A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Winter Cottage, a wonderful book! Near the beginning of the Great Depression, Minty and Eggs are on the road with their sweet but feckless father when their car breaks down… right next to someone’s charming isolated lakeshore summer cottage. As their current destination is the back bedroom of an aunt who emphatically does not want to put them up, they make only some half-hearted attempts to fix the car before settling into the cottage for the winter. (Conveniently, they arrive with a winter’s worth of provisions, left over from their father’s latest failed business venture: a grocery store.) Exactly as cozy as a book with such a premise should be.

I also read Gerald Durrell’s Catch Me a Colobus, because I realized that the local library has a few of his books I hadn’t read and instantly could not survive another moment with a fresh Gerald Durrell book in my life. This one is a bit of a hodgepodge, I suspect because Durrell wrote it swiftly to get funds to shore up his zoo, which is mostly what the first third of the book is about, as he returned from a collecting trip to find the zoo hovering on the edge of bankruptcy. We continue on a trip to Sierra Leone for his first BBC series (this is the bit that the title comes from, as colobus monkeys are high on his list for the collecting trip), and end with a trip to Mexico to collect the rare Teporingo, a volcano-dwelling rabbit in danger of extinction.

Although hopping from continent to continent like this makes the book a bit formless, Durrell’s prose is a delight as always. I love his metaphors, perfectly apt and entirely unexpected: the “slight squeak” of a Teporingo, “like somebody rubbing a damp thumb over a balloon,” or the experience of walking through a forest of massive bamboo stalks, which “creak and groan musically” in the slightest wind; “It must have sounded like that rounding the Horn in an old sailing ship in high wind.”

What I’m Reading Now

Traipsing along in Women’s Weird. In any anthology, the quality is inevitably a bit uneven, but overall it’s quite high. The scariest story so far is May Sinclair’s “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched” (a pair of lovers stuck together in Hell for all eternity, even though in life they deeply bored each other); Edith Wharton’s “Kerfol” is a classic spooky ghost story, while my favorite for sheer strength of voice is Edith Nesbit’s “The Shadow.” Oh, props to Margery Lawrence for making a saucepan deeply ominous in “The Haunted Saucepan.” The way it just sits there, boiling, on a cold stove…

I should be hitting D. K. Broster’s story (“Couching at the Door”) next week. Excited to report back!

What I Plan to Read Next

An account of getting distracted by Winter Cottage and Catch Me a Colobus, I have made almost no progress on the books I earnestly desired to make progress on last week. Well, such is the reading life. Sometimes a book comes along that you want to read more than anything else, and it’s best to strike while the iron is hot.

Extremely busy tomorrow, so posting Wednesday Reading Meme a day early!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last, I’ve completed D. K. Broster’s Sir Isumbras at the Ford! Still no idea where the title came from. Presumably it’s a reference from a poem? I went into this expecting a medieval tale, and it absolutely is not. Like The Wounded Name and The Yellow Poppy, it’s about Royalists trying to oust the Republicans after the Revolution.

( Spoilers )

I also read Charles Finch’s What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year, largely because I’ve read all of Finch’s books hitherto and didn’t mean to break my streak just because his latest book is a diary of 2020. But it turned out to be surprisingly absorbing for a book about such recent events: I devoured it in one afternoon. You’d think it wouldn’t tell you anything new, and in a sense, of course, it doesn’t, but at the same time it was surprising to realize how much I had forgotten from 2020—in particular the absolute misery of having Donald Trump as president, and waking up every morning wondering how the hell that buffoon is going to make everything worse today. (Forgotten may be the wrong word. I may have repressed the memory in self-defense.)

And I’m back in the swing of things with the 1930s Newbery books, this time with Davy Crockett, by Constance Rourke. You may remember Rourke as the one who wrote the Newbery Honor-winning John James Audubon biography positing that Audubon might have been the escaped dauphin of France. Naturally I was agog to learn Rourke’s theories about Davy Crockett.

Sadly, nothing in Davy Crockett is as deliciously nuts as John James Audubon, Escaped Dauphin of France. (Then again, what could?) But the book is highly readable, and Rourke happily relates a great many Crockett legends (Davy Crockett was clearly the Chuck Norris of his time), sorting them generally into “probably true,” “could be true,” “okay these can’t all be true but it sounds like something Crockett might have done,” and “physically impossible for a human being to accomplish, so I must sadly admit that Davy Crockett did not in fact grease a lightning bolt.”

What I’m Reading Now

Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940, which I got because it contains a short story by D. K. Broster. (It’s near the end of the volume, so I haven’t reached it yet.) A few familiar names here (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton – also Edith Nesbit!), but also quite a few I’m not familiar with, so this will be an interesting exploration.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have decided that I am indeed going to dive into all things French! I’ve already read a few of the big ones (Les Mis, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Count of Monte Cristo) - perhaps it is time to read more Zola? To delve, at long last, into Colette? To attempt the first volume of Proust? Recommendations of books and also specific translations greatly appreicated.

Also considering books about French history! troisoiseaux, I know there was that one book you read about the last day of Robespierre. Maybe it’s time for me to give that a try.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Letters Regarding Jeeves has begun! We started off with a perfectly ripping story called “Jeeves Takes Charge,” in which Jeeves shimmers into Bertie Wooster’s employ and saves him from an engagement with a most unsuitable girl (though she did have a splendid profile), as well as a hideous checked suit. So glad that I signed up for this. It’s going to be a delightful ride.

And I have at last completed E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat! This is a collection of the essays that he wrote for Harper’s from 1938 to 1942, and one thing that struck me is how very bloggish it felt. A few of the essays are more structured (like the one where he inveighs against Anne Lindbergh’s book about how totalitarianism is the wave of the future, and who can fight the future? Maybe you can’t fight the future but maybe in this case we should TRY, says White), but some are quite disconnected, a few thoughts here and a few thoughts there and an observation about the agricultural life and we have a post magazine article.

Here’s an observation which I think is even more apropos today than it was in White’s time: “Even intelligence is an accident of Nature, and to say that an intelligent man deserves his rewards in life is to say that he alone is entitled to be lucky. Maybe he is, but I sometimes wonder.”

What I’m Reading Now

MANY HAPPENINGS in Sir Isumbras at the Ford! ( Spoilers )

What I Plan to Read Next

Fate is against me: a second volume of L. M. Boston’s memoirs has now slipped through my fingers. Alas!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The Mousewife, by Rumer Godden, a retelling of a story by Dorothy Wordsworth, about a mouse who befriends a dove in a cage. A lovely story, made lovelier by William Pène du Bois’s naturalistic black-and-white illustrations. I particularly loved the series of mouse portraits (ending with a Cubist mouse) and the two-page spread that shows the dove’s memories of its sweet days flying free.

Also The Romantic Friendship Reader: Love Stories Between Men in Victorian America, an anthology collected by Axel Nissen. I escaped with less damage to my reading list than I feared, just Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme and perhaps Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend, although I’m not sure I could stand the prose styling of the latter at novel length. Also happy to report that this anthology includes the complete text of Frederick W. Loring’s Two College Friends, so if anyone wishes for a paper copy of this whumpy trainwreck of a Civil War friendship, look no further!

What I’m Reading Now

In Sir Isumbras at the Ford, we have AT LONG LAST learned of the Chevalier de la Vireville’s TRAGIC PAST! ( spoilers )

In One Man’s Meat, I’ve just reached E. B. White’s chapter “Dog Training,” which is a fascinating look at change in dog- training methods over time. White observes, “at the turn of the century… one’s dog was fed on mashed potatoes and brown gravy and lived in a doghouse with an arched portal. Today a dog is fed on scraped beef and Vitamin B, and lives in bed with you.”

(Although my mother, growing up on a farm in the 1950s & 60s, remembers that the farm dogs were never let in the house. So this may have been regional, and maybe also a result of the fact that underneath his crusty exterior, White was a big old softie!)

What I Plan to Read Next

Good things come to those who wait! At long last Further Chronicles of Avonlea has arrived at the library!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Gaelic Ghosts, a collection of Scottish ghost stories. The preface is as charming as the stories themselves, for Nic Leodhas reminisces about where she learned the stories: this tale of a ghost dog from an uncle, the tale of the Lady’s Loaf-Field from a great aunt… a peek into an oral tradition.

Also D. E. Stevenson’s Amberwell, a family saga that starts in the 1920s and stretches till just after World War II. Amberwell is the name of the family estate, and Stevenson is so good at writing about places in a way that makes you see them; and so good, too, at writing characters who feel like real people, some of them nice and some of them dreadful (the parents in this book! Their motto is “never explain,” which tells you just about everything you need to know about their parenting style), but vivid and lively and a pleasure to spend time with. Reading her books is like going on a visit.

And also Hilary McKay’s Lulu and the Dog from the Sea. One of the delightful things about deciding to read through an author’s entire catalog is that it leads you to wonderful finds, like this series of easy readers about Lulu and her cousin (and best friend) Mellie, who are always getting into scrapes on account of Lulu’s love of animals. I don’t usually read easy readers, but McKay combines a simple writing style with a cracking good story about befriending a stray dog on a seaside holiday. Highly recommended as a present for a child learning to read, especially if the child loves animals.

What I’m Reading Now

This week in Sir Isumbras at the Ford, I’ve reached the end of book two. ( Spoilers )

Also continuing on in E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat. We’re in May 1939 now (these essays were originally written as columns for Harper’s) and the threat of war hangs in the air like a fog, its tendrils winding through the cracks even into White’s chicken coop.

What I Plan to Read Next

The sequel to Amberwell, Summerhills. I shall have to put an interlibrary loan on it, so it will be a bit... but on the other hand the Purdue interlibrary loan office was EXTREMELY on the ball with Mary Stolz's Go and Catch a Flying Fish (about which more anon!), so perhaps it will be here soon!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Mary Stolz’s Cezanne Pinto: A Memoir is a novel in first person about a boy who escaped from slavery just before the Civil War. Cezanne Pinto is the name our hero and his mother chose for him together the night before she was sold down the river to Texas; he promises her that he’ll escape once he’s older, and indeed he does, along with the ferocious cook Tamar. (I love Cezanne, but powerhouse Tamar who learned to read from the Bible and talks like it might be my favorite character.) After the war, Cezanne sets out for Texas to find his mother.

Cezanne is telling us this story decades after the fact, and he tells us very early on that he never saw his mother again. This was a clever decision on Stolz’s part: the book would be terribly depressing if you read it in hope of a reunion only to have that hope dashed on the last page, but since you go into it knowing, it’s sad but not devastating, and you know that the real point of the story is not the quest but the friends Cezanne makes along the way.

Another decision I quite liked is that, although Cezanne mentions his wife and it’s clear he loved her deeply, the story ends before he actually meets her. It would have imbalanced the book to shove in a “How I Met Your Mother” plot. The heart of the story is Cezanne’s mother, and that is as it should be.

I also read picture book, Carol Ryrie Brink’s Goody O’Grumpity, which sounds like it should be about a grumpy old woman but is in fact about a woman baking a toothsome spice cake that all the children want to eat. Charming illustrations by Ashley Wolff, woodblock painted with watercolors, which set the tale in a Puritan village.

Also Vivien Alcock’s The Red-Eared Ghosts, which is a wild ride of a book. Young Mary Frewin is an average, everyday, indeed slightly dull young Londoner – except for one thing: ever since she was a baby in her pram, she’s been able to see red-eared ghosts that no one else can see. Over the course of the book we learn what these ghosts are and where they come from, an explanation which hares off in several unexpected directions.

I didn’t think this book came together as well as some of Alcock’s others, but I have to admire the sheer weirdness of it all. Red-eared ghosts! Why not! (And in case you are wondering, no, although we learn quite a number of other things about Mary’s ghosts, we never learn why their ears are red.)

What I’m Reading Now

Not much progress in Sir Isumbras at the Ford this week. But I have to go to the BMV this Saturday to update the address on my driver’s license, so I may make excellent progress while I wait.

What I Plan to Read Next

I now have a university library card! Although I may, at some point, get around to more scholarly fare, at the moment I am trawling through the spooky little children’s section tucked back behind the magazine archives. I got Mary Stolz’s Night of Ghosts and Hermits and Rumer Godden’s biography of Hans Christian Andersen… I should see if they have any Anne Lindbergh or Sorche Nic Leodhas.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

One more Newbery Honor book: Elizabeth Janet Gray’s Young Walter Scott, a novelized biography of the youth of Sir Walter Scott. Fascinating to get a glimpse of life in Edinburgh in the last decades of the 18th century - the ‘45 still cast a long shadow!

Also Vivien Alcock’s Stranger at the Window, which I would have LOVED if I had read it as a child, as it’s a book about a hidden child and I LOVED books about hidden children. (Why yes, I did obsess over Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden, in which families are required by law to stop at two children so third children have to be kept hidden. The rest of the series never lived up to the first book, IMO.)

In this book, young Leslie realizes that there is a child hiding in the attic of the house next door in London. Soon, she realizes that the neighbor children are hiding an illegal immigrant… whom they can no longer hide, as their mother has become suspicious, so Leslie has to hide him! Wonderful. A++. You know how in the sixth book of the Samantha series, Samantha hides her best friend Nellie and her two little sisters in the attic? This pushes all those buttons.

Given the premise, you might expect Stranger at the Window to delve into the whys and wherefores of illegal immigration more than it does. But goddammit, I’m not here to learn anything, I’m here for adventure.

Also Carol Ryrie Brink’s The Pink Motel. Just before Christmas, the Mellen family inherits a bright pink motel in Florida from Great-Uncle Hiram. They head down to put the place in order and sell it, only the children are instantly smitten and want to stay there forever on account of the quirky guests: an itinerant handyman who carved weather vanes for all the cottages at the motel, a gangster who cuts paper lace, and an artist from Greenwich Village who carries a possibly magical hamper (always full of whatever food you happen to need, including on one occasion Alligator Food).

Is Miss Ferris in fact magical? The book never commits to an answer on this question, but (a) that magical hamper, (b) she keeps saying things like “[shooting apples off people’s heads] is a nice trick that originated in Switzerland, I believe, a long time ago when I was just a girl,” and (c) she spins and weaves an entire theater curtain in less than a week.

The book sort of sits at the intersection of mid-century children’s fantasy and mid-century children’s books about family hijinks, so if you like either of those things you might like it. Carol Ryrie Brink is always a good time, in any case. (I bought this book cheap at a used bookstore and if anyone would like it, I would be happy to send it.)

What I’m Reading Now

Not much progress in Sir Isumbras at the Ford this week. Having returned young Anne-Hilarion to his grandfather in London, the Chevalier de la Vireville has landed once again on the coast of Brittany… only to realize that his foot is more badly injured than he realized, and he may not be able to climb the rocky cliffs off the beach!

What I Plan to Read Next

The library has another autobiography by another mid-century woman children’s writer that I like (Carol Ryrie Brink). I’ve learned my lesson from the debacle after I put a hold on L. M. Boston’s autobiography last week: I’m going to Central Library in person to pick Carol Ryrie Brink’s A Chain of Hands up myself in my hot little hands!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, which was a wild ride from start to finish. (Collins is clearly having a great time, especially when he’s writing ( Spoilers )

Also Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Racketty-Packetty House, a book about a set of dolls who live in an early Victorian dollhouse, which has been pushed to the side of the nursery now that their owner has a brand spanking new up-to-the-minute dollhouse of 1906. Although the dolls live in fear that their dollhouse may be burned at any minute, they are essentially jolly souls, always joining hands and dancing around in circles. One of the dolls from the new dollhouse yearns to come over and join in the fun… particularly if it means she can meet Peter Piper, who is always turning somersaults. A tale as old as time!

What I’m Reading Now

Traipsing gently onward in Sir Isumbras at the Ford. Young Anne-Hilarion is paying a visit to two elderly ladies who are friends of his father… or are they? I have a suspicion that they may be SPIES, attempting to wrangle details of his father’s secret mission out of innocent young Anne-Hilarion, who of course has no idea what they’re doing.

What I Plan to Read Next

Pining for my Vivien Alcock novels to come in at the library. (The Red-eared Ghosts and Stranger at the Window.) Surely someday soon…

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking, a cookbook/food memoir about Lewis’s childhood during the Great Depression in Freetown, Virginia, a small agricultural hamlet founded by freedmen after the Civil War. A classic, full of succulent descriptions of food as it changed with the rhythms of the seasons. I read this on Thanksgiving and it is indeed a perfect Thanksgiving book.

Also Mary Stolz’s To Tell Your Love, another one of her young adult novels. (I briefly described it as a YA novel, but mid-century young adult is so different from modern that it feels misleading to use the acronym.) In this summer story, the POV drifts between 23-year-old Theo, a hospital nurse; her 14-year-old brother Johnny; and the middle sister, 19-year-old Anne, broken-hearted over a boyfriend who has just ghosted her.

But Anne begins to wonder if it might be just as well to lose the boyfriend when she meets up with her friend Nora, who gave up college last year to make a glorious romantic marriage at the age of seventeen… and now feels trapped in her new life, which she can’t admit to Anne but which Anne nonetheless can see. (At one point Nora leaves the baby with a sitter and feels “like a prisoner released from jail.”)

There is a tag scene where Nora calls her husband at his job at the garage (he had to quit college to support the growing family) and he’s happy to talk to her and Nora feels a warm glow, suggesting the marriage might work out after all, but the overall effect is to warn the young reader that perhaps getting married so very young is not so romantic after all.

What I’m Reading Now

Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White! Marian Halcombe sure is the kind of girl who bonds with men by chattering about how silly women are, huh. (And Wilkie Collins sure is the kind of writer who can write great individual female characters without having any very high opinion of women as a whole.)

I've also just begun D. K. Broster's Sir Isumbras at the Ford! Truly JUST begun it: our hero is still a little boy, who has just been put to bed.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday! Simply ambushed by Laura Amy Schlitz earlier this week… not my fault.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Mary Stolz’s Good-by My Shadow is an intimate, interior book, just a few days in the life of a teenager in a midwestern town. To be honest, it was a little bit more navel-gazy than I personally prefer, although this is very much the point: our heroine, fifteen-year-old Barbara, suffers from the all-consuming self-consciousness that sometimes afflicts adolescents, which means that she’s constantly overthinking her interactions in a way that means she often fixates on minutia while missing the blatantly obvious. My favorite example: a boy calls Barbara on the phone, and she’s so busy monitoring her own meta-analysis of the conversation that she almost doesn’t notice him asking if he can escort her to a party that evening.

Although Barbara admits to herself, somewhat grumpily, that her family is really pretty terrific, she’s so self-absorbed that she feels cut off from them, simply because it’s hard for her to get out of her own head enough to communicate effectively. There’s no dramatic character arc here, just a wisp of a realization that perhaps, after all, the problem is that she’s not present enough in her own life, followed by a few stumbling baby steps toward getting out of her head to pay attention to other people.

Also Mary Gould Davis’s The Truce of the Wolf and Other Tales of Old Italy, an enchanting collection of Italian folktales that got a Newbery Honor in 1932. I particularly liked the title tale, in which St. Francis of Assisi brokers a truce between a wolf and the town the wolf has been terrorizing, and the story of the heroic if sometimes ornery donkey Nanni, who doesn’t like to cross bridges but instead wades through the stream while his owner sighs and rolls his eyes and smokes a pipe. Now that is a theory of time management I can get behind!

What I’m Reading Now

Mary Stolz’s short story collection The Beautiful Friend and Other Stories. So far I’ve read the title story, which I have to say that I approached with some trepidation, because there are so many ways a story with a title like “The Beautiful Friend” could collapse in a heap of misogynistic tripe.

I should have trusted Mary Stolz more. She is one of the naturally feminist writers, who not only likes women but also understands that women - that all humans - can be complicated and contradictory; that Ella can be genuinely fond of her beautiful friend Madi and also have an attack of insecurity when Madi meets Ella’s fiance for the first time. Her society is so steeped in a particular spun-gold ideal of beauty that Ella struggles a little to accept that her fiance can truly love and want her even though she doesn’t meet it.

What I Plan to Read Next

PINING for the library to bring me Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday. What is up with the holds system! It’s gotten so slow in the months that I was away!