Bookish Thoughts

I finally made it to the end of LM Montgomery's series about Anne Shirley Blythe, and man was it worth it to get to this gem of a book. Rilla of Ingleside  is easily the best book of the series, throwing Anne's idyllic world into turmoil during the first world war. The rest of the series may have gotten repetitive and boring, but it makes the hardship and tragedy in this one stand out that much more. This book follow's Anne's youngest daughter. At the outset, she's eager to grow up, go to parties, get a boyfriend or two, and generally enjoy her youth. Unlike her brothers and sisters, she has no real ambition beyond enjoying her late teens. But all that gets thrown out the window by world events. One by one, Rilla's brothers sign up and travel to the front. Instead of parties and dates, Rilla finds herself organizing Red Cross fundraisers and raising a baby whose mother died and whose father left for the war and hasn't been heard of since. She has to grow...

This book felt like something of a bait and switch. It purports to be about Anne's children. In fact, it's mostly about the neighboring children, who recently moved in with their widowed father, the new minister in Ingleside. It makes sense. Anne and Gilbert have been established as basically perfect, so there would be very little conflict in a book about their children, who are also likely to be perfect. Or at least perfectly supported and encouraged. The book would be unbearably saccharine and preachy, much like Anne of Windy Poplars  was. Still, it would have been nice to get some indication of that in the cover art or book blurb or something. Rainbow Valley  was fun. A bit of a return to the first book in the series, with the younger characters. At this point, it's all feeling a bit formulaic. I'm picking up on the smallest hints, and I know exactly what's going to happen all the way through. There's one book left. A lot of people have said that it's...

Anne's House of Dreams  was a million times better than Anne of Windy Poplars . I think the latter suffered from a whole lot of nostalgia and a poor balancing of ideas. But this book gets back to what I loved about Anne in the first place. She and Gilbert get married and move into their first home together. They meet their new neighbors and begin to make a life for themselves. This book felt like an actual novel rather than a series of vignettes. It let Anne be human again. A wonderful, irrepressible human who charms everyone she meets and finds ways to solve every problem she comes up against. But it let her be wrong. It let her be disliked (temporarily). It let her experience tragedy and come through the other side. More importantly, this book introduced Miss Cornelia Bryant, who is officially one of my favorite literary characters ever. A spinster who never has a nice word to say about a man or a mean word to say about a woman. She spends all of her free time sewing clothes ...

I've been greatly enjoying the Anne books, but man this one got tedious. I wonder how much of that is because it was published later. It's more of a return to Anne's younger days, and you need a heavy dose of nostalgia to swallow it. The book covers the three years of Anne's engagement to Gilbert, when she's teaching school in a new community and he's finishing his schooling to become a doctor. The narrative alternates between letters she writes to him and the familiar third-person narrative of Anne's day-to-day activities. The book is divided into three sections, one for each school year, with summers and holidays (when Anne is with Gilbert) mostly skipped over. Because the focus is on Anne in a new environment, almost none of the Avonlea characters are present. There are a couple of brief visits to Green Gables, with appearances by Marilla and the twins. But for the most part this is an entirely new cast of characters. It was frustrating to not see any...

Back when I first read this series, this was my favorite of the books. I was twelve, and Anne seemed so grown up. She was off at college, studying hard and figuring out what she wanted out of life. The description of Patty's Place, particularly Anne's initial conversation with Patty, has remained etched in my mind. Though I've since learned that living with your best girlfriends is not necessarily a recipe for utopia. On revisiting this book, I didn't find it quite as perfect as I remember it being. Nor quite as good as the first two. It's a bit rushed, skipping over most of the college doings in favor of catching us up on how everyone back in Avonlea is growing. And while the first two books were also basically just a series of vignettes, this one suffered by accelerating through time. Entire semesters passed in mere paragraphs, and it caused some of the relationships to get the short shrift. Then again, I'm not sure I could have stood to read any more abou...

An argument could be made that all fiction is fantasy, on some level. Hell, an argument could probably be made that all writing is fantasy, but for now we'll stick with fiction. These books about Anne are often considered historical fiction. Actually, they can probably just be called fiction, since LM Montgomery was writing, in some ways, about her own life. They're books for children, morality plays in a way, though they go down a bit easier than Little Women  did. But if I were to ever formally argue that all fiction is fantasy, these books would be Exhibit A. To start with, they are Montgomery's fantasy life. The life she wishes she could have led, had she had a bit more confidence and a bit more education and a bit more luck. Her writing, and Anne's own optimism, makes it so easy to fall into this trap of believing that she lives in a perfect, idealized world. The books are comforting, the writing lovely. It's like stepping into nostalgia. Who wouldn't wan...

I downloaded the complete Anne Shirley collection on my phone so that I'd have something easy and familiar to read while feeding my son. It helped that I was able to get the whole series for $1. Though I then discovered that the "complete" series only includes 6 of the 8 books for some reason, so I'll have to buy those other two when I get to them. But I've been meaning to re-read these books for a while, now, and this seemed like a good way to go about it. I don't remember having a deep connection to these books, the way so many other girls and women do. I read them in the 7th grade on the suggestion of a friend. Well, actually, I tore through them as fast as I could. And I liked them well enough. But then I moved on to other things. Mostly fantasy. I was surprised by how well the books stood up to my memory of them. There's always a danger, revisiting a book from your childhood, that you will cringe at your former self. But this book was even better ...