A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Elizabeth Enright’s Then There Were Five. That’s right, the Melendys are back! This time, they befriend a local boy with no friends or relations except his horrible uncle, and the Melendy children take him home and ask “Can we keep him???” They gather scrap metal for the war effort, plan a festival (children in books always throw the most satisfying festivals), and put up a truly astonishing amount of tomatoes.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward and upward in Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle! The blurb on the front of this novel praises it as “suspenseful,” which is fascinating because that’s probably the last adjective I’d use to describe it. Absorbing, yes. Full of meticulous portraits of a dizzying array of people, yes. We meet a deeply religious prisoner, a soft-hearted prison guard, Stalin, a prisoner who still believes fanatically in Communism, a prisoner’s wife whose devotion to her husband is cracking under the strain of separation, her friend in their grad student dorm who is trying to wriggle free of being recruited as an informer…

But suspenseful? I wouldn’t call it suspenseful. We’re halfway through the book and we’ve just now meandered back to Volodin, the guy who telephoned the American embassy on Christmas Eve to warn them that the Soviets are planning to steal their atomic bomb secrets. We are not urgently searching for Volodin (well, maybe the fanatically Communist prisoner Rubin is urgently searching for Volodin), we are gently bobbing around in a pool and occasionally bobbing a bit extra hard when we come across one of the ripples caused when Volodin tossed his pebble.

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National Velvet!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, in which Romney tracks down many of the books Jane Austen admired (often as ebooks, which I must admit takes much of the romance out of the rare book hunt) and discovers many lost gems of literary excellence. (And also Hannah More, whom she did not take to.) An engrossing read.

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job. Like all of D. E. Stevenson’s novels, this is cozy like sitting curled up in an armchair by the fire with a cup of cocoa while a thunderstorm beats against the window in the night. It’s not that she’s writing in a world where bad things don’t happen, or even where bad things don’t happen to our heroes, but by the end of the book it will all turn out right.

Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, edited by Mikail Iossel and Jeff Parker. An essay collection published not long after 9/11, although only a few of the essays actually touch on that event. Many of them include potshots at American political correctness (hard to embrace the concept if you come from the country where you could literally be sent to a gulag for “political incorrectness”), as well as lists of American books the authors read at a formative age.

I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t read this before Honeytrap, as the book might have been delayed indefinitely while I tried to work my way through the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, as well as some other authors I’ve never even heard of. With truth the author of this essay notes “the average Soviet person probably knew [American science fiction] better than the average American.”

What I’m Reading Now

My next Unread Book Club book, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Sadly suspicious that none of these characters are ever going to make it to the lighthouse.

What I Plan to Read Next

Does my lightning zoom through Jane Austen’s Bookshelf mean that I will at last read an eighteenth century novel? MAYBE. The library boasts Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. Any recommendations among those works?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

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

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

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

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

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

What I’m Reading Now

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

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

What I Plan to Read Next

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

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Braxton Irvine published The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient in 2019, but nonetheless it seems tailor-made for 2020, the year that pulls the rug out from under your feet again and again.

The book is about how to deal with unexpected setbacks: view them as a challenge, he suggests; this is of course much easier to do with smaller setbacks, although the ancient Roman stoics were famous for applying it in situations like “exile” and “being ordered to commit suicide by the Senate.” It’s also about how to appreciate what you have: imagine what it would be like not to have it, and, well, lucky us! in 2020, you don’t even need to exercise your imagination on this one. If there’s one thing Americans have all experienced this year, it’s suddenly not having things we always expected to have. Movie theaters, restaurants, food and toilet paper on the grocery shelves, being able to see people’s faces, the expectation of a peaceful transition of power after the election in November…

It’s all unpleasant, of course, but I remind myself that historically speaking, we are really only paddling in the shallows of just how bad things can get, as evidenced (in this week's reading) by Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, which has a whole section on his maternal grandparents’ experiences escaping the Holocaust as Lithuanian Jews.

I actually got the book because I was interested in Halberstadt’s experience growing up gay in the Soviet Union. But in actual fact his family left the USSR when he was still a child, so there’s not too much for him to say about it; the most interesting tidbit is that he had his first sexual awakening looking at the illustrations in the textbook Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, a sort of Soviet martyrology of young people dying heroic, gruesome, patriotic deaths. (I imagined this sexually awakened MANY Soviet youths, of all sexual orientations.)

I also learned from this book that in Russian, chanterelles are lisichki, little foxes, which would have been ADORABLE in Honeytrap, oh my God.

Maybe I should stop reading about the Soviet Union for a bit. I seem to have this “that would have been AMAZING to include in Honeytrap” reaction to at least one tidbit from every book.

What I’m Reading Now

Continuing on in Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun. I’m enjoying the worldbuilding, particularly the imaginary Victorian theology of the fae (do they have souls or don’t they?), but boy, it would’ve been nice if the incest had been mentioned a little bit in the blurb. I suppose whoever wrote it must have thought comparing the book to Crimson Peak counted as due diligence?

I’m also working on Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer and of course Mary Renault’s The Charioteer, but I’m going to write full reviews for both of them once I’m done, so I won’t take up space talking about them here. (Oh, well, fine, for the Charioteer contingent, I will mention that I got to the part ( Spoilers ))

Another quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope:

The true believers were not only sure of their own triumph, they also thought they were bringing happiness to the rest of mankind as well, and their view of the world had such a sweeping, unitary quality that it was very seductive. In the pre-revolutionary era there had already been this craving for an all-embracing idea which would explain everything in the world and bring about universal harmony in one go. That is why people so willingly closed their eyes and followed their leader, not allowing themselves to compare words to deeds, or to weigh the consequences of their action. This explained the progressive loss of a sense of reality - which had to be regained before there could be any question of discovering what had been wrong with the theory in the first place.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve had Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona (called David Balfour in the United States; the lesser-known sequel to Kidnapped!) lying around for weeks and I really ought to just read it.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. At some point I’ll read The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, but first I need some emotional recovery time. (She also has a book called Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II. Had I known it existed, I could have used the material to make Gennady’s childhood even more heartbreaking, so possibly it’s just as well for everyone that I didn’t.)

I also got back in the saddle with Newbery Honor books with Jane Leslie Conly’s Crazy Lady!, which I thought was going to be a story about a misunderstood zany neighbor, but in fact turned out to be a story about junior high student Veronon’s wildly alcoholic neighbor, Maxine. Maxine tries to control her drinking in order to care for her disabled son Ronald, whom she loves deeply, but neither her love for her son nor the support of her neighbors (one of whom takes Ronald in for two weeks while Maxine is in jail on drunk and disorderly charges) are enough. In the end, she sends Ronald away to live with a kindly aunt and uncle.

It’s a well-written and well-observed book, but bleak - bleak - bleak; the tragedy of watching someone try as hard as they can, and fail.

Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Shameless: A Sexual Reformation is an argument against American Evangelical Christian beliefs about sexual purity: purity rings and pledges not to even kiss until one’s wedding day and so on and so forth. Eh, it’s fine. There’s nothing particularly new here, and also nothing that seems likely to convince a reader who isn’t already on board with the book’s basic message.

What I’m Reading Now

Keeping on keeping on with Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope. Another quote:

What we wanted was for the course of history to be made smooth, all the ruts and potholes to be removed, so there should never again be any unforeseen events and everything should flow along evenly and according to plan. This longing prepared us, psychologically, for the appearance of the Wise Leaders who would tell us where we were going. And once they were there, we no longer ventured to act without their guidance and looked to them for direct instructions and foolproof prescriptions.

Food for thought in a time when many of us (myself very much included) would like nothing more than for the course of history to be made smooth.

What I Plan to Read Next

DID YOU KNOW that there’s a new American Girl? She is a 1980s girl and I suspect her books are horrible because all the books have been horrible since American Girl got too cheap to pay for illustrations… but I’ll probably read them anyway because I have an American Girl problem.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

As a birthday present to myself I read Elizabeth Wein’s White Eagles, a short novel about a young woman flying with the Polish army at the beginning of World War II. If you know anything about the invasion of Poland, you’ll be able to guess that this has some dark moments, but overall it’s about our heroine flying away from Poland (with a stowaway!) so the grimness-to-adventure ratio ultimately tilts toward adventure.

As a further birthday present to myself (White Eagles is QUITE short), I read Francesca Forrest’s new short story Duplication, which takes place in a world a little slantwise from ours: sometimes people, especially children, will duplicate for a few hours, a day or two at most, so that there are two of the same person running around for a while till they merge back into one.

The story is concerned with the everyday experience of a mother whose daughter suddenly becomes two daughters, and the philosophical question - although with a certain lived urgency that philosophical questions often lack - of what it means for one person to become two. To what extent are the duplicates two separate entities? What does it mean - what is lost - what the duplicates merge back into one?

I also finished Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, which I read because I enjoyed the miniseries adaptation so much. (Well, enjoyed seems like the wrong word for such a bleak story, but you know what I mean.) It turns out that the adaptation was extraordinarily faithful, to the point that Grace tells her story in the exact words she uses in the book (I often had the eerie sense of hearing the words in the actress’s voice as I read), which, well, if you’ve got Margaret Atwood’s words at your disposal, why wouldn’t you?

The main difference is that the book includes a subplot in which Dr. Jordan, the doctor interviewing Grace Marks to try to prove her innocence, becomes sexually entangled with his landlady. In general I found Dr. Jordan’s POV unpleasant to read: he has such an instrumental view of people, always with an eye for how they can be of service to him (sexually, for women, and in his career, for men), and few signs of actual affection for anyone. Thus, the book induces an even stronger feeling of “WHY ARE MEN” than the miniseries, which also didn’t skimp in this regard.

What I’m Reading Now

I finished part one of Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, and I’m taking a break before I read part two because it’s such a dense, intensely emotional book.

Thus, I’m treating myself to Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha. Following series order, I should have read Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station, but the ebook was checked out and I figured, “There’s not super a lot of continuity in this series, it will be fine if I skip it for now!”

Reader, it turns out that Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha builds heavily on Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station. So I’m kicking myself, although honestly it doesn’t matter all that much: the books are clearly interrelated, but not so much that I’m finding anything in Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha hard to follow. Anyway one doesn’t read the Mrs. Pollifax books expecting surprises, but because it’s such a pleasure to spend time with Mrs. Pollifax and whoever she has befriended in the course of this book’s spying mission.

A quote I noted down, as exemplary of Mrs. Pollifax’s character: “Mrs. Pollifax measured intelligence by curiosity, rueing people who never asked questions, never asked why, or what happened next or how.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I intend to continue my Margaret Atwood journey with The Penelopiad, but before that, I really MUST attend to this stack of library books that has been moldering patiently on my bookshelf. (I’ve been clinging to them in the superstitious sense that we might go back on lockdown at any time, but I am coming to the conclusion that this would be MUCH too sensible for the government to ever actually do it.) First up: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Francesca Forrest’s The Gown of Harmonies is actually a reread - I first read it in 2018 in the anthology It Happened at the Ball - but it seemed like a good time for a light-hearted reread, the story of a blind seamstress who sews the titular gown of harmonies, which harmonizes with the music at the ball.

I love the way that this story engages all the senses - particularly hearing, of course, but also the sense of smell, like this quote, which combines the two (and actually the sense of touch, as well - that inaudible hum): “The inaudible hum of magic was in the air, the scent of it, almost like pepper…”

Obviously I’ve never smelled magic, but I love the idea that it smells like pepper: bright and startling and delicious, and a little bit dangerous, too.

On the not-light-at-all side, I finished Svetlana Aleksievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, which has been an oddly comforting companion to the current disaster? It’s just nice to reflect that, while things aren’t going great for us humans right now, at least this time around we haven’t poisoned the actual ground (not to mention the dogs, the cats, the cabbages, etc…) - the people that Aleksievich interviews mention over and over the strangeness of being told to bulldoze cabbages that looks perfectly healthy, unusually beautiful in fact, but are actually practically pulsing with radiation.

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I’ve finally started Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall! Which is actually the second book I’ve read that’s set in an academic reenactment of life in Iron Age Britain. Is this just something that British people do occasionally, like Morris dancing?

Anyway, Voices from Chernobyl took up my Serious Reading brain for this week, so I didn’t make it terribly far in this, but I’ve had it on my stack for so long that I feel pleased to have begun.

What I Plan to Read Next

Who even knows? I’m a will-o-the-wisp in the wind these days.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Anna Larina’s This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow. Larina was not only Bukharin’s widow, but the adopted daughter of an old Bolshevik, Yury Larin, so she grew up knowing a who’s who of the old Bolsheviks. Naturally most of her anecdotes about them are personal rather than political, but in a way that makes it more sobering: it really drives home the extent to which the Bolsheviks all knew each other. Imagine if your friend group took over a country, and then one of the friends insidiously turned the group’s faultlines into unbridgeable chasms and then, once he had consolidated his own position, started accusing the others of ludicrous plots and killed them off in elaborate show trials.

What I’m Reading Now

Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles, a 1922 Newbery Honor winner which retells the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, with shorter retellings of Greek myths sprinkled throughout. It’s just a straight-up retelling - no twist like “They’re all in spaaaaaace!” or whatever, just good old-fashioned ancient Greece. It’s been so long since I read a retelling of that kind that it’s actually kind of refreshing, just for variety's sake.

I’ve also begun to read Richard Rubin’s Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count, which is a… travelogue about modern memory of the Great War? I’m only one chapter in, so I offer this description rather tentatively: the first chapter is a lot more travelogue than it is anything else, but hopefully the memory stuff will rise to the surface later.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have MANY books on my pile right now, and I need to read some of them, and instead I… well, I’ve been working on revisions, so I have at least been neglecting my books to some purpose, but still. The pile just keeps growing. I should at least try to knock out Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall: it’s so short, and IIRC it was recommended to me as Dark Academia, which I love.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

These days I rarely pick up books that I haven’t heard of, but I was so charmed by the cover of Dylan Meconis’s graphic novel Queen of the Sea that I couldn’t resist it, and it turned out to be delightful. It has nuns who live on a small rocky island and care for shipwrecked sailors, a queen deposed by her vengeful sister, a loyal courtier who kneels to his liege-lady even though it could mean death if he is lost, and also beautiful illustrations. What more could you want from a book? Meditations on the meaning of rulership? A selkie story retelling? It has that too. (No actual selkies, though. Did not want to mislead you on this important point.)\

I also read Elena Dmitrievna Polenova’s Why the Bear Has No Tail and Other Russian Folk Tales, which Polenova’s friend Netta Peacock prepared for publication in England after Polenova’s death in 1898… and then for some reason it was not published. (It was too early for the Revolution or even World War I to interfere, so it’s not clear what happened.) But then Peacock’s descendents found the manuscript, and it was published in 2014.

The story of this circuitous publication stuck in my mind far more than the stories - there’s something about the cooperation across continents and also centuries that got me.

And I zoomed through Rainbow Rowell’s Pumpkinheads, which was adorable, both in its cute love story and also in the sheer autumnal exuberance of its illustrations: the story is set at the Pumpkin Patch, which is not so much a pumpkin patch as a rustic autumn theme park where Deja and Josiah have worked for the last three years.

What I’m Reading Now

William Dean Howells mentioned Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield as one of his favorite books as a child, so of course I had to give it a try. I’ve been enjoying it so far, insofar as one enjoys a book about a man suffering every ill that flesh is heir to, although during my own childhood I would not have understood it at all. Of course, I’m much farther away from it in time than Howells was, which may account for it.

I’ve also been reading Guy R. Hasegawa’s Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs, which I was hoping would have a bit more about the experience of wearing a Civil War era prosthesis, but as the title suggests it really does focus mostly on the artificial limb supply programs.

The Confederate program was called ARMS, which is especially funny because the Confederate program did not, in fact, supply any artificial arms. All the artificial limb firms before the war were based in the North, and while Confederate manufacturers managed to make decent legs, they never made acceptable arms, partly because they’re more mechanically complicated than legs but also because by the time the Confederates got around to having a limb program (1864) the Confederacy were already running out of just about everything.

What I Plan to Read Next

My ebook hold on Always and Forever, Lara Jean finally came in! Here’s hoping for a couple of slow days at the library: I want to devour the book.

“America is not the first night of a new play, and we are not theater critics. We transmit to paper our impressions about that country and our thoughts about it.

“What can be said about America, which simultaneously horrifies, delights, calls forth pity, and sets examples worthy of emulation, about a land which is rich, poor, talented, and ungifted?”

Ilf and Petrov write about America and the American character at some length in Little Golden America. They have, as the above quote suggests, quite mixed feelings - probably inevitably, as America was and is a place of very mixed character.

On the one hand, they have some complaints. They’re particularly annoyed by American advertising and publicity, and this in the broader sense includes American movies, which they see as propaganda by the rich studios. “The cultured American does not recognize his native motion pictures as an art. More than that, he will tell you that the American motion picture is a moral epidemic, no less harmful and dangerous than scarlet fever or the plague,” they explain.

Or, as a fellow who worked in the motion picture industry told them: “American motion pictures are perhaps the only industry into which capitalists have come not for profit alone. It is no accident that we make idiotic films. We are told to make them. They are made on purpose. Hollywood systematically stuffs the heads of Americas, befogs them with its films. Not one serious problem of life will be touched in a Hollywood film - I’ll guarantee you that. Our bosses will not allow it. This work of many years has already yielded a frightful harvest. American spectators have completely unlearned how to think.”

(This is of course a case of the pot calling the kettle black - the Soviet film industry had to toe the Communist Party line, after all - but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a point.)

In Ilf & Petrov’s view, Americans were much too susceptible to this sort of thing. “The average American, despite his outward show of activity, is really a passive person by nature. He must have everything presented to him in finished form, like a spoiled husband. Tell him which drink is best, and he will drink it. Tell him which political party suits him best, and he will vote for it. Tell him which god is the true god, and he will worship him.”

There’s an interesting bit, which unfortunately I didn’t copy, where they discuss the church in America in the context of advertising: someone comments enviously, I don’t have the exact quote, but it’s something like “God has the best publicity in America. They sing his praises at 20 million pulpits every Sunday.”

They’re also baffled by the American habit of smiling all the time and amused by the American obsession with health, a pair of twin habits that they finally synthesize in this passage that ties the two together: “It is better to laugh than to weep. So, he laughs. No doubt, in the past he forced himself to laugh, just as he forced himself to sleep with windows open, to indulge in gymnastics, and to brush his teeth. Subsequently these things became daily habits. And now laughter rattles in his throat, irrespective of his circumstances or his wishes. If you see a laughing American, it does not mean that something strikes him as comical. He laughs only because an American must laugh.”

But, on the other hand, there are a number of American habits that they admire. This comes up a number of times throughout the book - they’re very impressed by the way that Americans will stop to help stranded motorists, for instance - but there’s a passage in the conclusion that sums up what they consider best about the American character.

“Should an American say in the course of a conversation, even incidentally, ‘I’ll do that,’ it is not necessary to remind him of anything at all in the future. Everything will be done. The ability to keep his word, to keep it firmly, accurately, to burst, but keep his word - this is the most important thing which our Soviet business people must learn from American business people.

“We wrote about American democracy, which in fact does not give man freedom and only masks the exploitation of man by man. But in American life there is a phenomenon which should interest us no less than a new machine model. That phenomenon is democracy in intercourse between people, albeit that democracy, too, covers social inequality and is a purely outward form. The outward forms of such a democratism are splendid. They help a lot in work, deliver a blow to bureaucratism, and enhance human dignity.”