Do you ever spread your books all over the floor, to get a new look at them? Or a possible photo opp?
Okay, maybe that’s just me. But at various points I’ve spread out my book collections of three of my favorite authors–and they turned into interesting photos! In ascending order by number of books…
I have 18 Tamora Pierce books – basically her entire Tortall series (except Mastiff; I’m waiting on the paperback), plus my favorite Magic Circle book.
L. M. Montgomery accounts for 46 volumes of my book collection. There’s one book of poetry I still need, but other than that, I own, well, everything. If she wrote it and it’s available, I have it. I’m kind of a completist… But you know what’s very frustrating? I have 199 LMM short stories. One more would make a round 200, but you can’t get another one anywhere (they exist, but they haven’t been printed). I live in hope that someday they’ll put out a new collection.
And the biggest collection of all – 54 Edgar Rice Burroughs books. I’ve added a few since this picture was taken. Burroughs was extraordinarily prolific, so I still have about twenty left to collect… Someday I’ll have them all, and then I won’t know what to do with myself in used bookstores!
What authors do you have the most books by? And have you ever spread them across your floor for a photo…or is that just me? 😉
Today is rather exciting–not only is it Friday the Thirteenth, it’s my birthday. 🙂
I love keeping track of the birthdays of some of my favorite authors and celebrities, and celebrating if I can (which usually means reading or watching something relevant). Since it’s my birthday, I thought I’d share about some other birthdays.
January 18: Cary Grant, 1904 – My favorite actor, January 18th is the perfect opportunity to watch Bringing Up Baby or Arsenic and Old Lace.
January 19: Michael Crawford, 1942 – The original Phantom in London and on Broadway, I have enough of his CDs to spend an entire day listening to them.
March 17: Lawrence “Titus” Oates, 1880 – Titus went to the South Pole with Captain Scott, and is a major character in The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean. He also brings many people to this blog; his name is a frequent search term in WordPress’ stats.
April 23: William Shakespeare, 1564 – I once had a Shakespeare class which met on Shakespeare’s birthday. I brought cookies, even though I knew my professor wasn’t a Stratfordian.
June 9: Johnny Depp, 1963 – I have, erm, lots of movies on my shelf to choose from to celebrate Johnny’s birthday.
September 1: Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1875 – And I have even more books by Burroughs…
November 30: This one is interesting, because a remarkable number of my favorite people were born on this date – L. M. Montgomery (1874), Winston Churchill (also 1874!), Mark Twain (1835), William Bouguereau, my favorite painter (1825), and Mandy Patinkin (1952), who forever endeared himself to me as Inigo Montoya. It’s rather a busy day!
Do you celebrate the birthdays of anyone from history or literature? It’s fun–like putting extra holidays on the calendar!
I’ve been neglecting my “Quotable” category for months. So let’s revive it with a quote from a favorite author…
“I’d like to add some beauty to life…I don’t exactly want to make people know more…but I’d love to make them have a pleasanter time because of me…to have some little joy or happy thought that would never have existed if I hadn’t been born.”
– Anne Shirley, in Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery
It occurred to me that I have not actually reviewed L. M. Montgomery. She’s been woven throughout this blog, referenced here and there, but somehow I have not actually reviewed her yet. Even though she’s among my top two favorite authors!
Maybe the problem has been that I don’t know where to begin. I’ve read 20 novels, 199 short stories (believe me, I’m searching for a way to get my hands on a 200th one!), her autobiography, three books of letters, and her five volume journal. If it’s in prose, I’ve read it. And now, where to start?
My L. M. Montgomery collection. I have...a few of her books.
I suppose I could take the obvious route. Anne of Green Gables was her first novel, and the one I name when people look blank after I say L. M. Montgomery is my favorite author. It’s a good place to start reading if you’re not familiar with her books. Anne is a red-headed orphan who is adopted by Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert by mistake–their friend was supposed to bring them a boy from the orphanage, who could help Matthew on the farm. The story follows how Anne found her place in Green Gables. Anne is precocious, whimsical, imaginative, deeply in love with nature, and, though always well-meaning, apt to get into scrapes. Once she dyes her hair green–another time she breaks her leg after walking on a roof on a dare. Anne is a wonderful character and her adventures are funny and endearing.
That’s a good place to begin. But I don’t want to stop there. Because there’s also Emily, a dreamy writer, and Pat, who fiercely loves her home, and Valancy, who only starts to live her life when she thinks she’s dying. And beautiful, tragic Kilmeny; Marigold with her imaginary and magical friend; capable and confident Jane.
I don’t know why Anne of Green Gables is Montgomery’s most famous book, because she wrote so many others that were at least as good. The great gift of Montgomery is her ability to create appealing characters and place them in a beautiful world. With very few exceptions, her books are all set in small towns in Prince Edward Island. She herself grew up in Cavendish, a small town in PEI, and her books very much harken back nostalgically to the Cavendish she remembers in her childhood–a close-knit community where everyone knew everyone, and the chief social events were quilting circles, lectures and small dances–and weddings and funerals, of course.
Her books are also filled with nature. Like Anne, Montgomery had a passionate love for the beauties of nature. Pine trees, flowers, a range of hills against the sunset–from her journal you learn first-hand how deeply these affected her, and that carries into her books. I once read a book that combined quotes from Montgomery about nature, with pictures that were meant to correspond. I was amazed to find that none of the pictures were as beautiful as what she was describing. She felt beauty so intensely–she was able to see it and then convey it in words, where someone else wouldn’t have seen the same thing at all. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but not when the words were written by L. M. Montgomery. She has a very unique writing style, which I obviously love–it may not appeal to everyone though, which is why I sometimes recommend starting with her short stories to see if it’s a style that works for you. The Road to Yesterday or Chronicles of Avonlea are good collections.
Don’t get the impression, though, that her books are long treatises on nature. The beautiful surroundings are the backdrop to human adventures. They’re funny, exciting, romantic, sometimes tragic. She had a gift for drawing out the emotions in events small and large–from the pettiness of carping relatives to the deep betrayal of a disloyal suitor to the fun of a picnic in the woods to the humor of an awkward dinner party.
There are some books I feel I’d love to live inside, and L. M. Montgomery’s certainly sit high on the list. After reading her journals, I think she felt the same way. Her life was not always happy, and the sunny world of her writing was sometimes an escape. Fortunately, she’s made that world available to the rest of us too.
I bought A Window in Thrums because L. M. Montgomery recommended it to me; she mentioned it in her journals. She mentioned a lot of books she read in her journals, and since this one was by J. M. Barrie I decided to try it. But this isn’t a book review, this is a Fiction Friday post.
I recently wrote about books as objects, especially pieces of history, and mentioned my copy of A Window in Thrums. It’s a good story, but one of the most interesting aspects of my copy is the inscription on the flyleaf: “For Grandma from Mary Eunice, December 25th, 1898.” I don’t know who Mary Eunice or her grandmother were, since I bought the book used online only a few years ago. But shortly after buying it, I decided to write a story imagining who they might have been, and who else might have owned the book over the years.
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A Window in Thrums
“Do you think Grandma will like it?” Mary Eunice asked, hugging the book to her chest.
“Of course she will, dear,” her mother said firmly, continuing briskly down the row, eyes on the baskets of fruit for sale.
Mary Eunice frowned, the frown of a girl just old enough to start questioning firm parental assurances. “But will she really like it?” she persisted, hurrying after her mother. “I want her to like it because she really likes it, not just because it came from me.”
Her mother absently picked up an apple, put it down, and went on to the oranges. “There’s never anything really fresh this time of year,” she muttered.
“But, Mother, will she?”
“What? Oh, the book. Yes, of course, you know she likes Mr. Barrie’s novels.”
“That’s true,” Mary Eunice said thoughtfully, feeling reassured. She watched her mother walk down the row but stayed where she was, to look at the book in her hands. She enjoyed the proud thrill of ownership for at least the twelfth time in the last ten minutes since they’d walked away from the bookstore. It was the first book she’d ever bought with her own money.
Mary Eunice thought it was the prettiest little book she’d ever seen. The cover was dark blue, with silver curls and swirls and a scattering of pink flowers. The spine was the same, the back pale gray, the pages crisp and white. Mary Eunice ran her fingers lightly across the silver title stamped on the cover: A Window in Thrums. She checked on her mother, saw she hadn’t gone very far, and carefully cracked open the book. She turned a few pages and found Chapter I.
“On the bump of green round which the brae twists, at the top of the brae, and within cry of T’nowhead Farm, still stands a one-storey house, whose white-washed walls, streaked with the discoloration that rain leaves, look yellow when the snow comes.”
Mary Eunice stopped reading with a puzzled frown and closed the book. “Oh well,” she whispered to it, “I still think you’re the prettiest little book I ever saw, even if I don’t know what a brae is. And Grandma likes Mr. Barrie’s writing. That’s what matters.”
Tales of the Marvelous 