Sunday, March 31, 2013

Anne of Green Gables (1908)


Anne of Green Gables is a sweet story about a young girl's adoption, growing up, settling down, and getting an education. It's also the first novel I've read completely online through iBooks. :-)

Anne Shirley, when we first meet her, is an overly dramatic, extremely talkative 11-year old. She has a temper she cannot control and a passion to speak her mind. She is high-spirited, scatterbrained, and always in some kind of innocent but problematic trouble.

As the young girl ages, under the strong care of Marilla Cuthbert and her quiet but loving brother Matthew, Anne becomes more balanced. She works hard, achieves recognition as a scholar, and makes solid decisions that put others before herself.

Mark Twain is said to have called Anne "the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice." The character is certainly well developed with both positive qualities and youthful faults. Anne is driven by her emotions and imagination and later by her ambitions. She can be set apart from other young heroines by her rich inner life. Additional characters within the story are less developed, though, and men are positively absent or barely significant to the plot.

Which of the following portrayals come closest to how you IMAGINE Anne Shirley to look?

Mary Miles Minter
Dawn O'Day
Meghan Follow

Sunday, March 24, 2013

50 Classic Matchbook Girl Novels

Are you a Matchbook Girl?  Matchbook is an online magazine that covers "past and present fashion ... the arts, travel, and culture." It seeks to "inspire women around the globe to design a life they adore."

And here is the Matchbook list of Classic Novels.

How many have you read?

1811
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

1813 
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

1815
Emma by Jane Austen

1847
Jane Eyre* by Charlotte Bronte
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

1853
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

1857
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

1861
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

1865
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

1868
Little Women* by Louise May Alcott

1869
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

1874
Middlemarch by George Eliot

1877
Anna Karenina* by Leo Tolstoy
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

1880
Heidi by Johanna Spyri

1881
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

1891
Tess of the d'Urbervilles* by Thomas Hardy

1900
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

1902
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

1905
The House of Mirth* by Edith Wharton
The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

1908
Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery (Canadian)

1909
A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter (American)

1911
The Secret Garden* by Frances Hodgson Burnett (English-American)

1918
My Antonia* by Willa Cather (American)

1920
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (American)

1924
A Passage to India* by E.M. Forster

1925
The Great Gatsby* by F. Scott Fitzgerald (American)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (British)

1926 
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (American)

1927
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (French)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (British)

1928
Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

1932
Little House of the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

1934
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (American)

1936
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (American)

1943
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn* by Betty Smith (American)

1945
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

1951
The Catcher in the Rye* by J.D. Salinger

1955
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

1957
Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

1958
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

1960
To Kill a Mockingbird* by Harper Lee

1961
Franny and Zooey* by J.D. Salinger

1963
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

1970
Play It as it Lays by Joan Didion

1978
The World According to Garp by John Irving

1984
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

* = books I've read but not yet blogged about.