You all know the feeling. You have a pile of books waiting to be read. New shiny books sent by the publishers who are just waiting for you to read and let them know what you think; they all look fascinating and yet, there is not a single one you fancy reading today. Tomorrow perhaps, next week, whenever, but not today.
I have read two books in the last couple of days I want to post about but I can't be bothered. Don't misunderstand me, I loved them both but I feel a sense of total sloth descend upon me and I am getting very irritated and keep telling myself to Get a Grip. But I can't. So the only thing to do when in this sort of mood is to pull down an old and well loved book and read that. So this afternoon found me curled up on the sofa re-reading Jane of Lantern Hill by Lucy Maud Montgomery. This is one of her stand alone books, no Anne of Green Gables or Emily of New Moon, but Jane who lives with her mother and her domineering grandmother at No 60 Gay Street. "Gay Street, so Jane always thought, did not live up to its name. It was, she felt certain, the most melancholy street in Toronto..."
Jane thinks her father is dead, but in fact he is alive and kicking and writes to say he wants to get to know his daughter and she is to spend the summer with him on Prince Edward Island. Reluctantly she goes and immediately feels a kinship with her father and a love for the Island, where she had been born and where she had spent the first two years of her life. During the summer with her father, where he purchases a house on Lantern Hlll and where Jane for the first time in her life has the freedom to flourish and be herself, she matures and grows up so that she is able to cope with her grandmother back in the city who soon realises her domination over her granddaughter is over.
Of course, we know deep down that Jane's parents love each other and have been kept apart by the horrid grandma, who is a jealous and posessive mother who did not wish her daughter to marry a penniless writer, and we also know that it will all end happily. It does and this is never in any doubt, but while we are waiting for the inevitable final reunion, we spend our summers with Jane on Prince Edward Island and see it through her eyes and fall in love with it:
"There were silver and lilac sand dunes between them and the sea, extending into a bar across the harbour where great splendid, blue and white waves were racing to the long sun washed shore. Across the channel a white lighthouse stood against the sky and on the other side of the harbour were the shadowy crests of purple hills that dreamed with their arms around each other. And over it all the indefinable charm of a Prince Edward Island landscape"
Reading this again was the perfect way to get me back into a reading mood and tomorrow I will pull a new book out of the pile or one of those on my Victorian challenge and dive in and start off my read for 2009. But for today, meeting this old friend was just right.
Incidentally, my copy of this book was one of those unexpected finds. Many years ago I was in Brixton High Street and there was one of these cut price bookshops that move in for a short lease and then move out again. I wandered in and to my total astonishment and delight discovered not only this story by the wonderful LMM, but also The Blue Castle, The Tangled Web and Magic for Marigold. I had never heard of any of these so you can imagine how thrilled I was to stumble across them. The publisher is Angus and Robertson who, from a quick check on Google, appears to be an Australian publisher, which makes it all the more curious how they came to end up where they did. Just how did they get there?
Don't care really - just happy to have them...
