motor-car from a Gorgeous Man (capitalization in the original; I bet he is either the villain or the romantic lead or possibly both), acquired a chauffeur named Rattray, and attempted to learn how to drive… only to promptly crash into a haberdashery! All in just three letters. Delighted with the heroine’s voice: like a particularly flighty Jean Webster heroine.

What I Plan to Read Next

DELIGHTED BEYOND RECKONING to find that archive.org has a treasure trove of William Heyliger books, including the long-yearned-for The Spirit of a Leader, a book about high school student government, an excerpt of which was my Heyliger gateway drug! At last I can read the whole story.

ALSO delighted to inform you that I found an article about William Heyliger, in which I discovered that he also wrote a few books under the pseudonym Hawley Williams, including Batter Up!, which is available as a Google book! The article (it begins on page 15) includes a lengthy quote from an autobiographical sketch by Heyliger, with this passage which captures for me the appeal of his books: “I have tried, to the limits of my particular craft, to be a romantic realist. I am never particularly interested in what my characters do; I am always interested in why they do it. My stories do not move in the sense of physical action; they do move thru the medium of psychological action.”