A Certain Slant of Light

Books I've Given Up On This Week

I regret to admit (or rather admit without regret) that I got deeply bored about a quarter of the way through Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, and have therefore taken it back to the library. Sorry, Jean-Paul! This is simply not a season of my life where I am interested in you.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

While looking for more Penelope Farmer books, as one does, I discovered that the author of Charlotte Sometimes also occasionally moonlighted as a translator from Hebrew. Specifically, she and Amos Oz teamed up to translate Oz’s book Soumchi, a wistful childhood journey through British-occupied Jerusalem between the world wars.

This is an adult book about children rather than a children’s book - the tip-off lies in the prologue, a melancholy reflection about how everything is changing all the time which is very “adult looking back at childhood.” A gentle period piece about a boy with a massive crush on his classmate Esthie and also absolutely zero common sense, as evidenced by the fact that he keeps making trades where he is fairly obviously getting the worse end of the deal.

Also continuing my Vivien Alcock explorations with A Kind of Thief, a contemporary novel about a girl whose father is arrested for theft. But before he’s marched off by the police, he manages to sneak her the information to pick up a bag at the railroad station. Does receiving these presumably stolen goods make her… a kind of thief?

I think Alcock’s work is stronger (or at least more tailored to my interests) when she’s exploring a fantastical premise. This is fun but not something I would suggest seeking out unless you’re an Alcock completist. (If you are an Alcock completist, I do own a copy and I would be happy to send it to a new home.)

Also zipped through Dorothy Gilman’s Kaleidoscope, the sequel to The Clairvoyant Countess, which I probably should have read first as Kaleidoscope is chock full of spoilers for the earlier book. On the other hand, I’ll probably have forgotten all the spoilers by the time I mosey around to The Clairvoyant Countess, so it’s fine.

Always love Gilman’s older heroines. This book is aptly named, a kaleidoscope of different fractured glimpses of other people’s lives, some of which appear once and some of which are threaded throughout the book. No strong through-line but lots of fun little interweaving stories.

What I’m Reading Now

Grace Lin’s Chinese Menu, a lavishly illustrated compilation of the legendary origin stories of many classic Chinese dishes. Just about the embark on the story of spring rolls.

What I Plan to Read Next

I know I keep saying I’m going to read E. F. Benson’s Queen Lucia, but I’m going to read Queen Lucia for real this time.

Last time I posted one of these reading lists, asakiyume noted that I’d already read, like, half the books, and I decided that it might be the path of wisdom in the future to try to post these lists BEFORE I started reading the books on them. So! Behold! The authors I intend to revisit from my 2018 reading list!

Juliana Horatia Ewing - Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances (the university library has Mrs. Overtheway’s Remembrances (memories of early nineteenth-century England), The Story of a Short Life (unclear, but I think a child soldier dies valiantly?), and Lob Lie-by-the-fire ; Jackanapes ; Daddy Darwin's dovecot (three short stories, possibly fantasy). Any preferences?)

Ngaio Marsh - Enter a Murderer

Jerry Pinkney - The Sunday Outing

Rosemary Sutcliff - The Flowers of Adonis; found this buried in the bowels of my Kindle and couldn't resist. (originally planned We Lived at Drumfyvie, on the basis of regshoe’s review)

Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Head of the House of Coombe

Roald Dahl - I’ve read the most famous ones (Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), plus his memoirs Boy and Going Solo. But I’ve barely skimmed the surface otherwise. Recs?

Caroline Dale Snedeker - The White Isle

M. T. Anderson - Nicked. Recced by multiple people!

D. E. Stevenson - Mrs. Tim Flies Home. The last of the Mrs. Tim quartet.

E. M. Delafield - The Provincial Lady in America (technically The Provincial Lady in America is next, but I’d have to get it through ILL, whereas the library has The Provincial Lady in Wartime. Will probably get Wartime unless someone feels strongly the books must be read in order and/or the America is wonderful and I simply mustn’t risk missing it.) (decided I could resist The Provincial Lady in America and enjoyed it very much)

Elizabeth Enright - Spiderweb for Two. Wrapping up the Melendys!

Rick Bragg - I really liked his food memoir The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table, so I meant to try some of his other books, but… I have not. Any suggestions?

Daphne Du Maurier - Would like to read The Scapegoat but we'll see.

Edward Eager - Playing Possum (the last of his little-known picture books)

Deborah Ellis - One More Mountain, the newest Breadwinner novel, published in 2022

Fyodor Dosteovsky - The Brothers Karamazov. Thoughts which translation I should get?

Jacqueline Woodson - Remember Us

Eliza Orne White - I, the Autobiography of a Cat. I am including White on this list solely because the archive has this book, and how am I supposed to resist a title like that?

Zilpha Keatley Snyder - The Bronze Pen

C. S. Lewis - Studies in Words

Elizabeth Gaskell - Mary Barton or Ruth, probably.

Dorothy Gilman - Kaleidoscope

E. Nesbit - The Wouldbegoods

Thanhha Lai - When Clouds Touch Us, the sequel to Inside Out and Back Again. Always nervous about sequels but going to give this a try.

Vera Brittain - Testament of Youth. Another book I’ve meant to read for AGES.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Valenti Angelo’s Nino, a 1930s Newbery book of one of my favorite genres, “a thinly fictionalized memoir of the author’s childhood in Ye Olden Times.” Angelo emigrated to the United States at the age of eight, but he remembered his early years in Italy in great detail, especially the delicious food, like polenta with cheese and honey.

I’ve been looking for a Louisa May Alcott book to read for my postcard project, and rather stymied because I’ve read all the main ones at this point, but Tasha Tudor came to the rescue: she illustrated A Round Dozen, twelve short stories by Louisa May Alcott collected by Anne Thaxter Eaton. Alcott’s moralistic tendencies grow somewhat more concentrated in short story form, and although I have generally a high tolerance for that sort of thing, by the last story I wanted to eat an entire indigestible mincemeat pie while sitting in a hayloft reading something unwholesome.

And I read Dorothy Gilman’s The Tightrope Walker, a recent Little Free Library find! Our heroine Amelia Jones, unwilling to follow her therapist’s recommendation that she find some purpose in life by taking a typing class, instead acquires a secondhand shop. While tidying up her new wares, she discovers a note inside the hurdy-gurdy, which purports to be from a woman who is about to be murdered…

If you like Gilman, you’ll like this. An excellent mystery story that grows increasingly tense, with a couple of twists that delighted me.

What I’m Reading Now

In Lord Peter, I just read a short story that appears to be Sayers’ first go-round for the mystery plot of Have His Carcase, followed by a short story where Lord Peter fakes his own death and goes undercover for two years in order to round up an evil secret society of criminals.

This is particularly funny because in the story immediately preceding, Lord Peter announces that he always loses interest in detective stories featuring evil secret societies of criminals. So do I, Lord Peter! And yet here we are!

What I Plan to Read Next

I have a mere THREE Newbery books left! Lois Lenski’s Phebe Fairchild: Her Book, Jeanette Eaton’s Leader by Destiny: George Washington, Man and Patriot, and Dorothy Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus. Full speed ahead to the end!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled. I really meant to save this final Mrs. Pollifax book for a rainy day… but I felt an overwhelming urge to read it now, and who am I to resist an overwhelming urge? Gilman brought back John Sebastian Farrell to team up with Mrs. Pollifax for the denouement, thus bringing the series full circle from Mrs. Pollifax’s first adventure with Farrell. A satisfying end.

As this is the last Mrs. Pollifax book, I figured it was now or never on Mrs. Pollifax - Spy, the Mrs. Pollifax movie starring Rosalind Russell as Mrs. Pollifax. Russell is a goddamn delight, but I was sorry ( Spoilers )

Last January I bombed out of Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, but I gave it another try with littlerhymes and we powered through! It helped perhaps that I went into it knowing that this is going to be the book where Everyone Is Mean to Merlin, and not in a tragic woobie way either: that’s just how the bannock crumbles in the harsh world of Dark Ages Britain.

What I’m Reading Now

Elizabeth Brooks’ The Orphan of Salt Winds, a delicious novel which has performed the difficult feat of making both its historical and its modern-day plotlines equally gothic. On the eve of World War II, orphan Virginia is adopted by the young couple who own the seaside house Salt Winds, in what the reader quickly senses is a doomed attempt to save their rickety marriage. In the modern day, Virginia in her old age finds a curlew skull on the doorstep of Salt Winds, which she believes is a sign that tomorrow night she must walk into the marsh to drown… No idea where this is headed, but loving every minute of it.

In Dracula, Lucy has DIED. Could this all have been avoided if Van Helsing had been a literal more liberal in sharing information so that everyone was on the same page about the necessity of the garlic flowers and keeping a constant watch over her at night? MAYBE. littlerhymes and I also agreed that PERHAPS if Mina had been summoned, her blood might have saved Lucy: the love of a good woman etc. Lucy Westenra, killed by heteronormativity…

What I Plan to Read Next

Onward in the Merlin Chronicles!

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

I’ve been on a bit of a graphic novel kick recently, which I continued with Besties: Working It Out, cowritten by Kayla Miller & Jeffrey Canino and illustrated by Kristina Luu. I’ve complained about some of Miller’s choices in her past books (although it hasn’t stopped me from reading each new book as it comes out!), so I was surprised that I just straight up liked this one. Possibly bouncing ideas off a cowriter and illustrator softened some of the weirder edges off Miller’s ideas about How Friendships Work.

The best friends in this are Beth and Chanda, two friends who get a dogsitting job so Beth can buy her mother a birthday present and Chanda can convince her parents that she’s responsible enough to get a pet cat. Naturally, things don’t go quite smoothly… I love this snapshot of a pre-teen friendship: they have so much fun together, and their friendship is strong enough to mend after they get into a big fight.

I also finished my Alex Beam journey with his first book, Gracefully Insane: Life and Death in America’s Premier Mental Hospital, which chock full of interesting anecdotes about the history of psychiatry. It focuses particularly on anything related to the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts (the last resort of Boston Brahmins in mental distress), although Beam ranges more widely at times, as in telling the tale of Freud’s disciple Dr. Horace Frink, who also became Freud’s patient, which resulted in a spectacularly botched psychoanalysis.

Frink had fallen in love with one of his own patients, a wealthy married woman named Angie Bijur. Frink himself was also married, but Freud nonetheless encouraged the pair to leave their respective spouses, marry each other, and then give a large amount of money to Freud, as he explains in this arrestingly bizarre letter to Frink (Freud, you understand, had diagnosed Frink with unconscious homosexuality): “Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right [that is, if Frink and Mrs. Bijur marry] let us change the imaginary gift into a real contribution to the psychoanalytic fund.”

What I’m Reading Now

After MUCH TRAVAIL I figured out how to play audiobooks on Overdrive through my iPod, so now I’m listening to Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer, which the library CRUELLY refused to buy as a regular ebook. Mrs. Pollifax’s friend Kedi has just been ATTACKED IN THE PALACE GARDEN!

I’ve also begun Sylvia Townshend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a book about nuns in the Middle Ages. The Black Death has just passed and now the remaining peasants want better wages for their labor! THE AUDACITY.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been organizing my book tag and stumbled on a recommendation for another nun book, Gail Godwin’s Unfinished Desires. Has anyone read this? How did you feel about it?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’m barreling along with the 1990s portion of the Newbery Honor project, and this week I read one I really liked! Russell Freedman’s The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane does what it says on the tin in an engaging, informative style. The descriptions of the Wright brothers’ autumns on Kittyhawk as they tested their airplane designs particularly appealed to me - not the driving winds and the infinite sand, but the long happy days utterly focused on their absorbing airplane invention hobby.

Walter Dean Myers’ Somewhere in the Darkness I didn’t find as appealing (Myers’ characters always seem strangely affectless to me), but at least it was short.

After my vaccination I was feeling kind of out of it and therefore in need of something light, so I read the next Mrs. Pollifax book, Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief. This is in fact so light that it’s already slipping out of my head, but it was exactly the level of engagement that I needed at the time.

What I’m Reading Now

Still in the thick of Murderbot! I finished Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy before post-vaccination lethargy made me set Network Effect aside briefly... and then I realized that Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is due in three days, so I'd better read it now if I want to read it. But I WILL return to Murderbot, and am saving my thoughts for a Murderbot post.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job even more than I expected. It’s about a woman who keeps taking different jobs looking for something that is easy, only to accidentally grow deeply invested in each one. The second section (the book has five sections, one per job) has a slight whiff of the supernatural about it, which I was not expecting and found an immensely enjoyable surprise.

What I Plan to Read Next

Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility!

I have a bunch of New Year related posts to deal with over the next few days, so I’m going to get this week’s Wednesday Reading Meme out of the way today, even though it is but a Tuesday.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished up my Christmas reading with Mary Kelly’s The Christmas Egg, a pleasantly forgettable detective novel from 1958 with enjoyable Russian elements. The Christmas egg in question is Faberge, stolen from an exiled princess who fled the Russian Revolution and had been living ever since in a squalid apartment in London with a trunk full of treasures under her bed.

I also finished Gene Stratton Porter’s Freckles, which, like many Stratton Porter books, is a trip and a half. Freckles falls madly in love with a girl he nicknames the Swamp Angel; there is one point where one of her footprints hardens in the mud and Freckles goes back later that night to kiss the footprint, which is one of the most extra things I’ve ever read and I love it so much I may steal it.

( Spoilers )

I am also delighted to inform you that the library has at last plugged the gap in its Mrs. Pollifax collection, so at long last I read Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle. I am grudgingly - very grudgingly! - coming around on Mrs. Pollifax’s new husband Cyrus; I suppose after another book or two I will be so used to him that it will be like he’s always been there.

And finally, at long last I’ve finished M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time, which I started *mumblecough* a while ago. In the late 1920s through the early 1930s, Blanchet and her five (!) children spent their summers exploring the coast of British Columbia in a 25-foot boat. Even after reading the whole Swallows and Amazons series, I know so little about sailing that I often found myself confused while reading this book, but the idea of these maritime summers continues to enchant me.

What I’m Reading Now

I have begun Gordon Corera’s Secret Pigeon Service: Operation Columba, Resistance and the Struggle to Liberate Europe, which I think is going to be a delicious treat. I’ve neglected World War II for a while (World War II was my first historical love) and it feels lovely to be getting back to it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been contemplating what worked best in my reading in 2020, and also what I want out of my reading life in 2021, and came to two seemingly contradictory conclusions: what worked best in 2020 was finally reading books by authors I’ve meant to read for ages (Donna Tartt, James Baldwin, Mary Renault, etc.), and what I want in 2021 is more spontaneity in my reading life.

But actually I don’t think it’s that contradictory; I’d meant to read those authors for quite some time, but the actual decision that the time was now was taken more or less on a whim. I think I need to attend more to what I want to read at this moment, and trust that the time will come for any book I really need to read.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

If ladyherenya hadn’t posted about it, I probably never would have heard about Jill Paton Walsh’s Fireweed, and that would have been a great pity. The children’s book centers on two teenagers who end up living on the streets during the early days of the Blitz in London - or rather, living on the streets during the day and in the bomb shelters by night, because the Blitz somewhat ironically has made it much easier to be homeless.

This book is more serious than The Boxcar Children, but it’s got a similar kids-on-their-own feeling, with prose that is simultaneously lyrical and transparent. The narrator is telling the story years later, which gives the story an “Et in arcadia ego” feeling, the sense of the narrator looking back on a golden past that he realizes was not really golden (bombs dropping from the sky, and so forth) and yet remembers with great fondness.

We saw London getting knocked apart. We knew where there was ruin, and we knew that it wasn’t all in the papers. We saw a lot of terrible things. But the strangest thing, in a way, was the way things were the same. It sounds silly to say that the oddest thing was that the leaves turned gold and fell off while Hitler’s bombers filled the sky; of course they would, and they did. But in all that disruption, in the midst of so much destruction, when everyone’s life was changed and we were alone, standing on our own feet for the first time, looking after ourselves, familiar things seemed as exotic and unlikely as hothouse flowers.

I continued my James Baldwin journey with Go Tell It on the Mountain, a semi-autobiographical novel that draws on Baldwin’s time as a youth preacher. The story is set, steeped really, in the traditions of a Black church in Harlem, which is both the characters’ savior and their tormentor, which provides them with a strait and narrow path through the grim circumstances of their lives and yet tortures them with the torments of hell when they slip and stray..

I realize that this makes the book sound absolutely grim, and that’s not inaccurate, but it’s written with such clarity and truthfulness that it has a certain raw horrifying beauty. In this quality it reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s work, even though in many ways the two authors are quite different; but both of them look at the dark side of the human soul without flinching.

She found herself fascinated by the gun in his holster, the club at his side. She wanted to take that pistol and empty it into his round, red face; to take that club and strike with all her strength against the base of his skull where his cap ended, until the ugly, silky, white man’s hair was matted with blood and brains.

On a much lighter note, I read Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, the memoir which inspired the TV show The Durrells in Corfu, about an English family living on the Greek island of Corfu in the late 1930s. In terms of specific incidents, there’s actually not a lot of overlap between the book and the show, but they share very much the same feeling and atmosphere: the eccentric family having madcap adventures, featuring animals collected by young Gerry and exasperated epigrams by his older brother Larry, an aspiring writer.

And I read Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha, which is jolly good fun, as Mrs. Pollifax books generally are. This one features a cameo from a sidekick in a previous book, plus of course Mrs. Pollifax’s new husband (technically her name is now Mrs. Reed-Pollifax, although the narration still calls her Mrs. Pollifax, presumably so as not to confuse us), to whose existence I am becoming resigned.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, which tells Penelope’s story both before and after the Odyssey (it begins, in fact, when Penelope is already dead, a shade looking back at her life, and Atwood’s glimpses of life in the Greek underworld are darkly comic), interwoven with a Greek chorus of the twelve maids who Odysseus kills at the end of the Odyssey for dallying with the suitors. I’m not very far in, but so far I’m really enjoying it.

What I Plan to Read Next

My forward motion in the Mrs. Pollifax series has been tragically arrested by the fact that the library doesn’t have the next three titles (Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle, Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish, and Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief). Alas! I intend to request that the library purchase them as soon as possible, but unfortunately the library’s purchase request form is down right now on account of the pandemic, so who knows when THAT will be?

In brighter news, I’ve discovered that the 1971 adaptation Mrs. Pollifax - Spy stars Rosalind Russell, so that may very well be worth watching.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Judith Flanders’ The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London, which I’ve been dipping in and out of for months. It’s the sort of book that rewards that kind of reading; there’s not really a storyline as such, so you’re not going to lose the thread if you go slowly, and there are fascinating tidbits of information on every page. An amazing resource if you want to learn more about life in Victorian London. (Some of the information is clearly London-specific, but Flanders’ overarching thesis - that the city streets in the nineteenth century were a much livelier social space than they are today - jibes with descriptions I’ve read of other nineteenth century cities, in America as well as England.)

Conveniently, another history book that I read this week provides an echo of this fact: Margaret Creighton’s The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World’s Fair is a solid but not spectacular history of the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York, which buttresses Flanders’ assertion that large crowds would turn out to watch just about anything with its description of the crowds that came to watch the Milburn House, where President McKinley convalesced after being shot. They couldn’t even get near the house - the police cordoned off the whole block so McKinley could have quiet to rest - but people still turned out, even though there was nothing to see but the policemen patrolling the block and maybe a far-distant view of the roof.

The Buffalo fair was called the Rainbow Fair because, in contrast to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (called the White City for its dazzling white buildings), it painted its Spanish Mission-inspired buildings in many colors. It also, in a bold but perhaps misguided move, decided to focus solely on the Western Hemisphere: it only had pavilions from North and South America, not Europe. Unfortunately, Americans then (much like American now) were much more interested in Paris than, for instance, Buenos Aires, which perhaps partially accounted for the low attendance numbers: the fair didn’t make back its initial investment. (Although of course, President McKinley’s assassination may have slowed business, too.)

Onward in the Newbery Honor project: I read Patricia Reilly Giff’s Pictures of Hollis Woods, which perhaps suffered because it reminded me of a book I really didn’t like, Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s The Language of Flowers. Both books center around a girl in foster care; both are told in alternating chapters, half the chapters set Now and the other half set Sometime Before Now, when our heroine tragically messed up the only foster placement that made her feel like she really had a home, a fact to which she keeps alluding but does not explain for most of the book.

Because of this association, I kept expecting Hollis Woods to reveal that she, like the heroine in Language of Flowers, is really kind of a psychopath, but that’s entirely on me and not the book at all; if Hollis has any problems as a character, it’s the fact that the book keeps telling us she’s trouble but never actually shows her… being troublesome. Even the part where she sort of kidnaps her foster mother is really an altruistic act: her foster mother clearly has dementia or something of that nature, and Hollis is afraid that the foster care system will separate them and perhaps put her foster mother in some sort of institution.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST (I read a lot of books this week), I read Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax on Safari, a solid entrant in the Mrs. Pollifax series, a soothing balm of exotic espionage during these troubled times. I was a little sorry that it seems Mrs. Pollifax is going to marry not!Farrell, but I daresay her paramour will grow on me eventually, even though their emotional connection didn’t grow like a tender vine while they spend ten days trapped together in a prison cell in Albania.

What I’m Reading Now

Sarah Orne Jewett knows what I like, and what I like is HERMITS. Earlier this week, the narrator visited her landlady’s mother, an older woman in her eighties who lives on an idyllic island off the coast of Maine - with her son, though, and they always welcome visitors, so they are really only semi-hermits.

Then Jewett followed this up with the tale of Joanna, who was Crossed in Love (jilted, in fact, right before her wedding day) and thereafter resettled on small, storm-tossed Shellheap Island, on which boats can only land if the tide and the winds happen to align. Now that shows true commitment to hermithood.

What I Plan to Read Next

A friend of mine is sending me a book care package from Caveat Emptor, so I shall have many mystery books, both in the sense that I don’t know what they’ll be, and in the sense that some of them should be mystery novels.

Caveat Emptor is a Bloomington institution, which was looking down the barrel of defaulting on its May rent because of the pandemic; I was going to include a link to the book care packages, but the Bloomington book community responded with such fervor to the threat of the bookstore's death that they now have too many orders to fill! So they've temporarily shut down that deal while they catch up. A story with a happy ending!