Since its publication in 1908, Anne of Green Gables has become one of the most-read and best-loved stories in the world. Translated into more than twenty languages and with at least fifty million copies sold worldwide, L.M. Montgomery’s classic novel has made her talkative and impulsive heroine Anne Shirley not only a Canadian icon but an international treasure as well. As inspiring today as it was a hundred years ago, Anne of Green Gables remains a testament to the powers of hope, friendship, and imagination.
This is an enduing work and one of my favorite novels. It’s not deep. It’s not long. It’s not hard to understand. It’s simply a beautiful story of a girl growing up. So, now that autumn has arrived, curl up on the couch with a mug of hot tea, snuggle under a cozy blanket, and just enjoy reading Anne of Green Gables.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
The hobbit-hole in question belongs to one Bilbo Baggins, an upstanding member of a “little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded dwarves.” He is, like most of his kind, well off, well fed, and best pleased when sitting by his own fire with a pipe, a glass of good beer, and a meal to look forward to. Certainly this particular hobbit is the last person one would expect to see set off on a hazardous journey; indeed, when Gandalf the Grey stops by one morning, “looking for someone to share in an adventure,” Baggins fervently wishes the wizard elsewhere. No such luck, however; soon 13 fortune-seeking dwarves have arrived on the hobbit’s doorstep in search of a burglar, and before he can even grab his hat or an umbrella, Bilbo Baggins is swept out his door and into a dangerous adventure.
The dwarves’ goal is to return to their ancestral home in the Lonely Mountains and reclaim a stolen fortune from the dragon Smaug. Along the way, they and their reluctant companion meet giant spiders, hostile elves, ravening wolves–and, most perilous of all, a subterranean creature named Gollum from whom Bilbo wins a magical ring in a riddling contest. It is from this life-or-death game in the dark that J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterwork, The Lord of the Rings, would eventually spring. Though The Hobbit is lighter in tone than the trilogy that follows, it has, like Bilbo Baggins himself, unexpected iron at its core. Don’t be fooled by its fairy-tale demeanor; this is very much a story for adults, though older children will enjoy it, too. By the time Bilbo returns to his comfortable hobbit-hole, he is a different person altogether, well primed for the bigger adventures to come–and so is the reader.
Tolkien’s words are beautiful. His story is breathtaking. If you haven’t read this fabulous story yet, pick it up this month. This sweeping tale will capture you in its magic. I’m so pleased to be reading now, with Literary Ladies!
Also, for the ladies who feel up to the challenge, because the new Jane Eyre movie (starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender) is being released into theaters on March 11th, I will also be holding an event for reading the book, watching the movie, then discussing the differences. I know that we read the book last year, and this is just an extra club activity for those who have the time and are planning to see the movie.
Generally considered the first English sensation novel, The Woman in White features the remarkable heroine Marian Halcombe and her sleuthing partner, drawing master Walter Hartright, pitted against the diabolical team of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde. A gripping tale of murder, intrigue, madness, and mistaken identity, Collins’s psychological thriller has never been out of print in the more than 140 years since its publication.
(From the publisher.)
I know that this was a busy month for many of you, with the holidays and all, but I hope that some of you took the time to read ‘The Woman in White’… it was certainly worth the time and effort!
As much as I would love to talk about the fabulous book all over again, you can read the majority of my thoughts on the book (and the movie version) here: http://www.literaryladies.com/2010/12/my-thoughts-on-the-woman-in-white-book-and-movie/
If you read ‘The Woman in White’ this month, please take a moment to share a quick thought or write several paragraphs. Whatever you have time for and what suits your fancy.
For those that are interested, here are the discussion questions for this book:
1. Laura is presented as an ideal of Victorian womanhood, obedient, respectful of social conventions, and willing to sacrifice her own wishes for others. How does her double, Anne Catherick, illuminate the dark side of that ideal?
2. Why is Marian so mesmerized by Fosco, who she says “has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him”? Why is Fosco able to see Marian, despite her physical unattractiveness, as a “magnificent creature”?
3. One critic has suggested that Marian and Fosco might be considered the true protagonists of The Woman in White. (In many ways they are much closer to Collins’s own bohemian sensibilities than Hartright and Laura.) In what sense might this be true? How would you interpret the story’s conclusion— especially Marian and Fosco’s fate—in this light?
4. The use of multiple narrators was one of Collins’s favorite storytelling techniques. What qualities does each narrator bring to the story? How does each change our view of the characters? Could the story have been told from a single viewpoint, and if so, whose?
(This set of questions issued by Penguin Group USA)
The question or topic that I want to pose to you for discussion is this:
What are your thoughts on how Collins portrays women in ‘The Woman in White’? From Marion to Laura to Anne…
I finished reading this month’s book today and it was incredible. It was wonderful. For me, it started out rather slowly, but, towards the middle and end I could hardly bring myself to put it down.
I understood the book well, but, to reinforce the story in my mind, I rented and watched the movie version starring Tara Fitzgerald as Marion and Justine Waddel as Laura. I enjoyed in immensely, but they did change some vital parts of the story. In the book, Hartright describes Marion as being “ugly”, yet, in the movie, Tara Fitzgerald was anything but. The mystery and Sir Percival’s Secret were changed drastically, the book was much “cleaner” -to put it in that sense. The book has a “clean” story and they altered that in the movie by putting in some more risqué references.
As I said before, I watched the movie to help me to grasp a better understanding of the novel. Instead, it succeeded in confusing me thoroughly and I had to go back in the book and read passages over again. To me, the book was 100 times better! There were many differences in the movie that I haven’t mentioned including the fact that, in the book, Marion’s last name in Halcombe and in the movie, it is changed to Fairlie, the same as Laura’s.
Marion (Tara Fitzgerald) and Laura (Justine Waddel)
Walter Hartright (Andrew Lincoln) and Marion (Tara Fitzgerald)
I adored the length of the book because it gave me time to become emotionally involved with the characters. I don’t think that Wilkie Collins characterized his characters extremely well, so it took me a long time to connect with them. But, once I did, and had been with them for 600 pages, I was sorry to see the book end. In my opinion, the movie moved along much to quickly for you to feel anything for the characters.
Have any of you finished the book and/or seen the movie?
One of the greatest mystery thrillers ever written, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White was a phenomenal bestseller in the 1860s, achieving even greater success than works by Dickens, Collins’s friend and mentor. Full of surprise, intrigue, and suspense, this vastly entertaining novel continues to enthrall readers today.
The story begins with an eerie midnight encounter between artist Walter Hartright and a ghostly woman dressed all in white who seems desperate to share a dark secret. The next day Hartright, engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie and her half sister, tells his pupils about the strange events of the previous evening. Determined to learn all they can about the mysterious woman in white, the three soon find themselves drawn into a chilling vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue.
Masterfully constructed, The Woman in White is dominated by two of the finest creations in all Victorian fiction—Marion Halcombe, dark, mannish, yet irresistibly fascinating, and Count Fosco, the sinister and flamboyant “Napoleon of Crime.”
(From Amazon.com, the Barnes and Noble edition of the book.)
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As a word to all of you: The Woman in White is a very long book and it has a rather slow beginning. I’ve currently read 200 of its 600 pages and I’m just really starting to enjoy the story. I know that December it a busy month for many of you, but, if you decide to participate this month, don’t give up too soon! This book is fascinating and well-worth your time.
How did you all like this book? I utterly adored reading it again and one of the members whom I talked about it with shared my sentiments.
As usual, I’m posting the discussion questions, but feel free to tell me any or all of the following:
Who was your favorite character?
What was your favorite line/letter?
Who would you cast as the characters if there was to be a movie made?
Did the book make you want to go to Guernsey?
etc., etc., etc.
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About the Reader’s Guide:
Celebrating literature, love, and the power of the human spirit, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is the story of an English author living in the shadow of World War II—and embarking on a writing project that will dramatically change her life. Unfolding in a series of letters, this enchanting novel introduces readers to the indomitable Juliet Ashton. Through Juliet’s correspondence with her publisher, best friend, and an absorbing cast of characters, readers discover that despite the personal losses she suffered in the Blitz, and author tours sometimes marked by mishaps, nothing can quell her enthusiasm for the written word. One day, she begins a different sort of correspondence, responding to a man who found her name on the flyleaf of a cherished secondhand book. He tells her that his name is Dawsey Adams, a native resident of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands recently liberated from Nazi occupation. Soon Juliet is drawn into Dawsey’s remarkable circle of friends, courageous men and women who formed the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society as a cover to protect them from the Germans. With their appetite for good books, and their determination to honor the island’s haunting recent history, this is a community that opens Juliet’s heart and mind in ways she could never have imagined.
The questions and discussion topics that follow are intended to enhance your reading of Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. We hope they will enrich your experience of this captivating novel.
Reading Guide
1. What was it like to read a novel composed entirely of letters? What do letters offer that no other form of writing (not even emails) can convey?
2. What makes Sidney and Sophie ideal friends for Juliet? What common ground do they share? Who has been a similar advocate in your life?
3. Dawsey first wrote to Juliet because books, on Charles Lamb or otherwise, were so difficult to obtain on Guernsey in the aftermath of the war. What differences did you note between bookselling in the novel and bookselling in your world? What makes book lovers unique, across all generations?
4. What were your first impressions of Dawsey? How was he different from the other men Juliet had known?
5. Discuss the poets, novelists, biographers, and other writers who capture the hearts of the members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. What does a reader’s taste in books say about his or her personality? Whose lives were changed the most by membership in the society?
6. Juliet occasionally receives mean-spirited correspondence from strangers, accusing both Elizabeth and Juliet of being immoral. What accounts for their judgmental ways?
7. In what ways were Juliet and Elizabeth kindred spirits? What did Elizabeth’s spontaneous invention of the society, as well as her brave final act, say about her approach to life?
8. Numerous Guernsey residents give Juliet access to their private memories of the occupation. Which voices were most memorable for you? What was the effect of reading a variety of responses to a shared tragedy?
9. Kit and Juliet complete each other in many ways. What did they need from each other? What qualities make Juliet an unconventional, excellent mother?
10. How did Remy’s presence enhance the lives of those on Guernsey? Through her survival, what recollections, hopes, and lessons also survived?
11. Juliet rejects marriage proposals from a man who is a stereotypical “great catch.” How would you have handled Juliet’s romantic entanglement? What truly makes someone a “great catch”?
12. What was the effect of reading a novel about an author’s experiences with writing, editing, and getting published? Did this enhance the book’s realism, though Juliet’s experience is a bit different from that of debut novelist Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece, children’s book author Annie Barrows?
13. What historical facts about life in England during World War II were you especially surprised to discover? What traits, such as remarkable stamina, are captured in a detail such as potato peel pie? In what ways does fiction provide a means for more fully understanding a non-fiction truth?
14. Which of the members of the Society is your favorite? Whose literary opinions are most like your own?
15. Do you agree with Isola that “reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad ones”?
As we are reading ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’ this month, I found, on the book’s website, a recipe for the infamous ‘potato peel pie’.
Here is my challenge for all of you participating this month: Make and try the recipe by the end of the month. Post your thoughts in the comment box of this post. Enjoy! (Or, at least try to. *smiles*)
Here’s a recipe for a potato peel pie, but I warn you, it tastes like paste. The more authentic it is, the nastier. These ingredients will make a very small pie (expand at will):
1 potato
1 beet
1 Tablespoon milk
Peel the potato and put the peelings in a pie pan. Don’t cook the peels, because you’re in the middle of an Occupation and you don’t have any fuel. Boil the potato and the beet together in salty water, but not for very long, due to the fuel problem. Just until you can stick a fork in the potato. Take them out and mash them up with the milk. Pour the glop in the pie pan. Bake at 375 for as short a time as is consonant with digestion (fuel again), say, fifteen minutes.
The finished product will look quite attractive and pink. If you squint, you can almost imagine raspberries. Don’t be fooled. It looks a lot better than it is. However, if you forgot that you were in the middle of WWII and added a bunch of butter and milk and salt, it could be quite tasty.
January 1946: writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.
Hello Literary Ladies!
It’s Cassie, back again from a lovely break while the wonderful Kyla/Liberty handled things around here.
I am so excited for this month because this is one of my favorite books that I have ever read. Ever.
I picked it up from my grandfather’s stack of books on Christmas Day of last year. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it the next day. As I read the final pages tears were streaming down my face.
This book is beautiful.
If you haven’t read any of the books for the club so far, this is the one I would recommend the highest. Once you read it, it will touch you in incredible ways and, I assure you, you will be glad that you did.
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Also, please check out the post below and join the ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ discussion.
Anyway, sorry I’m a few days late everyone! I’ve got my chemistry final exam on Tuesday and I’ve been swamped with studying!
How did you all enjoy this month’s book? I’ve talked to some of you and it sounds like this was a popular one! (It’s one of my favorite books! )
Anyway, I look forward to hearing your thoughts, and, if it suits your fancy, to reading and joining in discussion around the following questions OR whatever caught your interest.
(PLEASE note: You don’t need to fill out answers to all of the questions unless you want to. Just read through them and pick something that you feel like sharing or discussing further. It’s up to you and there are no rules about how much you can share- or how little. *smiles*)
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First, there were ten – a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they’re unwilling to reveal – and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. And only the dead are above suspicion…
Reading Group Guide Questions
1. Who is telling the story of And Then There Were None? What effect did the tone, voice, or language employed by the narrator have on you (i.e., it was frightening)? Explain.
2. What is a motive? (Distinguish between the words motive and motivation.) What motives, if any, did each of the ten guests have for committing these horrible murders?
3. Did you “see it coming”? If not, before you read the “Manuscript Document,” what did you think explained the murders? If you were asked to rewrite the story’s conclusion, which character would you make the murderer and what would see as his/her motive?
4. Which one of the killings depicted in the novel seemed especially accurate or believable to you, and which one seemed especially incredible or fantastic? How would you rewrite the former murder so that it is less realistic, or the latter so that it is less farfetched?
5. Discuss the depiction of group psychology in this novel. Are there any scenes where events or ideas are altered or influenced by how the characters interact with one another? Also, does the dynamic of group psychology in this novel strike you as realistic, frenzied, contrived, simplified, or otherwise?
6. Think a bit more about how this story is told, especially its remarkable plot. What are the inherent problems a storyteller might encounter in killing off all of his or her main characters one by one? And what are the problems an author might face in basing his or her plot on a familiar nursery rhyme? How does Christie successfully avoid these problems, or if you think she fails, how so?
7. Were there moments when you as a reader thought the characters were acting in ways such as you yourself would have acted? If so, explain.
If not, how and why would you have behaved differently?
8. Though there isn’t a real “main character,” Vera Claythorne is one of the more fully developed ones (if only because she lives longer). What do you think of the way that she dies and do you think it is consistent with her character up until that point?
9. The effect of guilt emerges as one of the major underlying themes in the book. Based on your own experience, how accurately does Christie portray the different human responses?
10. Talk about the idea of “justice” in the mystery. Did people “get what they deserved,” or were any of the characters punished unfairly? Does “just behavior” (i.e., Warfield punishing the others for their prior actions) mean that you are a “good” person? Why or why not?
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CHRISTIE ON “And Then There Were None”
And Then There Were None is one of the most carefully planned of Christie’s mysteries; she herself considered the plot “near-impossible.”
“It was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me…I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning, and I was pleased with what I had made of it.”—Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, 1977.
The rhyme comes from a Victorian music hall show song written by Frank Green in 1869, an adaptation in itself of the American comic song, Ten Little Indians, written by Septimus Winner, published in 1868.
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