A Certain Slant of Light

I’m leaving for my trip to Massachusetts tomorrow! So I’m posting my Wednesday Reading Meme today to sweep the decks clean before I go.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I finished Mary Stewart’s The Last Enchantment, the final book of the original Merlin trilogy, although Stewart went ahead and published a fourth book a few years later. The Last Enchantment nonetheless feels like a conclusion - I’d be certainly very surprised if Merlin narrates the next book - for it takes us through the end of Merlin’s story, and indeed beyond the usual end: he’s buried alive in his crystal cave, as is his usual end, but here he’s rescued and at the end of the book is living in retirement, an old man tired yet content, frequently visited by the king.

We were particularly interested in the book’s ambiguous treatment of Nimue. Is she truly in love with Merlin? Pretending to love him to steal his power? Not stealing his power at all, but learning all his skills so she can take up his mantel as Arthur’s sorcerer, just as Merlin bade her?

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the third book in the Regeneration trilogy, alternates between Billy Prior, who is headed back to the front now that he’s been released from Craiglockhart, and his counselor Rivers, who spends most of the book ill to the point of delirium, recollecting his fieldwork among the headhunters of Melanesia. The colonial rulers of Melanesia had forbidden headhunting, and because their entire culture had been organized around the headhunt, they were basically pining away in despair.

Rivers doesn’t draw a direct parallel, but there’s clearly a meditation here about war as a bearer of cultural meaning - whose cultural meaning is perhaps divorced from anything that a reasonable person might consider a “war aim.” The point of the headhunt is the headhunt. It’s not meant to win territory or settle a point of politics by other means or Defeat Autocracy; the point is to take heads. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

( Spoilers )

Nghi Vo’s When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is a sequel to The Empress of Salt and Fortune, also featuring a cleric who travels the countryside collecting knowledge/stories, also very concerned with how stories change depending who tell them. In this case, Chih is telling the story of a human-tiger romance to a trio of tigers who may eat them… or might leave Chih alive to go home and correct the record with what the tigers consider the real version, although they are grumpily aware that Chih will probably just put it down as a competing version, equal in weight with the clearly incorrect human story!

Finally, there’s a new Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel out! Jessi’s Secret Language is one that I read as a kid (in general I read all the Very Special Episode books about disabilities), and it was fun to revisit it now, especially because I’ve actually seen a production of Coppelia, the ballet that Jessi stars in. In fact, I think my desire to see that ballet stems from this book! (Almost all my other ballet feelings come from Princess Tutu. Someday I WILL see Swan Lake and Giselle.)

What I’m Reading Now

In Dracula, Dracula has end-run our heroes! They have now split up to chase him, one team by land and one by waterway… Will they be able to kill him before he reaches his castle stronghold??

What I Plan to Read Next

To my distress, I have discovered that I weeded Jane Langton’s The Diamond in the Window from my collection! So I’ll only be taking The Fledgling and the recently-acquired The Astonishing Stereoscope to Massachusetts with me.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This week’s Wednesday Reading Meme brought to you by littlerhymes! We have finished Mary Stewart’s The Hollow Hills! I enjoyed it more than The Crystal Cave: Merlin spends way less time getting kicked in the face by life, and everything bucks up once young Arthur appears on the scene. Love his friend Bedwyr with his little crush on Arthur! (You really don’t see much of Bedwyr in most recent adaptations. Is it because the name Bedwyr sounds goofy to modern ears?)

littlerhymes also sent me Christine Pullein-Thompson’s Stolen Ponies, a pony book from the 1970s in which the five children set out to find out who is stealing the ponies on the moors… only for one of the children to get dreadfully lost, which takes up most of the rest of the book, until he stumbles on the pony thief by accident! The plotting is odd and meandering and the characterization not very sharp - especially for the ponies, who are interchangeable as bicycles.

What I’m Reading Now

littlerhymes and I have begun The Last Enchantments! We have concluded that the entire fall of Camelot could have been avoided if Merlin had kidnapped Mordred and had him raised by some kindly country squire, rather like Arthur himself. Alas there is no way to communicate this conclusion to Merlin himself, so unfortunately he’s still on a collision course to maybe attempting to drown a baby.

In The Wounded Name, Aymar has been reunited with his cousin/ladylove, whom he insists on not explaining the true reason for his disgrace, as it occurred in part because he thought she was in danger of being executed as a spy! I’m sure this will not backfire on him in any way.

Things have been pretty quiet on the Dracula front - the calm before the storm, of course - which has given me time to reflect that when I first read this in high school I thought it was a typical Victorian novel. Reading it now, with greater understanding of Victorian literature, I can see that while none of the details specifically are atypical, the sheer density of Stalwart Manhood is a lot even by Victorian standards.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been writing up a storm this month, which doesn’t leave much time for reading, so I’ve jettisoned my goal of clearing off my TBR shelf before I head to Massachusetts at the beginning of November. My new goal is to polish off the books I’ve got out from the library: Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Elizabeth Seeger’s The Pageant of Chinese History (last of the Newbery Honors for a while!), and Mary Renault’s North Face.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“Seems weird that we have this one random heterosexual in this book,” I said, eyeing Billy Prior doubtfully as I read Pat Barker’s Regeneration. Well, now I’ve read the sequel, The Eye in the Door, and it turns out Billy Prior is also as queer a nine-bob note, so balance has been restored to the universe.

Overall I feel that Billy Prior is not as compelling as Rivers or Sassoon or Wilfred Owen (who do have the incomparable advantage of being real people), and this book is therefore not quite as strong as the first - but maybe that’s an unfair thing to ask, anyway. My favorite character is Rivers: his cool, detached, analytical voice, even when he’s looking at his own emotions, not so much experiencing them as peering at them under a magnifying glass.

I loved the atmosphere of Elizabeth Brooks’ The Orphan of Salt Winds, which is set at the delicious gothic decaying house of Salt Winds, beside a treacherous marsh alongside the sea. But both of the dual timelines deflated at the end, which was a disappointment. ( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

D. K. Broster clearly just decided to throw ALL her favorite hurt/comfort tropes in The Wounded Name and I am HERE for it. Since I last posted, Laurent has been taken captive, only to discover that Aymar has also been taken captive, and Aymar is TERRIBLY WOUNDED! SoLaurent volunteers to share Aymar’s cell, because only constant nursing can save Aymar from death, and no one else will take it on because Aymar stands accused of betraying his own men!!!

Yes, you heard that right. The wounds to Aymar’s body are as nothing to the wounds in his HEART. Of course Laurent is convinced to the bottom of his soul that Aymar couldn’t possibly be guilty… but Doubts are beginning to creep in.

In Dracula, the men have FINALLY realized that leaving Mina out of the loop is a TERRIBLE idea, but TOO LATE, Dracula has already begun to feed on Mina! It’s fine, though, because that means that now Mina has a psychic connection to Dracula, which will surely help them track him down and stake him?

What I Plan to Read Next

At the beginning of November I’m going on a trip to Massachusetts, and I’m contemplating what to bring along for a little You Are Here reading! A reread of The Witch of Blackbird Pond perhaps? Maybe I should take another crack at Walden?

The trip encompasses a visit to Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, which is now a museum; I plan to at long last buy myself a copy. I KNOW, it’s shocking I don’t have one. Maybe I should also read a biography of LMA, or a critical analysis of her work, or something like that? Let me know if you have any recs.

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

Melody Warnick’s This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live, a self-help memoir of the little exercises that Warnick did to help herself feel more rooted in her local community. Most of these exercises are low-key, visit-a-local-attraction sort of things, which is useful from a self-help perspective (a small task is much more likely to get done) but not exciting as a memoir.

A while ago, evelyn_b sent me Helen Perry Curtis’s Jean and Company, Unlimited, a 1937 novel based loosely on Curtis’s travels through Europe with her daughters (here telescoped into one daughter, Jean). Curtis was a museum curator as well as a freelance writer (most of the chapters in this book were initially serialized in a magazine) who went to Europe to purchase folk costumes, so we get a LOT of folk costume detail, plus delicious food and fascinating historical tidbits. Absolutely charming. Now I want to go on a European tour too…

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun A Wizard of Earthsea! Attempting to impress his hated rival Jasper, Ged attempted a spell to summon the spirit of a dead person and accidentally also summoned a nameless shadow creature, which is now lurking somewhere in Earthsea waiting to possess Ged so as to use him as a puppet of evil. Well, Ged, maybe you should’ve just stayed with your first master Ogion instead of going to mage school, huh?

(Also relieved that I went into this knowing that Tehanu is going to unpack some of the patriarchal assumptions undergirding Earthsea, because WOW. “Weak as women’s magic, wicked as women’s magic,” huh? Strong words from a story about a boy who summoned a nameless horror from the deep!)

In Dracula, Lucy briefly regained her health… only to take a turn for the worse! Dr. Seward has summoned his mentor Van Helsing from the continent, but Van Helsing seems devastatingly averse to telling anyone what is actually wrong. VAN HELSING, MAYBE IF YOU WERE MORE FORTHCOMING IT MIGHT SAVE HER.

What I Plan to Read Next

Once I’m done with the Newbery Honor books of the 1970s (three left!!!) I’m going to devote myself to the books on my TBR shelf, with the intention of finishing them by November. Then on my Massachusetts trip I can splurge in the used bookstores guilt-free!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

In the days of my youth, my friend Emma recommended A Wizard of Earthsea to me, and I got a few chapters in and didn’t like it and promptly swore off Ursula Le Guin forever. However, the Newbery project forced me to give The Tombs of Atuan a try, and I am enraged to inform you that in fact Le Guin is just as good as everyone has been telling me for years.

Our heroine is Tenar, who at the age of six became high priestess of the Nameless Ones, and as such is called Arha, the Eaten One. (Eaten by the Nameless Ones, you understand.) She is mistress not only of the Tombs of Atuan, but over the Labyrinth, an endless tangle of complicated underground tunnels, and also over the Undertomb, a vast underground cavern where it is blasphemy to strike a light…

Until one day, Arha finds that a man has broken into the Undertomb: a wizard holding a shining staff which lights up the crystals on the walls. She chases him into the Labyrinth and locks the door behind him, so he will never get out, but die of hunger and thirst. Only Arha, fascinated by this intruder into the unvarying routine of her life, can’t resist bringing him water. Such has been the emotional aridness of her childhood that she frames this to herself as a way to torment him: she’ll tell him that the water is in a certain room, and sometimes it will be there and sometimes it won’t!

(After the first time, in fact, she always brings water when she says she will. Can’t miss a chance to ask him about the outside world, after all.)

The book does a fantastic job invoking Arha’s headspace, as well as the physical setting of the underground Undertomb and Labyrinth, these dark, winding, featureless halls that have to be navigated by counting doorways, where it is so easy to get lost. Just an incredibly vivid sense of the space.

What I’m Reading Now

Lina Rather’s Sisters of the Vast Black, recommended by oracne as Nuns! In! Space!!! You know how I am about nuns, so of course I had to give it a go. The nuns travel through space in a living spaceship, which currently yearns to mate with another ship, thus thrusting the nuns into the theological quandary of whether a spaceship that is also a nunnery can be allowed to breed.

In Dracula, Lucy Westenra grows wan and pale! Worse, Mina has been torn from Lucy's side, rushing across the continent to care for Jonathan Harker, leaving no one but Lucy’s ineffective mother to stand between Lucy and whatever mysterious creature keeps transforming into various red-eyed animals and calling her in the night. Doubtless this is not worrisome in the least.

What I Plan to Read Next

I guess I gotta read the rest of the Earthsea books.

Actually, I have a question about this: my impression is that everyone considers the first four top notch (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu), but I’ve heard less about the last two (Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind). Should I read all of them, or just the first four?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I have read MANY books this week, because my housemate tested positive for Covid, which means I also am stuck at home (currently I’m all right… just waiting to see what happens…) without much to do but read.

The Traveling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa, translated by Philip Gabriel, with an adorable cat illustration at the beginning of each chapter by Yoco Nagamiya. I picked this up on a whim because the cover enchanted me, and I’ve enjoyed a number of Japanese novels in translation (maybe I should have a tag for that?), and it did not disappoint. Our narrator, Nana, is a cat with a crooked tail shaped like a seven (whence comes his name), and the story tells of his travels with his owner Satoru. Satoru is looking for a new home for Nana, and on the way we not only take a tour through Japan, but through Satoru’s past as he visits old friends.

( Spoilers )

William Dean Howells’ The Flight of Pony Baker is a book for boys in the style of Tom Sawyer, and it draws so heavily on Howells’ memoir A Boy’s Town that one really only needs to read one of the two books. Personally I found The Flight of Pony Baker much weaker: the plotting is clunky, and Howells has pruned back a lot of the detail that made A Boy’s Town so fascinating.

Jessamyn West’s The Friendly Persuasion is a series of interlinked short stories about Jess and Eliza Birdwell and their brood, a Quaker family in southern Indiana during and after the Civil War. Earlier this year I happened to visit their neck of the woods (Clifty Falls and the town of Vernon) and it was thrilling to see these locales in fiction, although I expect that they’re much changed.

Mostly these are tales of incidents from ordinary life: the time that Jess brought home an organ (when Quakers aren’t supposed to have musical instruments), a daughter of the family getting her first crush, a son breaking with Quaker pacifism to join the Vernon militia to defend the town against Morgan’s Raiders (only for the Raiders to pass Vernon by)... Of course in some ways a raid, even one that never comes off, is a big break from ordinary life, but West writes it as an extension thereof. Ordinary life stretched out to its edges.

AND FINALLY, Katharine Hull & Pamela Whitlock’s Escape to Persia, sequel to The Far-Distant Oxus. As often happens with sequels, this is not quite as good as the first, although in this case the fall-off is very slight: none of the children’s adventures are as epic as their week-long trek to the sea in the first book, but they still have lots of fun. It’s easier perhaps to write a good sequel when the first book was episodic: all you have to do is come up with more fun episodes, not a whole new plot just as good as the first.

What I’m Reading Now

In Dracula Daily, Dracula has spent the last couple of weeks eating the crew of a ship one by one, as chronicled in the captain’s log. It builds up such dread to read this as it happens, and makes it so sad when the ship crashed at Whitby, with the heroic captain lashed to the helm, dead… the journalist writing up the incident hints darkly that perhaps the captain killed his crew, but fortunately the townsfolk know better and are planning a hero’s funeral.

What I Plan to Read Next

Through carefully laid plans to abuse my parents’ library privileges, I have cut the number of Newbery Honor books I will need to interlibrary loan down from seventy-two to a mere forty!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Joan G. Robinson’s Charley, also sometimes called The Girl Who Ran Away, an enchanting book about - well, a girl who runs away! Through a series of miscommunications, no one realizes that young Charley never arrived at the house of the relation with whom she was meant to spend a holiday. Instead Charley spends a week on her own, making a home for herself in an old hen house and beneath a chestnut tree, finding food and a source of water and wandering in a beautiful copse where she makes up adventures for herself and an imaginary animal companion, a beautiful fawn.

Highly recommended if you like books about runaway children, with lots of rich detail about finding food and water and just generally looking after themselves. Charley comes to the end of her resources a little more swiftly than the Boxcar Children, but she has a wonderful time while it lasts.

I also finished Frances Hodgson Burnett’s T. Tembarom! It 100% turned out just as I expected - this is not a book that you read for surprises - but there’s great pleasure in watching Burnett do a fairly realistic take on a melodramatic plot involving a wandering amnesiac, the unexpected inheritance of a vast English estate, a haughty society beauty, and a self-made fortune from an invention in which Burnett is so uninterested that she simply calls in “the invention.” What does it do? What industry is it used in? Who knows! Who cares! Burnett certainly doesn’t, and honestly it’s inspiring how she flings such trifles aside to focus on the culture clash between a New York street kid made good and the fascinated gentry who live in the county around the estate he just inherited.

And I read ND Stevenson’s Nimona, which I expected to love and ended up hating. I am just extremely over stories where the protagonist kills a bunch of redshirts, and the narrative treats this as a quirky and even adorable personality flaw (Nimona just gets kinda murdery out on heists sometimes! Lookit, she turns into a dragon to do it, so fun), and the protagonist’s friends give her a mild scolding and then continue to shower her with love and acceptance.

I also hate that this story seems completely unable to grasp that there is a difference between “persecuted for being a shapeshifter!” (insert allegory for minority of choice here) and “prosecuted for destroying a WHOLE CITY with MANY CASUALTIES!” and treats ANY attempt to stop Nimona from murdering again as an example of the first. The ONLY allowable method of stopping her is to shower her with love and acceptance until she decides maybe she wants to stop.

And of course the book expects us to root for Nimona and presents “Nimona roams free!” as a happy ending, when she’s just spent the whole book killing people and she’s clearly going to kill again as soon as she feels like it.

What I’m Reading Now

I really meant to keep going with Black Narcissus and Sensational but then my hold on Emily Henry’s Book Lovers came in and as there are 479 holds on it (sadly this is not an exaggeration) I thought that PERHAPS I ought to prioritize that. I’ve enjoyed all of Henry’s books but so far this is a strong contender for my new favorite. Love the protagonist, a literary agent so intense that her colleagues call her the Shark, love her relationship with her sister, tentatively loving her dynamic with the love interest but we’ll see how that develops over the book.

In Dracula, Jonathan Harker has crawled along a ledge outside Dracula’s castle to sneak into Dracula’s room and thereby discovered that the count sleeps in a coffin in the crypt! Fascinating information no doubt but I personally hope that Harker soon turns his attention to the life-or-death question of “How is he going to escape?”

What I Plan to Read Next

Have discovered that the library has David Sweetman’s biography of Mary Renault and I am contemplating whether to read it now or to wait until I’ve read all or at least almost all of Mary Renault’s books. (No one has anything nice to say about Funeral Games so I may… just… not read that one.)

What I’ve Finished Reading

Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Season of Ponies begins more strongly than it ends, alas. It’s hard to beat a set-up like “magical colorful ponies appear from the mist to befriend our lonely heroine,” but some of the later magical pony adventures are only related in summary (perhaps Snyder was coming up against the word count?), and there’s also a chapter inspired by Circe that seems to come out of left field. Nothing against sorceresses who turn men into pigs! They just seem like an odd fit with the magical ponies.

I also zoomed through Captain W. E. Johns’ Worrals on the War-path, in which Worrals and Frecks set up a temporary British airbase in the remote mountainous Cevennes region of France, which Worrals just happened to explore a few years before the war began! Through a series of difficulties, Worrals also ends up in the Camargue, a fascinating brine lagoon region. The action is excellent as always, and I REALLY enjoyed the landscape description in this one - so vivid and specific. I wonder if Johns had visited the Cevennes and the Camargue himself.

This is the last of the Worrals books currently available on fadedpage.com, but I live in hope there will be more. (TBH I think reading all ten in one go might have given me the literary equivalent of a stomach ache anyway, so perhaps it is just as well I have to pause here!)

I also finished Kassia St. Clair’s The Secret Lives of Color. I would have preferred a less bitty approach - the book is a collection of short essays about many, many colors, and IMO it would have been stronger if it dug deeper - but it is full of fascinating tidbits. For instance, apparently medieval artists considered the mixing of colors morally suspect. Who knew?

What I’m Reading Now

Many books in various stages of progress: Bruce Catton’s The Coming Fury, Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Bent Twig, William Bowen’s Philip and the Faun (astute readers may recall Bowen as the author of zany 1922 Newbery Honor winner The Old Tobacco Shop), Teresa Lust’s Pass the Polenta: And Other Writings from the Kitchen, and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s T. Tembarom, which I have just realized that I’ve been spelling incorrectly for weeks. It is Tembarom, with an M at the end.

Only the briefest of Dracula updates this week! Dr. Seward notes that one of the patients in his asylum is acting unusually odd. No news from Jonathan Harker, which is OMINOUS. Has Dracula discovered his hidden diary and taken it away from him?

What I Plan to Read Next

No plans to start anything new till I’ve wrapped up a few of the many books in progress!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I finished Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover, about which I had more mixed feelings than about The Haunting. It does many of the same things just as well as The Haunting: the family relationships (here, I particularly liked Laura’s relationship with her mother Kate), the uncanny magic. But it also has a romance that I can only describe as EXTREMELY 80s (the book was published in 1984), in which school prefect Sorenson backs our heroine Laura into a wall and fondles her breast and then they joke about whether this is sexual harrassment. I think in fact it is!

My theory is that Sorry (I also just can’t with this nickname) is trying to prove that, although he is a boy witch (which is quite rare; most witches are girls), he is a normal boy in OTHER ways. But for goodness sake, Sorry, couldn’t you overcompensate in a way that is NOT groping our heroine?

Edward Prime-Stevenson’s White Cockades confirmed my impression of Prime-Stevenson’s extremely moderate gifts as a writer of fiction. Prime-Stevenson wrote the book to be as slashy as possible (he later recommended it as a book with Uranian undertones in The Intersexes, a nonfiction book about what would eventually be called homosexuality, written under a different penname), and it’s got all the ingredients - the heroes are fascinated by each other at first meeting! And one gives the other a ring! And they swear “whither thou goest, I will go!” - but somehow it doesn’t achieve the depth of emotion of, say, Anne Shirley sobbing in the window seat because someday Diana will get married.

I also read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again, which to be honest I found so depressing that I struggled to finish it. This is the result of an unfortunate collision between the book’s proposed systemic changes to fix some of the reasons why many people are finding it increasingly hard to focus nowadays (very short version: web designers designed many websites to be addictive and distracting because it maximizes their profits), and my current low-key despair about the US ever getting it together to ever make any systemic changes. Or at least any good ones.

What I’m Reading Now

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s T. Tembaron has become my “book to read on my cell phone when I am in line,” which means that progress is slow but ALSO means that every time I am in line I am all “YES, it’s Tembaron time!!!”, which means the slow progress is worth it.

Tembaron has acquired a friend with amnesia AND ALSO inherited a fortune! (Likelihood that the friend with amnesia is actually the lost heir to said fortune: low, but I wouldn’t put it past Burnett!) He is now on his way to England and I am VERY curious to see how English society feels about this slangy New York street urchin with a heart of gold.

In Dracula news, Jonathan Harker has been MENACED by three SEXY LADY VAMPIRES, only to be saved by Dracula who announced to the sexy lady vampires that Jonathan Harker is HIS and then bridal carrying Harker to his room. (I’m making an assumption re: bridal carry, as Harker swooned at the psychological moment.) This book is SO much.

What I Plan to Read Next

Will I finally start reading the physical books on my TBR shelf instead of checking yet more books out from the library? I’ve been meaning to do this for months now, but I keep getting seduced by just one more library book.