These October days have been drifting by like colorful leaves dancing on the wind, and here we are at the end of another month! I’ve been busy working on my new kitten book, The Book of Cymbeline III (stay tuned for the pre-order link!), busy with some lovely autumnal travels (many fun vlogs to come), and busy reading some wonderful books…
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
I am venturing to share a rather lengthy quotation from this classic, but I didn’t like to break into Oscar Wilde’s flow! The spooky ambience of this passage seems appropriate for Halloween, and it also illustrates one of the themes I found so interesting.
“There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself…Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.”
Dorian Gray is obsessed with exploring fantasy worlds, and he never lets scruples stand in the way of his quest for pleasure and novelty, but nothing ever satisfies him for long. The powerful and compelling thing about this book is that, while it looks at the lure of beauty, art, curiosity, “fresh shapes and colours”, it leaves you in no doubt as to which world is the enduring reality. The ever-more-horrific portrait that Dorian tries to hide in the attic always reveals the truth! The “unreal shadows” fade away, and there’s no escaping the soul that you’ve chosen to pursue in your daylight hours. It was so much fun to discuss this during our book club meeting!
The Pillars of the House; Or, Under Wode, Under Rode by Charlotte Mary Yonge
“Can it be really as he says - and Lance - that their belief makes them like what they are?”
“Most assuredly.”
…”But I have seen plenty of Christians that were not in the least like Felix Underwood.”
“So have I; but in proportion as they live up to their faith, they have what is best in him.”
“I should like to be like him…He and little Lance too, seem to belong to something bright and strong, that seems inside and outside, and I can’t lay hold of what it is.”
“One day you will, my dear boy.”
It’s hard to know where to start with all the things I loved about this book, but the way the characters grapple with and remain rooted in their faith certainly stands out. Kate Howe originally recommended Charlotte Mary Yonge and called her a Victorian Elizabeth Goudge, and I would definitely agree with that high praise. Yonge feels like a kindred spirit, and I flew through the two hefty volumes of Pillars of the House this Victober!
There are thirteen orphan siblings at the heart of CMY’s impressively varied and vivid cast of characters, but she manages to bring them all to life as we follow their trials and triumphs over the course of about two decades. It took me a little while to sort out the siblings at first: not only do they “rejoice in eccentric appellations,” but many are called by their middle names, and on top of that they pick up nicknames like Blunderbore and Master Ratton throughout the book. The family dynamic was so relatable and realistic!
There are cozy domestic comforts coupled with challenges and tragedy that the characters learn to face with patience and gentle strength. I also loved the appreciation of art and beauty (this time properly grounded in faith, unlike poor Dorian Gray!) and the casually erudite references that I had to continually stop and look up, like a seventeenth century French fairytale called “Riquet with the Tuft,” or a line (in French of course) from Saint Francis de Sales. I am officially on the Charlotte Mary Yonge hype train and can’t wait to read more of her works!
The Horse and His Boy and The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis
“Shasta’s heart fainted at these words for he felt he had no strength left. And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.”
This line from The Horse and His Boy put me in mind of a quip my family often quotes: “No good deed goes unpunished.” 😂 I’ve been very much enjoying my journey through Narnia, and I think Shasta’s adventures in The Horse and His Boy have been my favorite installment so far. We get a glimpse of the Pevensies as their regal selves, and there are also plenty of cats. I suspected from little feline touches in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe that C.S. Lewis was an “F,” as Beverley Nichols would say, but now I am convinced of it!
I also have a passage from The Magician’s Nephew to share, but it could be considered a spoiler since it comes from later in the book, so here is your spoiler warning!
I mentioned in the video that Lewis’s world-building reminded me of Tolkien’s world-building in The Silmarillion: in both backstories, it’s a song that shapes the new creation! It’s such a beautiful image, but some try not to see it…
“When the Lion had first begun signing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he had realized that the noise was a song. And he had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel. Then, when the sun rose and he saw that the singer was a lion (“only a lion,” as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make believe that it wasn’t singing and never had been signing - only roaring as any lion might in a zoo or in our own world…Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.”
This reminded me of an anecdote from Little Town on the Prairie: there’s a little boy in school who pretends to be stupid so that the teacher won’t try to get him to do the work - but he gradually becomes as vacant-minded as he pretended to be and has to be snapped out of it. The scenarios are a little different, but the sentiment is the same: if you try to make yourself stupider than you really are, you might just succeed! You can always count on Lewis (and Laura Ingalls Wilder) for wisdom!
I have back-to-back bookish videos for you all this week - there should be an Advent readalong announcement going up on my channel tomorrow! Are there any books you’re hoping to read before the end of 2023? Let me know in the comments below.
What I Read in October 2023