Halloween vampire classic! Today I finished Carmilla by J. Sheridan le Fanu. This novella is posited as the “first vampire book.” I can’t actually confirm if that’s true or not. But there is a vampire.

Your exposure to Carmilla may be like mine, in that it’s the “old lesbian vampire novel.” While there is truth to this—Carmilla is undoubtedly attracted to the protagonist, Laura—if you go into expecting a torrid lesbian love story, you will be disappointed. On the whole, it’s a lot more “lesbian passionately into disinterested but lonely straight girl” than a romance. At various times, Laura is repulsed and “embarrassed” by Carmilla’s fawning, and although taken by Carmilla’s beauty, never desires more than friendship from her. This is a story of a predator preying on vulnerable and ignorant young women for her own ends. However, if we can romanticize Dracula, which I’m happy to do, we can of course romanticize Carmilla—I just want to be upfront about the actual text.

The story is told through Laura’s written recollection after the events take place. It does a solid job setting the scene of Laura and her father’s isolation and some of the strange goings-on in the area around them before the mysterious Carmilla makes her entry. The abandoned village three miles west, around the ruins of the defunct Karnstein castle, make for a delicious bit of foreshadowing.

It plays up Carmilla’s strangeness and the push/pull of her relationship with Laura as an unknown illness claims the lives of young women nearby. I enjoyed the slowly increasing fear and horror Laura experiences as these inexplicable events in her home and her mind start piling up.

The novel is paced well until the end, which felt jarringly abrupt. I think the book would have benefitted from being longer. I was disappointed not to learn more about Carmilla and the Karnsteins’ history, and that there’s not much room for Laura to consider her feelings about discovering the truth of Carmilla (How would it feel to find out your only friend had been slowly killing you, and had been planning to do so from the start?), or really a denouement at all.

Overall, there’s a lot of tasty gothic mystery and troubling, strange physical + psychological maladies here, and I can definitely see how Carmilla influenced later vampire novels. However, I did find the sudden wrap-up disappointing. I still liked the book though, and it was a very fun October read.

Yesterday I concluded Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. This story was originally serialized in a paper, first published in the 1950s. It is structured as the covert diary entries of a dissatisfied housewife in Rome.

The book deals with various themes of generational conflict, the impact of both World Wars, and Italy’s economic downturn, but the heart of the book is the diarist, Valeria’s, fight to create and maintain a sense of self. Her struggle is contained so neatly in the fact that no one even calls her by her name—to her aging, aloof parents she is always and forever “bebe,” and to her grown children and even her husband she is “Mama.” She has no real friends to speak of.

Valeria keeps her diary hidden from everyone in their too-small apartment, terrified that her husband or adult children might find it. Frequently, she threatens to swear off writing in it and destroy it, emphatic that she’s only become more unhappy since she started it. This is because the more Valeria keeps track of her life, the less satisfying she finds it.

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The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien edited by Humphrey Carpenter

Concentrated on the ones about his works, though with a few personal ones, such as his horrified reaction to the atom bomb. Some philosophical discussions about life and religion. A lot to ponder about Middle Earth.

The First Salute : View of the American Revolution by Barbara W. Tuchman

A view of the revolution from other countries. The Netherlands, which was not only a supplier of arms, but took shipments of arms from England to sell to the rebels. France. Spain. The maneuvers viewed from the British side. Cornwallis's failure to take bold action when penned in Yorktown and how he referred, for the first time, to General Washington rather than Mr. Washington in his letter explaining his surrender. How King George threatened to abdicate rather than allow peace -- and discovered it did not matter.

A few flaws here and there -- there was nothing magical about the end of the Middle Ages to explain the increase in ship voyages; that was the increased cost of spices owing to high taxes on the land route -- but overall interesting stuff.

If you went through the American school system, you may have read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in English class. I didn’t and I figured I ought to, and having read it now, I absolutely see why it gets included in school curricula.

Not only does Morrison make powerful statements about social issues sadly still relevant, her prose is eloquent and has a remarkable ability to drop you right into a very specific scene. That this was Morrison’s first published novel makes it all the more impressive.

Although The Bluest Eye switches perspectives frequently, at its heart is a young girl named Pecola and the damage that growing up in a racist society has on the self-image of Black children. If whiteness is the pinnacle of beauty, what is left for non-white people?

Morrison does not mince words about the harm here. It is easy to see the more practical impact of other racism—being kept out of a job or certain housing; being physically assaulted or even killed; the use of slurs. But the insidious harm of being raised and living in a society where you are categorically prohibited from being considered beautiful or worthy goes deep and lasts long.

Pecola, poor, abused at home, and failed by virtually every adult in her life, is convinced that if she only had blue eyes, everything would be different. People would love her if she had blue eyes.

The Bluest Eye is a thunderclap of a novel, and it is devoid of any lightheartedness that might alleviate Pecola’s grim situation. It is about the failures of society and it does not let anyone off the hook.

It makes perfect sense to me, having read this, why Morrison is considered one of the great American writers, and I will have to explore more of her work in the future (and finish that documentary on Netflix!)