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.

I was poking around to see if there was a release date for the next Skulduggery Pleasant book, and apparently it is August 29 (I assume that's UK, not America), and it has a title -- Skulduggery Pleasant: Last Stand of Dead Men.

So, I'm all excited about this, and THEN I see the author has a novella about Tanith Low being released at the end of this month: [link] (Again, pretty sure that's just UK.)

Holy crap, a book about Tanith. (And, one assumes, Billy-Ray Sanguine.) I am SO THRILLED.

Oooh, thanks for posting that, Steph! I have a feeling I would have missed out entirely until someone mentioned having read them otherwise...

It was sheer luck. I just got curious and started reading the author's blog, and lo and behold. A Tanith book! Yay!

All of the Chronicles of Narnia are on kindle for $1.99 today.