Holiday Reads

I just finished two pretty fun Christmas books--both are short story collections and they couldn't have been more different.

First up, Christmas with Anne and Other Holiday Stories, by L. M. Montgomery.  I'm an Anne of Green Gables fan from childhood and by far the best stories in this collection were the two extracted from the series.

The first is from AoGG, when Matthew gives Anne a dress with puffed sleeves--it's the first pretty dress that Anne has ever gotten, and she is thrilled, thankful, and blown away by Matthew's love for her.

The other Anne story was from Windy Poplars, when Katherine Brook comes to Green Gables with Anne over the Christmas holiday.  I always loved that part of the story and it was a joy to reread.

The rest of the stories in the collection were ones that the editor, Rea Wilmshurst, culled from various magazines, circa 1905.  They are fairly conventional stories in which either one of the following happens:
1) A poor family is struggling to have a Christmas for their children and a rich benefactor showers Christmas goodies on them at the last minute.
2)  A fractured family or arguing friends are reunited due to a mistake of some sort that makes them celebrate Christmas together and mend broken fences.

My favorite was one in which a country woman feeds a train car full of various people out of her voluminous hamper when the train is stranded over night on Christmas Eve due to a snowstorm.  The spirit of giving and friendship shines through this one, without it being overly saccharine.

This was a quick book to read, a bit too sweet for my taste, but pure heaven to spend some quality time with Anne again.

The second collection of stories was The Mistletoe Murder: And Other Stories, a set of four stories, by P.D. James.  This is my first time reading James and I can finally appreciate her for the fabulous mystery writer she was.  All four were all well-crafted, tight, and interesting.  The first was a classic country house murder, the second an unreliable narrator, and the third and fourth featured Adam Dalgleish.

The setting was Christmas, but that was really the only thing Christmasy about these stories--no change of heart, no uplifting sentiments, just murder most foul...but very entertaining!

I'm keeping track of my Christmas reading, year to year, here.

Rilla of Ingleside

I finally got around to rereading Rilla of Ingleside, the last in the Anne of Green Gables Series by Canadian author, L.M. Montgomery. Unlike the rest of the Anne books, I'd only read this one once, when I was about 15, and didn't much care for it.  For one thing, Anne is in the shadows for most of the book. And for another, it is focused exclusively on WWI.  Back when I was 15, I was definitely not interested in the least in WWI and wanted more Anne!

Time flies and people change.  Now that we are in the midst of the centennial of the Great War, I am actively seeking out books about WWI and trying to wrap my head around it.  I confess that I still have big gaps when it comes to understanding the flow of the war and the issues before and during it. I found Rilla of Ingleside to be a perfect introduction to the war.

Much of the novel is either extracts from Rilla's journal--she is Anne and Gilbert Blythe's youngest child, and is 15 in 1914--or conversations about the war, with Susan Baker, the Blythe's housekeeper, holding court in her kitchen about the latest news from the front.

In the course of the war, Rilla's three brothers, countless friends, and sweetheart join up, and she matures from a giddy, vain, flibbertigibbet to a lovely earnest, capable, caring woman.  It's classic L.M. Montgomery, with starry eyes, toothsome cookery, bewitching glens and hollows and valleys and meadows, and apt quotations.  It's full of small-town quirkiness, quaint charm, and spirited misunderstandings.  It is sweet and funny and warm, but it is also poignant and patriotic and threaded with the tragedy of senseless destruction.

Much as I love historical fiction, I really valued the fact that Montgomery wrote this novel in 1921, just three years after the end of the war.  I felt that she must've responded to the war in much the same way that the Blythe family did. Pouring over newspaper reports, studying maps, debating military strategy, praying that the lines would hold, raising the flag over victories, and working hard to keep the faith over defeats.  

Rilla felt personal in a way that, much as I love the other Anne books, they do not.  In reading Rilla, I feel like I had an insight into what Canadians living through the Great War thought and felt about it, how they responded to their role in the global conflict, and how they viewed not only England and France, but also the U.S. and its late involvement in the war.

Rereading Rilla now, I can fully understand why I didn't like it as a teenager.   It wasn't what I wanted an Anne book to be.  That said, I thought it was wonderful.  Despite the sadness (and there are some very sad parts), Rilla is still definitely a feel-good book.

Final thought--I couldn't help but do the math and realize that if Rilla and Ken Ford, her sweetheart, do marry and have children right away, as expected, their children will be of age to march off to WWII in 1939-1945.  L.M. Montgomery died in 1942 at the age of 68.  Recently, it has been revealed that she suffered from depression and her death was possibly a suicide.  I can't help but wonder if seeing the world enveloped in yet another catastrophic war after soldiering through the first one was too much to bear.  I don't mean to end this post on a downer.

Rilla is a lovely, warm, uplifting novel from an author whose works shaped me into the person I am today.  It's also a great way to get a handle on the outline of the Great War.

This is the first book in my Back to the Classics challenge for 2015, nicely fitting into the category of Classic Children's Book.

The Beggar Maid - Alice Munroe

After Alice Munroe was awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, I read a number of reviews of her work in general.  She's a short story writer, and I like short stories.  She's Canadian, as is my mother, and I've always felt a bit feeble for not having read more Canadian authors.  Her stories were reputed to be of the commonplace, the everyday, the unsung--I tend to like stories like this.

So, I stopped in at the library and picked up the only book left on her shelf--I clearly wasn't the only person who decided to see why Munroe was awarded a Nobel Prize.  The book I read was The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose--a collection of stories about Rose and her step-mother Flo, and published as a collection in 1991.

I'm not sure this was the best introduction to Munroe because frankly I didn't think the stories were that good.  They span a period of about 40 years--from when Rose is a young child to when Flo is elderly, suffering from dementia, and in a nursing home and Rose is middle-aged and trying to make the right decisions regarding caring for her.  Neither woman is very appealing--neither demonstrates qualities that I admire--and their stories are uniformly dull.  That said, Munroe is an excellent writer--she has a quiet, deft touch with words, a spareness that is elegant, and an honest, unflinching manner. She is not coy.

I wanted to love these stories, but I didn't.  Actually, it crossed my mind that Rose is somewhat like Anne of Green Gables, but without the rosy patina of fancy that L.M. Montgomery scattered over her creation.  They are both isolated and adrift as young children, craving love, nursing ambition, dreaming big.  But Rose's life is gritty and grubby, mean-spirited, and selfish. She looks for love, but discards it without actually letting it envelope her.  Flo has the harsh exterior of Marilla but without the big heart and sterling core. I'm not sure if I would've thought to compare Anne and Rose if they both hadn't been from Canada--I think maybe, but the Canadian roots made the comparison inevitable for me.

I have another Alice Munroe waiting on my TBR shelf--Dear Life--a much more recent collection of stories.  I hope I like it better.  I really want to love Munroe's work!