Here’s a particularly charming post over at Book Riot — The thirty most entertaining and uplifting quotes from Anne of Green Gables.
Something about her irrepressible optimism paired with her wholly original view of the world makes me love coming back to her when life gets overwhelming or frightening.
Um, shall I admit that I never read Anne of Green Gables? Nor do I plan to, because I suspect it’s one of the books you need to read when you’re a kid. Even so, I like this post.
“Here sat Marilla Cuthbert, when she sat at all, always slightly distrustful of sunshine, which seemed to her too dancing and irresponsible a thing for a world which was meant to be taken seriously.”
That’s delightful. A good many of these quotes are delightful. Maybe I should rethink my plan not to read Anne of Green Gables after all.
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I have to admit, I haven’t read it either. Ditto for Little House on the Prarie. Maybe I’ll read them to my daughter in a few years? But there’s so many favorites of my own that I want to introduce her to already! At least she definitely likes Fraggle Rock :)
I really like reading books with a positive tone, about people just living their lives. The small daily happenings without the world-threatening “grand adventures”, showing that living an ordinary sort of life can be meaningful too, albeit in smaller ways.
(Though I like “big adventures” and books where the stakes are high as well, as long as the underlying mindset remains positive.)
I’ve read and liked both series, though I seldom/never reread the first & last (Rilla) book of the Anne series. In the first Anne often makes me cringe for the clueless things she does – they’re funny, but poignantly so. In the last, I can’t stand to think about World War 1 looming so closely over all the people I’m reading about, how some I’ve grown attached to will soon be killed horribly.
L.M.Mongomery wrote a lot more books; if you don’t want to start the whole 8-book Anne series (though, being about living a life, you could stop after book 3 or 4 or 5 without getting the feeling of “missing the ending”) but would like to try her writing style and the sort of stories she tells, you could start with another standalone or shorter set. My personal favorite is the 3-book Emily series. The bones of the story are very similar to Anne’s but the adventures are a bit less wild and cringe-worthy, and it stops at a satisfying place instead of just meandering on until you get to insupportable territory for this kind of story (WW1).
Or the Pat of Silver Bush/Mistress Pat duology, that one is good too.
The standalones are a bit different. Magic for Marigold is standalone but deliberately aimed younger and has less complexity of people, less to hold my interest. Kilkenny of the orchard is standalone but more a simple romance from my grandma’s time, and doesn’t have the richness and diversity of life and supporting characters that Anne or Emily has, which is such an important part of the charm of L.M. Montgomery’s style, though I still like it occasionally when I’m upset with modern life and times and want a short and simple feel-good romantic story to make me feel better (though there’s sadness in it too – it helps me get my own feelings back in balance).
The Little House books are much better than the television series that was made from them; they don’t have the everlasting proselytizing about religion, but do give a child’s view on frontier life, in which the immediate family circle is what she knows. It’s a small-scale world with a limited cast, but with a realistic view of what living like that was like, which I find very interesting. It’s a much more prosaic writing style than Montgomery’s, that fits well with the story she’s telling: in small steps she does give a real sense of how this large continent was so quickly colonised, and what that was like for the people doing the colonizing.
A lot less cringeworthy “over-the-top imagination” moments than with Anne, but lots of real and practical information about what living like that was like (and felt like to a child), with doing your chores and the daily practicalities as well as the family life in fairly isolated settings being important.
These books feel more like living history to me, while Montgomery’s books have a bit less of an immediate reality / real history feel to me, though I did like a lot of the historical detail about what running a household (and going off to college) near the end of the 19th century was like.