An irregular installment of What I’ve Quit Reading: Maud Hart Lovelace’s Early Candlelight, a historical fiction novel about life at Fort Snelling in Minnesota in the 1930s. In between the lackluster Early Candlelight and Gentlemen from England I think I have to accept that I just don’t particularly care for Lovelace’s adult fiction. (But she does have one more picture book that I want to read.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A couple of months ago, I commented to skygiants , “I think I’m going to give up on Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.”

“You can if you want to BREAK MY HEART,” said skygiants , or words to that effect, so meekly I returned to the book, and at long last I have finished! And I am glad that I stuck with it (even though I also believe in my heart that Dickens maybe didn’t need a full eight hundred pages to tell this story) just because it’s nice to see how things play out for everyone. Special props to the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren, the real star of the show.

I had Monday and Tuesday off for fall break, so on Tuesday I hit up the archives and read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Good Wolf (a very slight fairy tale about a little boy who meets a magical wolf who takes him to a magical Snow Party which all the animals shrink down to the size of kittens to attend) and Alice Dalgleish’s A Book for Jennifer: A Story of London Children in the Eighteenth Century and of Mr. Newbery’s Juvenile Library.

This latter book I read because it was illustrated by Katherine Milhous, of The Egg Tree fame, and indeed the illustrations were charming. I particularly liked the one of the street with Mr. Newbery’s bookshop, with all the little detailed shops all around.

What I’m Reading Now

The stated purpose of Among the Shadows, the collection of L. M. Montgomery’s “darker” stories, is to show that Montgomery did indeed have a dark side, but actually I think the stories are mostly showing her melodramatic side: the man who falls in love with a magnificent but ruined woman only for her to die in his arms a week later, the girl who falls in a dead faint at the very moment her far-distant lover dies, etc. Now I enjoy a bit of good melodrama as much as anyone, but let’s face it, if you want to bolster Montgomery’s reputation as a serious writer, you need to showcase her Rilla of Ingleside aspect rather than the Kilmeny of the Orchard side.

What I Plan to Read Next

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.

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