A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This holiday weekend was SO cold that I basically spent it ensconced in a chair under a blanket, reading. In no particular order, I read:

Elisabeth Kyle’s Girl with a Pen, a 1963 children’s biographical novel of Charlotte Bronte’s life, lightly fictionalized (nothing to the excesses of many modern“biographical” novels, however) and wholly absorbing. I picked it up on a whim and zoomed right through in a day. It begins with a visit from Bronte’s school friend Ellen Nussey, to whom Bronte shyly admits she would like to write, and ends just after Bronte arrives at the publisher’s office to announce she is the author of the blockbuster hit Jane Eyre. An unusually triumphal arc for Bronte’s life! The secret of a happy ending is simply where you stop.

I also greatly enjoyed Carol Ryrie Brink’s Louly, a companion piece to Two Are Better than One, about a pair of best friends in early 20th century Idaho. In Louly, Chrys and Cordy are a little older and have expanded their friendship to include lively neighbor girl Louly, who is always coming up with fun ideas for pretend plays - especially after her parents go east to visit relatives, leaving the children to look after themselves for six weeks… Just a really fun mid-twentieth century novel about children having good times (mostly) without adults.

And I finished Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche, a lengthy historical novel set during the French Revolution, which I cribbed off a list of “slashy books on gutenberg.org” many years ago. I didn’t think it was actually that slashy (your mileage may vary; maybe “main character motivated by best friend’s brutal premeditated murder-by-duel” does it for you), and Andre-Louis is an omnicompetent trickster figure always ready with a quip, which is a character type that I’ve soured on in my old age… but darn it if I didn’t like him! The book details his adventures in early Revolutionary France, as he moves from revolutionary orator to actor in an improvisational theater group (playing, of course, Scaramouche) to assistant at a fencing school, all strung together on the thread of Andre-Louis’s thirst for vengeance against the villainous nobleman who killed his best friend AND ALSO wants to marry Andre-Louis’s beloved Aline.

Last but not least, I went into a brief period of mourning when the daily Christmas Carol email came to its end on December 26th. Simply the perfect read-along experience. Excerpts just the right size to enjoy of a morning. The perfect infusion of holiday cheer. Plus the continuing enjoyment of comparing the original to The Muppet Christmas Carol, which is quite a faithful adaptation considering that it is full of Muppets.

What I’m Reading Now

I have decided that life is too short to read Moby-Dick twice, so I’ve dropped Whale Weekly, but I’m still trucking with The Lightning Conductor (a couple of installments behind however! Sorry Molly…) and quite enjoying Letters from Watson, which kicked off with a couple of chapters from The Study in Scarlet.

What I Plan to Read Next

Letters from Watson is focused on the Holmes short stories, and only did the first couple of chapters of A Study in Scarlet because they detail Watson and Holmes’ first meeting, but I’ve decided to read the novels off my own bat as we come to them in the timeline. So I’ll be finishing up the rest of A Study in Scarlet.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I wish I had read Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Sword and the Circle: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table right when I began my swan-dive into Arthuriana, because this is a solid, straightforward retelling of most famous pre-Grail Arthurian legends, set in the traditional quasi-medieval setting with the usual budget of magic and the customary characterization. (Although I think she’s channeling White’s Lancelot. Unless he’s traditionally ugly in pre-Once and Future King sources?) Better late than never, however. Looking forward to the Grail book.

Back on my writing prompt post, rachelmanija requested Biggles fic (this post is a treasure trove, btw, also including a Kay ficlet and uhhhhhh four Mordred fics God help us all), so of course I had to read a Biggles book for RESEARCH. Thus, Biggles Takes Charge, which actually features no Biggles at all till the halfway mark! Algy has driven to an isolated country lodge in the Sologne to return the key to a hunting lodge, which unfortunately he never got to use as it was given to him by a friend right before World War II… only when he arrives at the lodge he finds himself smack in the middle of a Ruritanian romance, with missing heirs, hidden jewels, revolutionary assassins, and our friend Erich von Stalhein, in a slightly awkward transition from his World War II Gestapo morph back into Biggles’ beloved nemesis.

And finally, I read Sujata Massey’s The Widows of Malabar Hill, which perhaps spent just a little too long on my TBR before I got around to it. I enjoyed the Bombay in the 1920s setting, but the prose was just a bit too clunky for me to want to continue the series. It’s too bad, because the covers are so stylish.

What I’m Reading Now

In A Christmas Carol, we have neatly wrapped up the Ghost of Christmas Past, with a scene which assures us that Scrooge’s former fiancee Belle did indeed find love with a man who doesn’t have a bank book for a heart! HOORAY FOR BELLE. (I always worried about this in The Muppet Christmas Carol.) Onward to the Ghost of Christmas Present!

I’m so impressed by Dickens’ pacing in this story, which is all the more noticeable in this short daily excerpt format: every single excerpt has propelled the story forward, but the cracking pace of the plot leaves plenty of room for word play and brief but incisive character sketches. (It’s so characteristic that Scrooge’s reaction to learning that the Ghost of Christmas Present has eighteen hundred odd brothers is “A tremendous family to provide for” - updated in the Muppet Christmas Carol to “Think of the grocery bills.”)

In The Lightning Conductor, Molly and her beau-who-is-pretending-to-be-her-chauffeur have reached the south of France! littlerhymes and I are both concerned that “pretending to be your beloved’s chauffeur” is not, perhaps, a strong foundation for a long-term relationship, but doubtless when Molly discovers that her surprisingly insightful and well-informed chauffeur is in fact an English lord simply acting the part of chauffeur in order to be near her, she will consider the whole situation very droll.

No news from Whale-Whenever-They-Feel-Like-It.

What I Plan to Read Next

littlerhymes, a brutal enabler of my Mordred obsession, has sent me Nancy Springer’s I Am Mordred, with Biggles of the Camel Squadron and Christine Pullein-Thompson’s Phantom Horse Comes Home for company!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Some blessed soul posted the next Worrals books on fadedpage: Worrals of the Islands: A Story of the War in the Pacific! I don’t know who is responsible for the steady uploading of Worrals books, but they are a gentleman and a scholar.

Top notch adventure (involving a SECRET ISLAND BASE and one particularly DARING RESCUE), but one of the more racist Johns books that I’ve read, as tends to happen in Johns’ books set in far flung locations.

Jane Langton’s The Mysterious Circus and The Dragon Tree, the last two books in the Hall Family Chronicles, a series of offbeat novels set in Concord, Massachusetts and liberally bedecked with quotations from Thoreau, plus occasional references to Emerson and Alcott (Louisa, not Bronson). Enjoyable, but didn’t reach the heights of some of the earlier books in the sequence. Still, I’m glad that I’ve finally read the whole series!

I also finished Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, which is one part hawking memoir about Macdonald’s hawk Mabel, one part nonfiction book about T. H. White, The Loneliest Man in the World, and yet another part memoir about Macdonald’s grief for her father, which was harrowing enough that I took some time to make it through the audiobook. Macdonald reads it herself; I loved the hawking and the landscape descriptions.

What I’m Reading Now

New developments in The Lightning Conductor! Shockingly, Molly’s wonderful new car is in fact a horrible car that breaks down at the slightest provocation, but FORTUNATELY, she has acquired a new chauffeur who is in fact a Gentleman in Disguise, who had taken on the position because Molly is so fetching. Clearly THIS is the love interest and perhaps at some point he will pop the Gorgeous Man in the nose for selling Molly such a wreck of a car.

Meanwhile, no news of Ishmael from Whale Weekly. Apparently the name is not quite accurate: “the pace will vary - some weeks you’ll get multiple emails and others you’ll get none.”

What I Plan to Read Next

littlerhymes is a bad influence and clued me in to the existence of a Christmas Carol readalong, which will deliver Christmas Carol snippets to the comfort of your inbox - a mere two pages a day, every day from December 1-26! A literary advent calendar! HOW COULD I REFUSE.

I am returned from Massachusetts! As I was busy visiting Louisa May Alcott’s house, eating lobster rolls, plundering the bookstore at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art etc., I didn’t do a whole lot of reading on the trip, but I thought I would go ahead and post about what reading I did.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Delighted to inform you that in Concord (at Barrow Books, a delightful bookshop) I did indeed find one of Jane Langton’s Hall Family Chronicles - moreover, one I’ve never gotten my hands on before, The Swing in the Summerhouse! Happily I informed the bookseller that I had just that morning recreated Georgie’s walk from her house (based on an actual ornate Victorian house in Concord, 148 Walden Street!) to Walden Pond, (actually I did it backward, starting at Walden Pond and working my way in), and she gave me $10 off the purchase price and also a cup of tea.

This series is so variable. As a kid I loved and reread over and over The Diamond in the Window and The Fledgling, and although I didn’t find The Fragile Flag till after college, I remember it very well. Yet twice I’ve read books in this series and then entirely forgotten them: The Time Bike and The Astonishing Stereoscope (the book I was so pleased to find a few weeks ago!) completely slipped out of my head.

I suspect that The Swing in the Summerhouse might fall into this category, although on the other hand I may remember it because of the unforgettable tale of its acquisition.

I also listened to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu on audiobook! I understand that the main pairing in this book is controversial, but as littlerhymes can attest, I started calling Ged “dungeon boyfriend” the moment he showed up in The Tombs of Atuan, so all in all I was delighted by this turn of events.

Last but assuredly not least! My long Dracula journey is over, as Dracula Daily has come to an end. (It turns out that the ending is a trifle anticlimactic when you stretch it out over a week, but IIRC I found the ending abrupt in high school too, so perhaps it’s just like that always.) I am pining slightly, but I’ve signed up for Whale Weekly (a three-year odyssey through Moby-Dick) AND regular installments of Sherlock Holmes in 2023, so perhaps those will fill the Dracula Daily hole in my heart.

What I’m Reading Now

skygiants gave me Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair, and I’ve gotten just a few chapters into it, so I’m still sorting out the quirkily elaborate worldbuilding. Our hero has just had a chat with a toy that he accidentally brought to life, an incident that seems to encapsulate the atmosphere of the book in miniature.

And at Commonwealth Books, genarti recommended Ruth Goodman’s The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything, one of those fascinating nonfiction books with a subtitle completely at odds with the book’s actual thesis! Goodman is in fact writing about the introduction of coal into homes in Elizabethan London, and her argument is that Londoners’ familiarity with coal as a domestic product helped kickstart the Industrial Revolution; coal did of course eventually reach the rest of England (and thence the world), but the part that changed everything is way before the Victorian era. I suppose the publishers couldn’t stand to put the word “Elizabethan” in the title of a book about coal.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve figured out how to get my paws on the final two books in the Hall Family Chronicles, The Mysterious Circus and The Dragon Tree, and I’ve decided I owe it to myself to finish up the series.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“...they, too, are in love with what happened to them, because it is not only war, but also their youth. Their first love.”

Svetlana Aleksievich makes this comment near the beginning of The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, and I’ve chewed over it for a long time because left to my own devices I would not have gotten that out of the interviews that make up the backbone of this book. Maybe because I tend to think of “first love” through a romantic haze, as a positive force? When of course a first love can be destructive, albeit not often as brutally destructive as the Eastern Front of World War II.

Maybe “in love with” here means “obsessed with,” which is certainly true. Many of the women Aleksievich interviewed comment that to a great extent they still live in the war, that their memories feel more real than current reality - they can’t stand anything red because it reminds them of blood, they can’t cut up a chicken because it looks too much like human flesh. (One of them comments “maybe I should have had psychotherapy,” but that clearly was just not available at all.)

The story that haunts me is the partisan who was tortured by the Nazis, managed to escape back home, and then could only be soothed by her mother’s presence; she screamed and screamed in agony whenever her mother had to step away to, say, make dinner for the family. Most of the stories aren’t so severe in their outward manifestations, but just the unending agony…

After The Unwomanly Face of War I needed something lighter, and therefore fell on Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood, a romance between a man who has become a woodland spirit and a Victorian folklorist. Great forest atmosphere, but I wanted a deeper connection between Tobias and Henry Silver.

What I’m Reading Now

Last Wednesday, I wrote that I wanted to finish Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Elizabeth Seeger’s The Pageant of Chinese History, and Mary Renault’s North Face before my vacation begins November 1... and then neglected all three books disgracefully all week. I really ought to prioritize North Face, as it’s an interlibrary loan, but a female English tutor has just started flirting with a man with the coy observation, “We must admit the masterpieces are all by men,” and… must we? Even the Greeks acknowledged the genius of Sappho!

We’re entering the home stretch on Dracula! There are two action-packed weeks left to go, and I for one am I tenterhooks. Will they defeat the Count and save Mina? ONLY TIME WILL TELL.

What I Plan to Read Next

I will be traveling from November 1 - 10, so this is entirely up for grabs. Could be a little! Could be a lot! Who can say?

I have been away these last few days on a camping trip to the Indiana Dunes with my father, during which it rained a good deal, so much reading has occurred!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

W. E. Johns’s Biggles of 266, a set of short stories set in World War I. My favorite was the story where Biggles realizes that the higher-ups have sent them no turkey Christmas dinner, and decides that the obvious thing to do is to fly behind enemy lines and steal a turkey. This just seems peak Biggles.

Also E. W. Hornung’s Witching Hill, a series of interconnected short stories about odd happenings on the housing estate of Witching Hill! Our narrator Gillon works at the estate office; he befriends (or perhaps rather is befriended by) one of the tenants, Uvo Delavoye, a young man of lively imagination who believes or at least pretends to believe that his wicked ancestor, who once owned all the lands around, now haunts the residents and presses them to live out his own debaucheries.

Gillon is in the unenviable position of skeptic who refuses to believe Uvo’s theories even after the elderly spinster sister of the vicar somehow writes a story that reproduces exactly the wicked ancestor’s abduction of a virtuous milliner, despite never having heard the tale in her life. I might have become a bit less skeptical then! But nonetheless these are pleasant entertaining stories. Uvo and Gillon are not shippable like Raffles and Bunny but I did enjoy that the book ends with the two of them going away on holiday together, Uvo’s brief flirtation with heterosexuality routed (and perhaps only inspired by the Wicked Ancestor anyway).

Also Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light, which I was looking forward to and then didn’t really enjoy. I think (perhaps led astray by the title) that I was expecting a lighter fantasy than it turned out to be, but fairly early on in the book our heroine Halla rushes out to protect her dragon guardian from a horde of evil heroes (Halla always uses the word “hero” as a negative descriptor: a nice touch), only to be summarily defeated and tied to a post by a hero who clearly intends to rape her, only she’s saved just in the nick of time by a dragon…

I mean I do enjoy the hero/dragon reversal. I just went into it expecting something light enough to have no attempted rape at all, whereas actually the book is a downbeat musing on the evils of empire and the unfortunate tendency of men to become dragonish and horde their gold.

Finally, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore. In which young Arren falls in love with the Archmage Ged (literally this is how it is described) and follows him to the ends of Earthsea to discover the source of the malaise that is stealing the wizards’ spells and the singers’ songs and the dragons’ speech! Delightful. Still not Tenar though.

What I’m Reading Now

In D. K. Broster’s The Wounded Name, I’ve just finished the part where Aymar tells Laurent about the misadventure that ended with Aymar branded a traitor. Even though I went into this knowing the basic details about what happened (after Aymar’s men were routed in a battle, Aymar was somehow branded the traitor who gave away their position to the enemy), it was surprisingly painful to read about poor Aymar rushing as fast as he could to try to warn his men… I knew already that he would be too late! Yet even so I hoped against hope that he might make it just in time.

In Dracula, we are in the lull before the storm. Our intrepid heroes have set out to Varna in hopes of vanquishing their foe, and we will perhaps hear naught of them until they arrive!

What I Plan to Read Next

Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood. I meant to read this on my trip (where better to read it than in the wood, am I right?) but somehow failed to actually fully download it. Well, this error has been CORRECTED, and I stand prepared to read this book during the appropriate autumn season!

A wild edition of Books I Quit Partway Through appears. I got about halfway through Montague Glass’s Potash & Perlmutter: Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures, a series of comic vignettes about two Jewish men who co-own a cloak and garment business in New York City in the early twentieth century. (Glass himself was Jewish, and although he wasn’t in the cloak and garment trade he must have done a ton of research, because there’s loads of interesting detail.) But after the halfway mark I realized I still couldn’t reliably tell our two heroes apart, and decided that life was too short for books that are merely okay.

There are some funny lines. When they first meet, Abe bites into a dill pickle that squirts in Morris’s eye; Morris replies, “S'all right…I seen what you was doing and I should of ordered an umbrella instead of a glass of water already.” But basically it’s a humorous book where a lot of the humor has been lost to the sands of time.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Naomi Mitchison’s The Big House, which has a lovely Scottish flavor not only to the dialogue but the narrative, and the way that the sentences are constructed. I’ve seen the book described as a Tam Lin retelling, but it’s not so much a retelling as a fractal remix, and the story gets retold, and retold again, and then again, and each time it’s further from the original but also nonetheless referring back to it.

In traveling in and out of fairyland to help their friend the piper Donald Ferguson, Su and Winkie also travel back and forth through time, so the book is also a meditation on the history of Scotland (not so much the Jacobites as the enclosures), and on the class system of the British Isles, and on the wheel of fortune in the medieval sense: the fact that fortunes rise and fall and a family that is on top of the world one century may be nothing much in another.

The book is a bit of a mess: the pacing is choppy and it doesn’t really all come together. But I admire it for its ambitions even though it doesn’t quite fulfill them.

What I’m Reading Now

D. K. Broster’s The Wounded Name. I started reading this the other day while accompanying a friend shoe-shopping, and she asked what I was reading, and I explained, well, it’s this book from the 1920s… set near the end of the Napoleonic Wars… and our heroes have just met for the very first time, and one of them slipped into the flood-swollen river and the other leaped in after him to save him from drowning…

Kayla considered the matter. “So 1920s Boys Love,” she concluded.

In Dracula, Van Helsing has at long last dropped the V word! You know, now that Lucy is dead and it won’t help her at all. Don’t mind me! Just gonna die mad about it!

What I Plan to Read Next

At war with the interlibrary loan office yet again, this time over Mary Renault’s North Face. Wikipedia lists it (inaccurately, as it turns out) as The North Face and I foolishly requested it under that title. Apparently the interlibrary loan office copy-pasted the title into Worldcat and then promptly gave up when it didn’t work, rather than, say, searching “Mary Renault” and making the obvious inference about the titles.

Now I realize that I did give them the wrong title, but also it took me, an untrained amateur, about two minutes to google my way to an answer, so I really feel that they could have managed it!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist. In my review of the previous Mrs. Pollifax book I commented wistfully that the series seemed to be going downhill, but this book provides a rebound! It helps that Mrs. Pollifax once again partners with John Sebastian Farrell, who worked with her on her first CIA mission lo these many books ago and remains my favorite of the many friends she has gathered along the way. They go to Jordan! They visit Petra! Farrell gets whipped again! A good time is had by all. (Well, by all the readers. Maybe not Farrell while he is getting whipped.)

Also Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Impressed by the sheer range of islands that Le Guin invented for Earthsea! Also chuffed because ( spoilers )

I missed Tenar though.

I also read Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void (translated by David Boyd and Lucy North). On a whim, a woman falsely informs her coworkers that she’s pregnant: the smell of coffee activates my morning sickness, so someone else will have to clean up the coffee cups from now on! And then she just rolls with the deception: cooks herself luxurious meals suitable for a mother-to-be, downloads a pregnancy app, joins a maternity aerobics class. She rolls with it so hard that she actually starts to experience psychosomatic pregnancy symptoms. ( Spoilers )

I found this book surprisingly stressful, because I kept waiting for the deception to be exposed, but it’s also a fascinating glimpse into, hmmm. The pregnancy experience? Pregnancy culture, if you can call it that?

Human experience is so fractal. There are so many different facets to it and each facet is so infinitely complicated.

What I’m Reading Now

littlerhymes sent me Cherith Baldry’s Exiled from Camelot, a professionally published whump-heavy hurt/comfort fic about Kay, the woobiest woobie in Camelot, and I am having a WONDERFUL time. Is it of high literary quality? Ehhhh. Does it feature Kay being kidnapped! tortured! and then returning to Arthur’s side only to SWOON at Arthur’s FEET when Arthur, enraged that Kay lost Arthur’s beloved (but secretly evil) illegitimate son Loholt, banishes Kay from his sight? It absolutely does! I have simple needs and sometimes that is all I want from a book.

In Dracula, Lucy is on her third blood transfusion this week, because people keep failing to take Van Helsing’s counter-vampire measures seriously. Now I realize that convincing a bunch of Englishmen all hyped up on their own rationality that the girl is being attacked by a mythical creature might be difficult, but Van Helsing’s current method of telling them NOTHING is clearly not working so perhaps he should try another tack.

What I Plan to Read Next

“I’m going to focus on the books on my TBR shelf,” I said. “No more new books till I finish the ones I have already accrued,” I said. Well, then I bought Pat Barker’s Regeneration and now, of course, I have to read the rest of the trilogy.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Elizabeth Wein’s “No Human Hands to Touch,” the Medraut/Morgause companion piece to The Winter Prince published in Sirens and Other Demon Lovers, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is exactly as “Dead Dove, Do Not Eat” as you might imagine from the fact that Medraut spends a large proportion of The Winter Prince waking up with screaming nightmares about his incestuous affair with his mother.

( Spoilers (need I tell you they are disturbing spoilers?) )

This has been quite a week for creepy sex books, because I also read Anne Serre’s The Governesses (translated by Mark Hutchinson), an exceptionally strange French novella about three governesses who show up at a country house where there are no children. Never fear: the governesses come with their own batch of little boys in tow! Not that they spend much time actually looking after the children, mind: most of their time goes to enticing strange men in the estate and devouring them out in the woods. (The devouring is probably a sexual metaphor, but it wouldn’t exactly surprise me if the governesses were vampires. Or fae. Or some other supernatural bitey creature.)

A weird, atmospheric, sex-drenched book. I have no idea what it’s trying to say, if indeed it is saying anything - might just be an exercise in vibes? Odd and interesting.

And now for something completely different: Rebecca Caudill’s Tree of Freedom, a Newbery Honor book from 1950 set during the American Revolution. When the Venable family moves from North Carolina to Kentucky, young Stephanie Venable takes along a seed from an apple tree, which in turn sprouted from a seed brought across the Atlantic when her Huguenot ancestors fled persecution in France. Inspired by her brother Noel’s patriotic fervor, she names the resulting sapling the Tree of Freedom, even though the seed at one point gets eaten by a chicken (!) and then Stephanie cuts the chicken’s crop open to get at the seed (!!) and then sews the crop back up (!!!!!!)... but don’t worry, both seed and chicken are fine. (Would a chicken be fine after that? Maybe I don't want to think about this too deeply.)

What I’m Reading Now

In Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist, Mrs. Pollifax is on her way to Jordan to pick up the manuscript of a novel by a recently murdered Iraqi author! In her undercover role as an innocent tourist, she has returned to her roots with a truly massive floral hat, and I love her.

In Dracula, Lucy is feeling better! Thank God her illness is all over. She’s definitely going to survive till her wedding at the end of September.

What I Plan to Read Next

I would like to track down a copy of Elizabeth Wein’s other extended Lion Hunters’ ‘verse story, “Fire,” but we shall see. In the meantime littlerhymes has sent me a copy of Cherith Baldry’s Exiled from Camelot, the woobiest Kay novel, which I am VERY much looking forward to reading.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword, in which McClellan spends a year failing to do much of anything with the Army of the Potomac because he is convinced to the bottom of his heart that (1) the Confederate Army outnumbers him two to one (in fact he outnumbered the available Confederate troops at almost all times), and (2) the government in Washington was plotting his downfall (which became true because of his unwillingness to use his army).

Much against my will I feel a certain sympathy for him, because if someone handed me an army, clapped a hand on my shoulder, and intoned “The fate of the nation rides on you, son,” I’m fairly sure that I, too, would instantly become convinced that I was outnumbered two to one, and therefore could do nothing with my army but crouch in a defensive posture while wittering about Dark Forces in Washington trying to undermine my command. But unlike McClellan I was sensible enough not to pursue a military career.

(Generally speaking, the road to political or military success seems to be the ability to accept the existence of opposition on your own side without obsessing over it or seeing said opponents as conspiratorial Dark Forces. Eyes on the prize! Remember that your true enemies are the Confederates and not those annoying dudes in Congress who understand military strategy about as well as an aardvark.)

Also, I zoomed through Enid Blyton’s second St Clare’s book, The O’Sullivan Twins at St Clare’s. The St Clare’s books have not captured my heart quite the way that Malory Towers did (maybe because the twins already have a built-in best friend and so the books don’t go as hard on Friendship?), but they are nice popcorn entertainment.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Elizabeth Wein’s The Lion Hunters (already read A Coalition of Lions and The Sunbird; wrote so much about them it became its own post), and ( Spoilers )

In Dracula, Lucy has sleep-walked down to the graveyard in the middle of the night wearing nothing but her nightgown! Absolutely scandalous. Also, we’ve heard from Jonathan Harker! He has spent the last few weeks in the hospital with brain fever, poor lad, and the hospital staff thinks he’s mad because he keeps nattering on about this vampire stuff, but he’s a very sweet boy and they hope for the best for him.

What I Plan to Read Next

skygiants and I agreed that it would be great if there was a book that gave an entertaining yet erudite discussion of the various surviving medieval Arthurian sagas, because there are clearly many, and they all seem to be bonkers. Thought I’d throw this out there in case anyone knows of such a book!