A Certain Slant of Light

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.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Perhaps surprisingly, given my lack of enthusiasm for Phyllis Ann Karr’s Frostflower and Thorn, I actually quite enjoyed Frostflower and Windbourne. I enjoyed Frostflower and Thorn’s established friendship and I liked the further fleshing out of the worldbuilding, which I had thought was rather thin in book one, but it came together elegantly here. I particularly liked the solution to the mystery ( spoilers )

I knew from the start that there are only two books in this series, but having finished the second one, I wonder if Karr didn’t originally plan to write more. The conclusion is satisfying, but it leaves a lot of open ends loose in a way that suggests she was planting hooks for a possible sequel.

I also read Elizabeth Goudge’s The Lost Angel, a set of short stories, some Christmas-themed. Uneven as short story collections are wont to be. My favorite was the title story, about a little boy who is supposed to play an angel in the Nativity play but escapes from dress rehearsal and wanders around London dressed as an angel.

And I read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s short story “Seth.” A homely and retiring young man arrives at a mine in Tennessee, hoping for employment, as the mine is owned by a native of his hometown. The handsome young mine owner indeed hires him, and Seth is in return devoted to him. Meanwhile, Bess the landlord’s sharp-tongued daughter seems softer on Seth than she has ever seemed to a young man before, so people tease her she’s sweet on him, to which she responds “Happen I am.”

( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve reached the tragic part in The Life of Charlotte Bronte, where everyone starts dying. First Branwell, and that’s tragic because he never accomplished anything and was in fact a misery to everyone who knew him for the last three years of his life. Then Emily, whose death is differently tragic, because Emily refuses to ask for help or even admit she’s sick till her dying day, when she finally acquiesces to see a doctor mere hours before she dies. And now Anne, who is willing to let Charlotte and the doctors try to help, but nonetheless is fading, fading…

What I Plan to Read Next

Contemplating which Rumer Godden book to read next. The ones I have easy access to are Four Dolls, The Dark Horse, and The River. I’m leaning toward Four Dolls because I usually like Godden’s children’s books better than her adult books, but then again there is In This House of Brede batting one thousand for the adult books... so I thought I’d see if anyone has a strong opinion about the other two.

Merry Christmas! I thought I might break tradition and post Wednesday Reading Meme on Thursday on account of Christmas, but no, here I am.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves, which is not technically a Christmas book, but I feel that all Jeeves and Wooster stories are Christmas-adjacent in that they are very jolly.

Also Annie Fellows Johnston’s Miss Santa Claus of the Pullman, which is about two small children (Libby and William, seven and four) who are riding a Pullman car to be reunited with their father and meet their new stepmother… and while on the car, they meet a girl who they are convinced is Santa Claus’s daughter! She tells them a story that helps them bond into a real family. A sweet Christmas story.

And Sara Crewe; or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s original serialized story that she later expanded into A Little Princess. No Becky, no Lottie, a good deal less Ermengarde, but the bit about the starving beggar girl outside the bun shop to whom Sara gives five of her six buns is still the same, and the ending where the bun shop lady has adopted the beggar girl.

What I’m Reading Now

In The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte has just begun attending Roe Head school, where Mary Taylor just told her that she was very ugly which somehow cemented their friendship for life.

What I Plan to Read Next

Alas, I did NOT manage to read Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal in time for Christmas. However I have decided that I would rather read it relatively close to when I read The Appeal rather than wait for next Christmas, so as soon as it returns to the library I’ll check it out this winter.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Gib and the Gray Ghost, sequel to Gib Rides Home, which like many sequels was not quite as good as the first one. In particular I felt she bobbled the ending. But lots of good horse material if you like horse books.

Also John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy, which took me forever to read - not as pacy as many of his other novels. It doesn’t help that this one often slips into a weirdly retrospective style, as in, “Afterwards people said Smiley should have done X, but given the information at the time it’s hard to see how he could have realized…” This could be used to heighten tension, but here I felt the style leached it away.

Also Ethel Cook Eliot’s Ariel Dances. Nineteen-year-old Ariel is the daughter of Gregory Clare, an unknown artist who recently died. His youthful friend Hugh has taken on the responsibility of selling Clare’s canvases, which will, of course, make Ariel’s fortune, but until then Ariel will be staying with Hugh’s family, where she is more or less adopted by Hugh’s semi-mystical grandmother, whom Eliot compares to great-great-grandmother in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin

Are Ariel and Hugh going to get married? 100%. Is this how the book ends? 100% not. In fact, we end with Hugh’s semi-mystical grandmother triumphantly shuffling off this mortal coil to her next great adventure, Death.

Ethel Cook Eliot is one of those authors where I’m sometimes a bit puzzled why I keep going back to her, and I think part of it is that her writing priorities are often interestingly bizarre, in a way that it didn’t quite come into focus for me until she brought in the George MacDonald comparison. Christian mysticism! But with magic! Except no actual magic in this particular book, but still kind of magic?

What I’m Reading Now

Galloping toward the end of Villette! Lucy has just been accidentally-on-purpose directed to the house where M. Paul pays room and board for his old tutor, his dead fiancee’s mean grandmother, and an old family servant, on the theory that upon seeing how many dependents he’s already supporting Lucy will realize that M. Paul is WAY too broke to marry.

Unfortunately for everyone involved in this plot, what Lucy has in fact realized is “M. Paul is an amazing human being despite also being the most irritating person on earth” and also “People think? that M. Paul wants to marry me? enough that they are actually going out of their way to dissuade me from considering it???? I mean I’m still NOT considering it, that would be PRESUMPTUOUS, if you allow yourself to want anything then fate will strike you down! But still…”

What I Plan to Read Next

Taking a little break from Smiley right now, but will swing back around with Smiley’s People in 2025.