The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)

The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende)

A Jest of God (Margaret Laurence)

"I do not know how many bones need be broken before I can walk. And I do not know, either, how many need not have been broken at all."

I've had A Jest of God on my bookshelf for almost three years, but until today I had never read it. It's a relatively short novel of about two-hundred pages, but its emotional depth is profound. Rachel Cameron is an elementary school teacher in her mid thirties who is single and still living with her ailing mother in the apartment (above a funeral home) that she grew up in. 

Rachel suffers from anxiety, insecurity and what can only be described as low self-esteem. She constantly apologizes to others and to herself for everything she says and for every action. Even as she has sex for the first time, she's saying "I'm sorry."  She is afraid of people--of doing the wrong things when she interacts with people. 

Early on in the novel, Rachel speaks with the principal at her school, and I was struck by these lines: "I know I must not stand up now, not until he's gone. I am exceptionally tall for a woman and Willard is shorter than I." 

Her insecurity over her height immediately drew me to her and allowed me to like her. I empathized with Rachel through every awkward moment she experienced talking to her co-workers, feeling trapped and claustrophobic in a crowded church, and her inability to relax while making love to the first man that had entered her life in years. 

A Jest of God is, in many ways, a painful novel to read, but the ending was rewarding. As G.D Killam writes in the introduction to my New Canadian Library Edition, "Margaret Laurence's fiction is about . . . the individual coming to terms with his own past and himself, accepting his limitations and going on from there, however terrified he may be." Rachel is able to, in the end,  face her own past and limitations, and begin to overcome them and move on with her life.

I look forward to reading more of Margaret Laurence's work.

Return of the Sphinx (Hugh MacLennan)

Today I spent most of my afternoon reading Hugh MacLennan's Return of the Sphinx.  Originally published in 1967, this novel approaches the French-Canadian independence/separatist movement from a reactionary and nationalist perspective. The movement, as the novel's title alludes to, is portrayed as a sphinx. "In the old Greek legend," says the plot synopsis on the back cover, "the Sphinx made the cities sick, tore families asunder, and set sons against fathers and daughters against mothers." For MacLennan, evidently, this is effect that the political atmosphere in Quebec had in the 1960s. In Return of the Sphinx politics literally tear the Ainslie family apart.

Through his older, wiser character Alan Ainslie, MacLennan does his best to tear down and discredit the legitimacy of the French-Canadian subjugated and separatist perspective. He condemns the separatist movement and the generation of the 1960s as being the immoral product of a break down in morals and education. He likens it to a kind of insanity in which people have become victims of their own thinking and narrow perspectives. MacLennan portrays Alan Ainslie's son, Daniel, as a lost and manipulated victim who needs to be saved from his insane and misguided perceptions of the world which are leading him towards terrorism. For MacLennan, as portrayed through Alan, the only correct way to view separatism seems to be from a nationalist perspective.

As with many of his novels, MacLennan also draws on the First and Second World Wars, using them to explain why his older characters are wiser, and why they are disenchanted with radical political ideologies. For Alan Ainslie, the Quebec independence movement is nothing more than  a continuation of the conflicts, civil wars, and disorder that have always been occurring.

While I enjoyed this novel, I found MacLennan's condemnation of the separatist movement problematic. While violence was not, and will not ever be the answer, the separatist movement did and does have legitimacy and should not be discounted as the product of insanity or the misguided victims of radical political ideologies.

Overall, though, Return of the Sphinx is worth the read. Regardless of MacLennan's political perspective, the novel is a beautiful and fascinating portrayal of 1960s Canada.

The Watch that Ends the Night (Hugh MacLennan)

First published in 1958, this Hugh MacLennan novel is set in Montreal primarily in the 1930s and 1950s. Written while MacLennan's wife Dorthy suffered from a fatal illness, The Watch that Ends the Night is a novel about continuing to live while waiting for death. As Jerome, a doctor and veteran of multiple wars puts it near the close of the novel, Catherine--who has had a fatal heart condition since birth-- is living her death. George, Catherine's second husband, and the narrator, describes his marriage with Catherine as beginning in the early evening of her life. Quite literally, George and Catherine are on a death watch.

Like many of MacLennan's novels, The Watch that Ends the Night is also about coming to terms with the First and Second World Wars. More than once MacLennan mentions Hemingway. For MacLennan, his characters as he portrays them during the 1930s--as products of the First World War and the Depression--are his lost generation. Jerome, Catherine's first husband who turns up at the start of the novel after having been thought dead for a decade, is the most symbolic figure of this generation. Jerome, after enduring the horrors of the First World War, was swept up in a political ideology and climate which, combined with his need to find a new "god" caused him to abandon his wife and daughter. 

Also hanging over this novel is the threat of nuclear war. The Watch that Ends the Night is more overtly political than some of MacLennan's other novels. George, who is a radio personality for the CBC, has come to the conclusion that events cannot be controlled or understood, and even when you believe that you can understand them, it doesn't do you any good. George, like many people in the 1950s, is disenchanted. He's very cynical towards any political system that claims to understand everything. "In the thirties we tried to make gods out of the political systems and worship and serve them," he tells the reader (p.334). For George, the cold war environment wields a sword over the heads of everyone which could drop and kill them all at any moment, in the same way that Catherine's bad heart wields a sword over her life and his life. 

Overall, The Watch that Ends the Night is beautiful novel. I won't pretend that the final two chapters didn't nearly bring me to tears because they did. Once again I'm left wishing that everyone would read Hugh MacLennan. 

Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)

Fifth Business is the first novel in Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy, but it can easily be read as a stand alone. I first came across Fifth Business in one of my high school English classes. I admit, at the time, I didn't really like the book, and I didn't understand it. I recall that it's treatment of religion made me a little uncomfortable. 

Having now re-read this book a number of years later, I understand it and I enjoyed it in a way I didn't before. As the novel's introduction notes, Fifth Business is "a novel about moral responsibility."  Davies wanted to explore the question of to what extent a person should be held accountable for the outcome of their actions. The catalyst of the novel is a snowball with a stone in the middle thrown by Percy Boyd Staunton at ten-year old Dunstan Ramsay, which misses him and hits a pregnant Mrs. Dempster in the head. After she gives birth prematurely and becomes "simple-minded," Dunstan feels partly responsible, but Boyd chooses to try and forget that the event ever occurred. An event which occurred by chance sends the two boys down two very different paths which culminate in an ending that appears very much like fate. What roles chance and fate ultimately play in this novel, I'll leave you to decide for yourself. I'm not sure I know yet myself. 

It's not the initial question of moral responsibility that intrigues me so much, as Davies' treatment of religion and myth. One of my favourite passages is, I would say, also one of the most thought provoking passages in the whole novel: "religion and Arabian Nights were true in the same way. (Later I was able to say that they were both psychologically rather than literally true, and that psychological truth was really as important in its own way as historical verification"(p.64). The narrator, Dunstan Ramsay, seems to see religion, myth and history as--in a way-- one in the same. The meaning we see in history, in religion, in our personal lives and in our interactions with others are only what we make them to be, or need them to be. However, we cannot always control meaning or control our interpretations of events. 

I would highly recommend this classic work of Canadian literature to anyone who hasn't yet read it. The Penguin Modern Classics edition if lovely and fairly inexpensive.  Plus, Fifth Business is a good introductory work for any any reader looking to explore classic Canadian literature. 

The Precipice (Hugh MacLennan)

If you've never read a Hugh MacLennan book, please do so now. Go out and buy this book or Two Solitudes, or Barometer Rising, or any of his novels. Even if you've never heard of MacLennan until now, don't put it off any longer. Today it occurred to me, as I closed the back cover of The Precipice, his third novel, that Hugh MacLennan is, without a doubt, my favourite author. 

The Precipice is a love story set during the Second World War. Lucy is Canadian from small-town Ontario, a setting that I am very familiar with as I've spent my entire life gazing out over Ontario cornfields and forests, and the Great Lakes are the closet I've ever come to the ocean. Steven enters Lucy's life when he, an American, comes to oversee bureaucratic changes to a porcelain bathroom fixture manufacturer that has been bought out by an American company. Lucy, who lives alone with her two sisters, soon finds herself falling in love with Steven. The novel follows her through the wartime years of her marriage. 

While the plot of this novel sounds like that of countless other novels of the era,  it's not. It is a novel about rejecting Canada and then returning. It's about the ups and downs of making a marriage last and about the differences between the two countries on either side of the 49 parallel. It's about coming to terms with the war, and with progress (which is portrayed as an American fixation), which has come to, as the novel illustrates, a precipice. 

One of the most poignant passages in this novel appears near the end. "Each day for years," writes MacLennan, "they measured out the distance they'd advanced.They were trained to believe there was nothing any of them had to do but keep on travelling in the same way. And then suddenly they were brought up short at the edge of a precipice which hadn't been marked on the map. There they were with all their vehicles and equipment, jostling and piling up on the front rank. For of course the ones behind didn't know the precipice was there and couldn't understand why the one's up front had stopped advancing. The pressure from behind kept increasing on the front ranks and they were all shouting so loudly nobody could hear anything"(336). This criticism of progress seems to be a theme of more than one of MacLennan's novels. In this novel, the theme is key to understanding everything. 

Although Elspeth Cameron, in the introduction to my edition, dishes out much criticism against this novel, charging that MacLennan "fumbles awkwardly and inconsistently to make sense of the human condition," and  MacLennan himself had his doubts about the quality of this novel, I love it. 

Voices in Time (Hugh MacLeenan)

First of all, I really love this edition of Voices in Time. I'm glad that I was able to order not only this book, but two more of Hugh MacLennan's novels in these editions. Secondly, I loved the book.

Based on the reviews that I've read, and on the Introduction to this edition, Voices in Time is considered, by many, as MacLennan's worst novel. At the time of its publication in 1980, it was not well received.

As Micheal Gnarowski writes in the Introduction, "a major shift was taking place in Canadian writing and Voices in Time would be its victim in public and critical perception. No longer were conflicts of ideology, the growing pains of nationhood, or the tensions between founding races and founding cultures of prime importance or concern" (xxx).

If Voices in Time had been published ten years earlier, then perhaps the novel could have been a success.  I  consider it a modernist work published too long after Canadian modernist literature had faded in popularity. 

Voices in Time is a novel about history, and about trying to make sense of not only the First and Second World Wars, but also the October Crisis of 1970. It is also a novel about the uncertainty of the future, the dangers of an overly bureaucratic state, as well as the dangers of disorder. MacLennan presents a binary of order and disorder within the state, which he never reconciles. Perhaps this is partly why I find the novel so compelling. He leaves the reader to decide which ideology is the correct one. 

Set in Canada in 2030, the novel opens with John WellFleet, one of the last remaining people to remember what life and civilization was like before the Great Fear, the term used to describe the destruction of civilization and of all the major cities by bombs. History has been suppressed in order to protect the people and ensure order, but John is forced to explore his past and the past of his family members when a young man uncovers some metal boxes with papers and videos tapes from the wreckage of an old apartment building. As John reconstructs the past, he shares with the reader the stories of Conrad Dehmel, a German during the Second World War, and Timothy, a TV host in 1970 during the October Crisis. 

Although the futuristic setting is not typical of Canadian literature, or of Hugh MacLennan's other works, Voices in Time is a masterpiece. It moved me almost as much as his most famous novel Two Solitudes did the first time I read it. The prose, like in all of MacLennan's writing, is beautiful. It spoke to me. I found myself underlining phrases here and there that I felt embodied truths and questions I have about today's world. Voices in Time embodies the uncertainties of yesterday, but also the uncertainties of today. It's also a tragic love story, which makes it doubly hard hitting. 

Value Village Book Finds

A new Value Village second hand shop went in not far from my home about a month ago, so I rode the bus out today and browsed their book section. I found seven books, including an Everyman's Library and few vintage New Canadian Library paperbacks.

My favourite find today was this expo67 guide book. It only cost me $1.50. I've been fascinated with the Montreal 1967 World Exposition since I was 15. I'm happy to be able to add it to my collection of expo67 and Canadian centennial memorabilia. 

I found two New Canadian Library editions. I already own Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches if a Little Town in another edition, but since I collect these vintage NCL editions, I was pleased to pick it up.  

I also found an NCL edition of Anna Brownell Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, a work which I was introduced to while taking a class in early Canadian literature last summer. 

Additionally, I picked up the Coles Notes for Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes, a Canadian classic which I've loved since high school. I don't really need the Coles Notes, but they're a neat collectors item for my Canadian Lit. collection. 

I was pleased to come across A Military History of Canada by Desmond Morton, a book which I've heard good things about. The synopsis indicates that it questions that idea of Canada as a peacekeeping nation. With our current involvements in the war against ISIS and in the Ukraine, I think this is a very timely book for me to read. 

Last of all, I picked up this 1950 Everyman's Library edition of Peer Gynt by Isben. 

Reading Again

Over the past month I haven't had a whole lot of time to read or to write about anything not related to my classes. Now that I've handed in my last final paper and written most of my exams, I can finally dig into the pile of books I've been anxiously anticipating and hopefully post on here more frequently.

I started this blog almost exactly two years ago at the end of my first year of university. I wanted to make sure that I was absorbing what I read and thinking about it as well. Two years later, that's still what I want to do. The major difference between two years ago and now--apart from my ever evolving taste in reading material--is that now, unlike then, someone occasionally reads my posts.

To kick off my return to leisure reading, I thought I'd share a couple of the books I've bought over the past two or three months. Even when I'm not reading, I'm buying.

To start, I'll share my most recent buy, The Battle of London: Trudeau, Thatcher, and the Fight for Canada's Constitution by Frederic Bastien. When I pre-ordered the new Dean Brody CD that comes out April 21st (go check out his music!) I threw this in to get free shipping. Canadian Constitutional law and history have fascinated me for a long time, but until recently my reading and exploration have been fragmented. 

Next, I have Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. This was mandatory reading in my grade 12 English class back in high school. I hated it at the time, but it's been a few years and for whatever reason it keeps coming back to me. I will always be grateful to my high school English teachers for introducing me to Canadian Lit. I think it's time for a re-read. I couldn't resist the Penguin Modern Classics edition. 

Finally, I picked up Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an author who has quickly become one of my favourites. It should be a fascinating and perhaps challenging read as there don't appear to be any chapter or even paragraph breaks anywhere within the text. 

In My Mailbox Today: "Art of Rhetoric" (Aristotle)

I couldn't resist ordering this beautiful little Aristotle edition.

Breakfast at Tiffany's (Truman Capote)

Until about a month ago I had no idea that Breakfast at Tiffany's was a book. I've watched the Audrey Hepburn (1961) movie adaptation many times, and so I was excited when I came across this title.

If you've seen the movie, you'll know that Breakfast at Tiffany's is the story of the sophisticated and somewhat bohemian Holly Golightly. Holly, when she has "the reds" (her angry version of the blues) likes to go to Tiffany's. Who can forget the imagine of Hepburn walking the lonely sidewalks outside of Tiffany's in the early morning? There is no other character in literature quite like Holly Golightly. She claims that she can love anyone if she decides to, and yet she doesn't seem to love anyone enough to stay in one place, or with one person for very long. You love her, feel sorry for her, and dislike her at the same time.The story is told through the eyes of Holly's upstairs neighbour, a writer.

This edition, which I ordered all the way from Australia (I really really wanted some Popular Penguins), also contains three short stories: "House of Flowers," "A Diamond Guitar" and "A Christmas Memory." I would consider Breakfast at Tiffany's more of a novella than a novel, as in this edition it fills only 100 pages. It's a light read, making it perfect for a cold winter afternoon.

The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)

I think the cover of this book is what made me pick it up off the shelf at Indigo last week. The dust jacket is gorgeous--elegant really.

I've been slowly sampling Hemingway over the last six months or so. I will admit, I had an aversion to his writing after reading some of his short stories in my first year English courses. I was convinced that I hated him, but then I read A Moveable Feast and I changed my mind. 

I really liked The Sun Also Rises. The story is simple, but not simplistic. An American living in Paris (I love anything set in Paris) goes to Spain with a few friends to fish and to see the bull fights. They drink plenty of wine (so much that as I read I started to wish I had a bottle), sit in cafes and, for the most part, live a life of leisure. 

The introduction notes that Hemingway had recently read, and was influenced by Scott F.Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby when he wrote The Sun Also Rises. I definitely noticed the similarities in character-types and style as I read. I was left with a similar feeling at the end of both books, although I greatly preferred this one. 

The center of the novel is Brett, a somewhat helpless party girl who flutters from the arm of one man to another. Almost every man we meet in the novel is either in love with Brett or attracted to her. She's the archetype I've seen in so many 1920s/30s detective novels and black and white movies. I've grown to hate that archetype. Never in my real life have I ever encountered that woman. For such a central character, she came across as underdeveloped.

The dialogue, which was natural and humorous more than made up for the flatness of Brett. This is definitely one of the better Hemingway works I've read.  

In My Mailbox Today: Little Women

I already own a copy of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, but mine is a somewhat battered 1950s hard-cover edition. I had toyed with the idea of buying a good condition vintage copy, but when I saw this Puffin edition, I decided I loved it too much to pass it up. 

Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

The ending of this book took my breath away. I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude, but Love in the Time of Cholera is just as good, if not better. I don't know whether I should be crying or smiling! This is a book about love; it's about a woman, Fermina, who marries a good man, falls in love, and lives a relatively happy life. It's about a man, Florentino, who waits all his life suffering in unrequited love to try and win back the sweetheart of his youth. 

Unlike in One Hundred Years of Solitude, politics are far in the background. State violence and politics are there, but they aren't nearly as pronounced as they are in One Hundred Years of Solitude. This book is shorter and it deals with far fewer characters, but it's just as rich. 

One of my favourite scenes in this book--if you read it you'll understand why I found it so comical--is Fermina's wedding night. Fermina's new husband, expects her to be shy, and she is at first, but then she begins to examine his anatomy for the first time. After observing her husband's penis "with an interest that was beginning to seem more than scientific" she comments  on "how ugly it is," and how she thinks "it has too many things on it." Her husband agrees! When I was reading I laughed out loud because it's not he kind of love-making scene I expected when I first began to read it. 

I'm not sure whether I found Florentino, the man who waited all his life for another chance with Fermina, entirely tragic and romantic, or pathetic. As romantic as it sounds for a man to wait fifty-one years for a second chance with a teenage sweetheart, at many points in the novel I just wanted him to let go and get on with his life. 

I won't spoil the ending here. I will say, however, that this is one of the most beautiful novels about love that I've read in a long time. 

In My Mailbox Today: the Everyman's Library Edition of War and Peace

I deliberated over whether to buy this edition of War and Peace for over a month. I finally ordered it a few days ago and it arrived today. It's beautiful, and as with all Everyman's Library editions, the books are sturdy and pleasant to hold.

    

Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest (Everyman's Library)

Dashiell Hammett is one of the most memorable authors of detective fiction from the early 20th century. I'm sure I've said this before, but I LOVE Everyman's Library editions. I love the old editions and I love the new editions. I pretty much love the look and feel of any book printed by Everyman's Library. I bought this book because a) it's an Everyman's Library, and b) the first novel included is The Maltese Falcon. 

Humphrey Bogart fans will know that in 1941, he starred as private detective Sam Spade in the most well known film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. As I read the novel, I couldn't shake the image of Bogart from my interpretation of Sam Spade. For readers who don't know the story, The Maltese Falcon is about a private detective who is drawn into a case involving a mysterious gold and jeweled falcon statuette after his partner is murdered. What surprised me the most about this novel was discovering that much of dialogue used in the 1941 film was pulled directly from the pages of the book. As the introduction to this edition notes, Hammett was known for his excellent dialogue. 

The Thin Man is also about a private detective, but in this case Nick Charles is retired. He, inadvertently, is drawn into a murder investigation after the secretary and former lover of an friend is found murdered and his friend--an inventor who cannot be found--is accused. I enjoyed this novel as much, if not more, than The Maltese Falcon. 

The final novel in this edition is Red Harvest, the bloody story of a city run by gangsters and crooked cops. The private detective, who never reveals his name, is given a $10 000 cheque to clean up the city of Personville, often called Poisonville by its residents. Poisonville is a mining town. The narrator explains--and he does a lot of explaining in this novel--that the mine-owner used thugs and crooked cops to crush organized labour and drive out the IWW. When the smoke cleared he'd lost his grip on the city. While I like the premise of this novel, I found it lacking credibility at times and a few of the characters seemed either like cardboard figures or seemed exaggerated. Red Harvest, while not bad, is the weakest of the three novels in this edition. 

These three novels were my introduction to Dashiell Hammett. A little searching online revealed that Hammett published two more novels and some short fiction. Although you can't tell from his writing, he was apparently a political activist with an interest in civil rights. He was a member of the Communist Party (USA), was blacklisted and was forced to testify before the House of Un-American Activities Committee, although they took no further action against him. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

I own two copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude. One is a paperback that I got for Christmas from my aunt, and the other is a library discard first (english) edition from 1970. When I received the paperback for Christmas, I knew it was time to finally read it. 

Set in Columbia, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of a family and Macando, the town they founded. The real and surreal blend and become inseparable in this novel. Women can float away with sheets and children can be born with pig tails just as easily as men and women fall in love, and war shatters a peaceful existence. 

Macando begins as a tiny village cut off from the outside world and visited only by gypsies who bring flying carpets, ice, and magnets. As time passes, the outside world intrudes, bringing outside laws and conflicts. 

The brutal civil war that politically divides the town and takes Colonel Aureliano Buendia  far from home severs the village forever from its history of self-governance and self-reliance. In many ways, Colonel Aureliano is the most tragic of all the characters. He represents something real--he is the man (or woman) who fought and still fights against oppressive regimes for the right to collective, local power only to discover that the governments and corporations are stronger. 

Eventually, Macando becomes a "banana republic" of sorts. A fruit company moves in, builds fences, brings foreigners and exploits the local workers. When the workers seek justice, the company claims that they are not actually employees. One of my favourite lines in the book also happens to be one of the saddest and most frustrating (frustrating because it rings too true): "by decision of the court it was established and set down in solemn decrees that the workers did not exist." 

Eventually, when it rains for six years straight (a surreal plot point) the fruit company abandons the muddy town and leaves it and its residents to succumb to decline. 

There's so much more I could say about this book, but I'm still processing it all. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece and fully deserving of all the praise it has received over the years. Macando could be any town in South America, or in the world really. 

A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett)

When I was about eight or nine my grandparents took me to a Chapters and allowed me to chose a book as a gift. I chose this very edition of A Little Princess. Yet, in my childhood, I never once read the book. I'd wanted the little golden locket that came attached to the cover of the book much more than I'd wanted the actual book. 

Two weeks ago, I picked up A Little Princess, in the same edition I had years ago, for $8. Needless to say, I read it this time. (I am however, just a little disappointed that the book did not come with a locket this time). 

I watched the Shirley Temple adaptation many times as a child, and read an abridged picture book of the story, so I knew the basics of the story going in. Sara Crew is the daughter of rich Englishman. At the start of the story her father is taking her from India, where she was born, to a boarding school in London. Sara is gifted and good, two qualities which cause her classmates to refer to her as a "little princess." After the death of her father, Sara is left as a penniless, starving, servant girl. Like all fairy-tales, she lives happily ever after, in the end. 

It's a sweet, heartwarming story--in many ways a re-telling of Cinderella, but as I read though, I found myself critiquing. Class barriers are very rigid in this story.  

The Shirley Temple adaptation paints a somewhat rosier picture. Sara's friend and attic-mate Becky is welcome into Captain Crew's open arms as a daughter in the film adaptation, but in the original story, this is not so. Sara's new guardian invites Becky into his home, not as a daughter, but as a maid for Sara. There is an implicit understanding that Becky is a servant and will always be a servant. In the same way that Sara is always a princess--no matter how rich or poor she is--because she was born a princess, Becky is always a maid or a servant, because she was born into that role. 

Regardless of the class politics portrayed, A Little Princess is an excellent book. I wish I'd read it as a child. 

Anne of the Island (L.M. Montgomery)

Anne of the Island is the third of six books in L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series. Originally published in 1915, this book, like all of the Anne books, remains timeless. Sourcebooks Fire published this particular edition, and Jacqui Oakley designed the cover. 

This novel takes Anne outside of P.E.I to Redmond College in Kingsport, Nova Scotia. At the start of the novel she is 18 and by the end she 20. We find her a lot more grown-up and less whimsical. She deals with the death of a friend, the marriage of another, and her own uncertain feelings for Gilbert Blythe. Not to give anything away (we all know that they end up together anyway), but this is the book where Anne finally realizes her love for Gilbert. 

Anne of the Island, like all the Anne books, is considered young adult. It took me a little over two hours to read all 268 pages of the book. I have to say, it was just as good as the first time I read it.