So, flipping through an old issue of Entertainment Weekly, they did an article featuring the Favorite Books of "Lit Stars". The graphic has a picture like it's a snapshot of their bookshelves, which is how I noticed that of the 13 listed by Stephenie Meyers, I only don't have 3. I feel a little dirty.

She has 13 books?? I thought she just had the four Twilight books, The Host, and that Bree Tanner thing.

Probably a copy or 2 of the Book of Mormon...

...Or wait, are you talking about books she's written?

Ooooh, now I understand.

Anne's House of Dreams is still boring(I bought the whole collection for the kindle recently for a dollar.) I thought I was just being a touchy teen feminist, but she really does spend a lot of this volume being complimented by adorable rustics. It's like Green Gables badfic.(Although being mature and sedate and telling your doctor husband he's awesome are not exactly compelling drama, either.)

Anne's House of Dreams was where I stopped reading on my first read through of those books. The subplot with the brain damage was just too much, and not much of anything else happened. It wasn't until several years later that I decided to give it a try again and realized how much the story picked up again in Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside.

realized how much the story picked up again in Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside

Yeah, there's a really dreadful "Woe, Gilbert doesn't love me anymore!" moment in Anne of Ingleside, which I really really loathe. It's so... pedestrian. And I will never not be annoyed at the way Anne's writing is set aside as some petty little thing incompatible with the Most Important Task of homemaker & mother.

Which makes me wonder what Montgomery had in mind for Emily, after she marries Teddy and starts a family. Emily is utterly and completely obsessed with writing: will she give it up to be a mother, too?

Yeah, it seems like, for Anne, imagining out the stories is the fun part, and writing them down is just the conventional way of recording them. It seems like she'd be just as happy to be telling her stories to an audience (like her kids) as she would be with publishing them. But with Emily, it's the actual writing, not just making stories, that she loves.

Rediscovering Anne of Green Gables through my sixth graders' eyes has been such a joy. We are having so much fun with it!

I just finished Seraphina which I found surprisingly moving. And I hate books with dragons (to the point that it was a limiting factor in Game of Thrones for me), FWIW.