Thursday, July 31, 2008

Books read in July

Looking for Anne, by Irene Gammel (also here)
I bought this with some gift money and found it fascinating, if occasionally disturbing. It's about how the book Anne of Green Gables came to be, and gives some wonderful insights into how L.M. Montgomery worked as a writer, as well as her personal life.

After that I was so interested that I went to the library and read
After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery's Letters to Ephraim Weber, 1916-1941, edited by Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen.

And after that I had to re-read Anne of Green Gables, because it had been too long since I read the real book and some of what I remembered about it had gotten mixed up with the 1985 film.

I also read:
A Slipping-Down Life, by Anne Tyler (one of her old books I had never read, but not high on my list of favourites)

The Stone Angel, by Margaret Laurence, because Mr. Fixit and I just saw the new film of this with Ellen Burstyn, and because I hadn't read it since high school and couldn't remember where the film departed from the book. Warning about some adult material in this: Margaret Laurence was a Canadian novelist whose books were always threatening to get banned out of high school literature courses.

I read part of The Book of Sorrows, by Walter Wangerin Jr., a sequel to The Book of the Dun Cow--I liked this but had to return it to the library.

And Plutarch's "Life of Alcibiades".

With Crayons:
Smith of Wootton Major, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit

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