A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I feel that I ought to have something intelligent to say about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but honestly I don’t have a lot to say intelligent or otherwise. Woolf is one of those writers where I respect her skill as a prose stylist, but almost never connect with her work outside of A Room of One’s Own. I thought it might be a fiction/nonfiction thing, where I didn’t vibe with her fiction but liked her nonfiction. But then I read a book of her essays and also wasn’t feeling it, so maybe A Room of One’s Own was just a one-hit wonder for me.

I also finished Alice Alison Lide and Margaret Alison’s Johansen’s Ood-le-Uk the Wanderer, a 1931 Newbery Honor winner written by two sisters. (The Alison sisters are one of three sibling pairs to win Newbery recognition, the others being brother-sister pair Dillwyn and Anne Parrish and brothers James and Christopher Collier.)

Ood-le-Uk is a fifteen-year-old Inuit boy who is swept out to sea on an ice flow, eventually landing in Siberia where he is taken in by the Chukchi and nearly human-sacrificed by the shaman, only to be saved at the last minute by the talisman he wears: a cross in a little wooden box that washed across the sea to his home in Alaska. Does he later meet a Russian Orthodox priest who changes his life by telling him about Christianity? One hundred percent.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve just started an Alice in Wonderland reread, in the copy given to me by my friend Micky, with a note in the front that assures me that the book is just as “chaotic and confusing” as the story my friend Emma and I wrote in sixth grade. It occurs to me that this may not have been a compliment to our magnum opus.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m going in with Fanny Burney’s Evelina.

A rare edition of What I Quit Reading. Last week I was struggling with Sebastian Smee’s The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art, but decided that might be because the first part was about two artists I’m not familiar with, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. So I went on to part two, which is about Degas (I love Degas!) and Manet (Smee’s other book Paris in Ruins made me interested in Manet!)... and unfortunately I didn’t particularly care for this section either. It lacks the firm grounding in the wider historical milieu and social world of the Impressionists that made Paris in Ruins so absorbing. So onward and upward to other books.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My break from the Newberies lasted about two seconds, and then I was back in the saddle with Lesa Cline-Ransome’s One Big Open Sky, which is written in verse (ever since Out of the Dust, Newbery books written in verse have frightened me), and printed in eight-point font, which is not the author’s fault but MY EYES.

However, despite these unpropitious first impressions, I enjoyed the book as a whole. Like Out of the Dust, it’s historical fiction about a family in a hard time. In this case, Lettie’s Black family is migrating from Mississippi to Nebraska in 1879, looking for a new start. A covered wagon story with all the covered wagon trials (is someone going to get cholera?) plus the extra concern that white men might attack their caravan, but overall more successful than Out of the Dust at portraying hardship without slipping into misery porn.

I also read Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, which is about Bringley’s decade as a security guard in the Met after his brother Tom’s death.

There is a very moving passage about going to a museum with his mother soon after Tom’s death, and finding his mother standing in front of a painting of a Pieta, Mary holding the body of her dead son. Throughout the book Bringley insists on the importance of an emotional connection to art, the primacy of the personal above learning facts by rote - primacy in the literal sense that this is what comes first: why would we care to learn facts about Degas if his ballerinas weren’t so beautiful?

But, as with Paris in Ruins, sometimes learning more about an artist’s life can make you want to revisit their art - to feel that there is more to be seen in it than you have seen heretofore…

Anyway he’s not in any sense arguing against learning facts, just arguing that to really experience a work of art you have to bring not just your intellect and your facts but your whole self, your emotions; to allow yourself to be moved.

What I’m Reading Now

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job, which is like a warm bath. Right after World War II, Mrs. Tim’s husband has been posted to Egypt and her children are both in boarding school. At loose ends, she takes a job helping to run a hotel in Scotland. On the train to the hotel, she meets a man who is baffled because his fiancee has just broken off their engagement after years of correspondence over the war. And then at the hotel, Mrs. Tim meets a girl who just broke up with her fiance, because she is simply so exhausted after years of looking after an invalid aunt that she feels she can never make a good wife…

What I Plan to Read Next

Eight Newberies left. The next one on deck is Ralph Hubbard’s Queer Person.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Miriam Mason’s Yours with Love, Kate, a biography of Kate Douglass Wiggin. I picked this up solely because Barbara Cooney did the illustrations, and lucked into a delightful mid-century biography of the kind that would definitely be published as a novel today, as Mason is 100% making up conversations.

Wiggins seems as boundlessly charming and enthusiastic as one of the heroines of her own novels, only even more extraordinary: a girl born under a lucky star. She meets Charles Dickens in a railway carriage, befriends famous actresses, is invited to act in the company of the famous Dion Boucicault, but decides to stay with the free kindergarten she’s building: this is a time when the kindergarten movement was new and exciting, Wiggins a pioneer in these children’s gardens where children learn through dance and story and song.

She marries Samuel Wiggin, who enthusiastically agrees that women can and should continue to work after marriage, and so continues to work in the kindergarten movement. She starts to write in order to raise money for the kindergartens and becomes one of the most successful children’s authors of her day with The Birds’ Christmas Carol.

I also read Rumer Godden’s Premlata and the Festival of Lights, a slim story about a little girl in India whose family has become so poor that they’ve had to sell the deepas they would usually light to celebrate Diwali. She comes into possession of some money and heads off to the fair to buy new lights, but the fair is full of merry-go-rounds and hot fresh samosas and bangle sellers where she might buy a present for her mother…

What I’m Reading Now

Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, which is about the early years of the impressionist movement and the effect of the Franco-Prussian War on their lives and art when it came crashing into their world. Loving it so far. Especially loving in the bits about Berthe Morisot and her sister Edma (also a painter), but all the information about the social world of the impressionists is fascinating.

What I Plan to Read Next

As you can see, I’ve allowed myself to be distracted from my Newbery readings, but this week I’m hoping to buckle down with Lesa Cline-Ransome’s One Big Open Sky.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Agnes Hewes’ The Codfish Musket, third and last in her trio of boring 1930s Newbery Honor winners. I can only imagine that the committee felt that the “Rah rah MANIFEST DESTINY” message was good for the Youth, because my God these books are dull. How can books be so dull when there are so many deadly conspiracies?

But maybe it’s because Hewes is actually not great at deadly conspiracies. The best part of this book by far is the non-deadly middle, when our hero Dan Boit goes to Washington and accidentally becomes Thomas Jefferson’s secretary after he finds Jefferson’s lost notebook full of observations about when the first peas come up and the frogs start peeping.

In modern-day Newbery Honor winners, I finished Chanel Miller’s Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All, a short and charming tale in which Magnolia and her new friend Iris try to return orphaned socks from Magnolia’s parents’ laundry to their owners. In the process, they explore New York City and learn more about the denizens of their neighborhood.

I also read Susan Fletcher’s Journey of the Pale Bear, about a Norwegian boy accompanying a captured polar bear to England as a present for the king. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Fletcher wrote a related picture book, but that focuses more on the bear’s experiences, while this is more about the boy and the boy-meets-bear of it all. Who among us has not wished for a bear friend!

What I’m Reading Now

In Our Mutual Friend, Lizzie Hexam’s father has DIED. This may be a lucky escape for him, as he was about to be arrested on suspicion of murder (at the word of his wicked lying former business partner), but I’m very concerned what will become of poor Lizzie.

My suspicion that Mr. Rokesmith is in fact the dead John Harmon has only grown stronger as he has insinuated himself in the Boffin household as an unpaid secretary. What is his ultimate goal here? A more suspicious soul than Mr. Boffin might wonder who on earth would offer himself up as a secretary without pay, and consider the possibility of embezzlement, but blessed Mr. Boffin is not concerned a bit.

What I Plan to Read Next

Onward in the Newbery books! I am ten books from the end of the historical Newberies, and I intend to finish the project while Interlibrary Loan is still alive.

I have been ill, so this Wednesday Reading Meme is alas two days late!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I reread Francesca Forrest’s “The Bee Wife,” (Amazon link here, but available through other retailers as well), which I have been gently prodding her to publish ever since she first let me read it. A lovely sweet and sad story about a beekeeper who loses his wife Joy, and the bees try to comfort him by forming a replacement Joy…

Love the magic of the bees and the characterization of the children, five children over a wide span of ages trying to understand the appearance of this new mother, and the story’s grounding in Catholicism. Is this a miracle? Witchcraft? Can the magic of the bees be holy, since we thank them specially for their candles at Easter? Shout out to the overwhelmed priest who is not at all sure what to do about an apparently resurrected Joy showing up at the church door, and even less sure when she assures him, “I am a new creation.”

What I’m Reading Now

My mother kindly delivered my hold on Our Mutual Friend when it arrived at the library, so I have at long last started reading it! So far, it’s about making your living by pulling dead bodies from the river and emptying their pockets of all their moveables before handing them over to the police (the river always seems to turn pockets inside out, the boatman says ingenuously), and a guy who is reading The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to a pair of retired servants who have come into a fortune.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have been eyeing the latest Newbery winner, Erin Entrada Kelly’s The First State of Being, with misery and dread since I got it from the library, but I suppose I’d better get it over with.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day, an early (1908) example of the “how to productively use your time” manual, and charmingly modest in its goals. Bennet takes it as a given that you don’t want to be more productive at the office: your office is boring! He knows it, you know it! And that’s part of why you want to develop your intellectual life in your time off, for which purpose Bennett suggests devoting one and a half hours three evenings a week to a course of reading you find interesting. Music theory, philosophy, the history of street cries, follow your heart.

The edition on Gutenberg also includes a preface in which Bennett addresses the weirdo who does put his all into his office work, but nonetheless wants to develop his mind even though he’s worn out by the evening. Get up early in the morning, before the servants, make yourself a cup of tea, and do your reading then.

What I’m Reading Now

Annie Fellows Johnston’s Cicely and Other Stories, a short story collection. I just finished “Alida’s Homeliness,” in which a homely girl is saved from a life of sulky self-consciousness… by taking up the study of medicine! She apprentices herself to Doctor Agnes Mayne, the local woman doctor, saves a child’s life, and incidentally wins the heart of the child’s doting young uncle.

What I Plan to Read Next

The recent IMLS cuts have put the fear of God into me re: my ability to get the rest of the 1930s Newbery books via ILL, so I intend to read the last twelve as swiftly as is compatible with actually getting the meat out of the books.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Vanity Fair! Yes indeed I did! ( spoilers for the ending )

I also read Idwal Jones’s Whistlers’ Van, a 1937 Newbery Honor book, which I approached with trepidation as the Wikipedia description says “it tells the story of a young farmboy, Gwilym, who spends one summer traveling with the gypsies,” which seems like something that could go quite wrong.

Now of course I don’t know anything about the Rommany (as Jones spells it) in early twentieth century Wales, so who knows how authentic Jones’s portrayal is, but it feels well-observed and affectionate, although perhaps more accurate to Jones’s Welsh boyhood in the 1890s than the Wales of the 1930s. (But, again, you could fill a thimble with my knowledge of Wales in the 1930s and still have room to spare, so maybe motor cars were still comparatively rare interlopers in rural Wales in the 1930s.) The structure is quite loose - it just sort of meanders along till it stops - but overall an enjoyable read.

What I’m Reading Now

Bits and pieces of this and that, but nothing I feel compelled to post about at this time.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve decided it wouldn’t be fair to Laura Amy Schlitz’s Amber and Clay to read it too close to Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits (about which more anon), so I’ve put it off for a more convenient season.

What I Just Finished Reading

Ingrid Fetell Lee’s Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness is actually a reread, as I saw it in the bookstore last week and on impulse bought it. It’s still a delicious pleasure to read (as I said in my previous review, “It’s just so rare to read anything that is such an unabashed celebration of the joyful”), and also so inspiring as I work on the Hummingbird Cottage: a reminder to embrace my love of bright colors and flowers and round things to create a joyful space.

What I’m Reading Now

In Vanity Fair, Becky has achieved her lifelong dream of being presented at Court! As a result, her lover (?) Lord Steyne bullies his female relations into inviting Becky to a dinner party, wherein said female relations cut Becky dead. “Assuredly, the greatest tyrants over women are women,” Thackeray writes, directly after a scene where Lord Steyne tells his sister-in-law, “Gaunt's tired of you, and George's wife is the only person in the family who doesn't wish you were dead.” Yes, being rude to a dinner guest is definitely a greater tyranny than making all one’s female relations daily lives a living hell.

What I Plan to Read Next

The end of Vanity Fair is in sight! (Still a long way off, but in sight.) I believe my next classic will be Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The first time I attempted Jane McIntosh Snyder’s Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho, I got quite cross at the book for not being the book that I wanted it to be: that is to say, a book about what we can learn about society in sixth-century Lesbos based on Sappho’s poetry, and about the ancient classical world in general based on the fact that Sappho was called the tenth muse and her poems remained so popular that they were quoted in books in rhetoric centuries after her death, which is how we come to have as many snippets of her work as we do.

Unfortunately for me, Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho has no interest in being that book. It’s a close reading of Sappho’s works to investigate how she articulates lesbian desire, and also an argument with Ye Commentators of Olde who insisted on reading all of Sappho’s love poems to women as bridal songs, because it’s the done thing to get up at a wedding and sing “The bride is so hot that my knees are shaking and I can’t even speak.” (I mean, maybe it was the done thing on ancient Lesbos! This is where some context would be useful.)

My first introduction to Sappho’s work, so I’m glad the poems were quoted so copiously. And it’s an interesting work on its own terms. But those were not the terms I was hoping for.

After a hiatus, I’ve returned to the 1930s Newberys with Nora Burglon’s Children of the Soil: A Story of Scandinavia, a delightful story about everyday life for a couple of crofter’s children in northern Sweden in the 19th century. This is one of those books that derives most of its interest from the description of everyday life in a certain time and place, which is the sort of thing that I love. (I wonder if one could write a fantasy novel of this type. That would be cozy fantasy, right?)

What I’m Reading Now

In Vanity Fair, Amelia Sedley was PINING AWAY because she was forbidden to marry her beloved George Osbourne. But when Osbourne’s friend Captain Dobbin went to visit Amelia (who of course Captain Dobbin secretly adores) and found her on the POINT OF DEATH because of her THWARTED LOVE, he convinced Osbourne to marry Amelia in the teeth of paternal opposition. (The pater wanted Osbourne to marry a mixed-race West Indian heiress of immense wealth.)

What I Plan to Read Next

At long last, I’m going to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Carries On, in which World War II begins, and Mrs. Tim tries to keep on keeping on even while worrying about air raids, the beginning of rationing, and most of all her husband who didn’t make it back to England during the evacuation of Dunkirk… A bit heavier than some of Stevenson’s other works but still full of her gentle charm.

I’m surprised this book wasn’t reprinted during the rash of D. E. Stevenson reprints a few years ago – there’s a big market for World War II fiction and I think modern readers would enjoy it.

I also finished John Le Carre’s Smiley’s People, in which ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve stolen genarti’s New Year’s Resolution to read at least one unread book that I already own each month, so this month I’m reading a book about the history of servants in England in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (Actually it seems to be mostly Edwardian with a few forays earlier.) Very interesting!

What I Plan to Read Next

After years of procrastination, I’m going to read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.