Books Read in November: Part 1, Novels

I'm getting a little tired of telling you about (almost) every book I read. But I'll stick with this process until year's end so as to have a complete record. This month, I admit, some of it was pretty juvenile...

Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis

As my little book club was making plans for our next meeting, we realized there was no way we could plan it when SC could be there. She was going to be traveling for six or seven weeks. Since one of those weeks was to be her annual pilgrimage to a C.S. Lewis conference, we decided to join her virtually by discussing Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. (Someday, I'll go to one of these conferences myself. This year I was tempted but just didn't think I could afford it.)

By the way, Caspian is not much like the movie. Here’s a line that jumped off the page this time:

“Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.”

A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Reptile Room, by Lemony Snicket

I thought the first Lemony Snicket book was quite funny, and gave my paperback copy to a friend who was missing hers in exchange for the chance to borrow this one, #2. (I still have it, two months later, so maybe I’m part of the problem in her lending library now!) This was more of the same – an amusing way to spend an hour, but I don’t know if I’ll ask for #3.

Emily Climbs, by L.M. Montgomery

You may know her only as the author of Anne of Green Gables, but I find several of Montgomery’s characters much more appealing than Anne. Emily may be the best of the lot. Picked up this one for a re-read at just the right time, struggling with some personal issues not unlike those of 14-year-old, aspiring writer Emily Byrd Starr: Who defines who I am and what I’m worth? How do others see me, and how am I going to respond to that? Ah yes. Do you ever feel like you’re still 14?

Mischievous Maid Faynie, by Laura Jean Libbey

“Don’t try to imitate Kipling,” advised Mr Carpenter, Emily’s teacher, in the 1925 novel mentioned above. “If you must imitate, imitate Laura Jean Libbey.” A quick peek at Wikipedia suggested that Mr. Carpenter must be joking. Still, I downloaded this 1899 “dime novel” free from Gutenberg to amuse me of an evening. It is a scream! Our heroine – a beautiful but sensitive heiress – is kidnapped under very nefarious circumstances, forced to marry at gunpoint, collapses into a dead faint, is buried alive - and then dug up again (not much the worse for it). And that’s just the beginning!

Also read...

A few more typical novels written for grown-up persons like you and me. I found all of them worth reading but none that you need to add to your "must-read" list:

• Messenger of Truth, by Jacqueline Winspear
• The Bird Catcher, by Laura Jacobs
• Worth A Thousand Words, by Stacy Hawkins Adams
• False Witness: A Sister Agatha Mystery, by Aimee and David Thurlo
  

Note: image swiped from an educational website, via a Google Images search.