Happy December to all of you! I’d love to hear what you’re reading these days. I’m always looking for recommendations even though I’ll never be able to keep up with all the books I want to read. After years of keeping track of books I want to read in a list on my computer, I’ve decided to start recording new recommendations in a notebook that was handmade (years ago) by my friend Maggie.

I’ve added the books by Ursula K. Le Guin that some of you recommended to me a few weeks ago, along with some books my friend Naomi wrote about in a recent blog post (including The List of Last Chances, by Christina Myers, and The Adversary, by Michael Crummey), The Lonely Hearts Book Club, by Lucy Gilmore (recommended by my friend and fellow L.M. Montgomery fan Nili because Anne of Green Gables features prominently), and many other titles.

What books would you like to receive over the holidays? What books are you thinking of giving as presents?

As I’ve said here before, I’m not in the habit of making lists of the best books I read each year, but since I did name one book in 2022 (Animal Person, by Alexander MacLeod), I’ll name one top favourite for this year: The Little Books of the Little Brontës, brilliantly written by Sara O’Leary and beautifully illustrated by Briony May Smith, in which the Brontë children are “a world unto themselves.”

“The books they write are tiny, but the worlds inside them are huge.”

My book recommendations notebook:

I’m reading After Anne: A Novel of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Life, by Logan Steiner, which focuses on Montgomery’s thirty-third birthday, at a time when she was engaged and had received news that the manuscript of Anne of Green Gables had been accepted for publication. This birthday, she knows, will feel very different from her birthdays in recent years, when there had been no manuscript and no publisher. Not even a completed manuscript.” In the past, “accompanying the sting of each of those birthdays was the old sinking feeling that would start up in her chest come November. Her habitual winter blues. Not that anyone would have known it about her. To nearly everyone, she was a ‘very jolly girl,’ ‘always in good spirits,’ no matter the season.”

I’m also interested in The Grace of Wild Things, a middle-grade novel by Heather Fawcett, inspired by Anne of Green Gables (and recommended by my friend Lisa). The heroine, Grace, asks, “Do you think one can have too much imagination? It seems to me it’s rather like having too much lemon shortbread or too many flowers in your garden. After all, if you had too little imagination, you’d spend your life finding fault with everything….”

My friend Hughena Matheson published a piece in The Hamilton Spectator yesterday with a list of book recommendations for children, including Lawrence Hill’s Beatrice and Croc Harry. Hill says he hopes the novel will speak “to children and adults of all ages who love language and who welcome story as one of humankind’s greatest gifts.”

A recent article on Robert McCloskey’s picture books sent me back to reread some old favourites: Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine, and Time of Wonder. In “Robert McCloskey’s Maine Trilogy as an Antidote to Climate Change Despair,” Ethan Warren quotes Gary D. Schmidt, who says that in “a world that chose to war with itself,” McCloskey provided an “absolute affirmation of the permanence and beauty and significance of the world.”

I took a picture of my daughter’s copy of Blueberries for Sal next to her painting of an enormous blueberry, which hangs on the wall in my office.

I’m looking forward to reading Juliette Wells’s new book A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist, and I enjoyed reading this excerpt, “How American Critics Originated Jane Austen Scholarship.” Juliette writes of Oscar Fay Adams, who “encouraged and equipped a new generation of readers, including but not limited to Americans, to cultivate their own appreciation of Austen’s works. Thus Adams stands too as the founder of what we would now call public humanities writing on Austen. All these extraordinary contributions he made with the credential only of his teaching degree, and without any academic affiliation at all.”

I’m keen to read two books by friends from the University of Alberta:

Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction: Crossing Borders, edited by Nora Foster Stovel,

and Apples on the Windowsill, by Shawna Lemay, “a series of meditations on still life, photography, beauty, and marriage.” You might remember my blog post about her fabulous novel Everything Affects Everyone, which I wrote about back in March.

Yesterday on her blog, Transactions with Beauty, Shawna recommended Lisa Whittington-Hill’s new book, Girls Interrupted: How Pop Culture is Failing Women, and I’ve added that to my book recommendations notebook as well. Whittington-Hill says it sometimes seems “that things are now better for women in Hollywood, in publishing, and in the music industry. That the problems have been fixed, that we can pat ourselves on the back for a job well done and move on. This book exists to prove otherwise.” Shawna writes that the book “will be the one I press upon a few friends, with ‘you HAVE to read this.’”

Here are a couple of L.M. Montgomery-related things I’d like to share with you. My friend Kate Scarth is the editor of the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies (and the author of guest posts for my blog on Jane Austen’s Emma—“Highbury Heights; or, George and Emma Knightley, Suburban Developers”—and Northanger Abbey—“‘Miss Morland; do but look at my horse’: Horses’ John Thorpe Problem”), and she wrote recently to share the exciting news about a special collection called “Writers and Artists Respond to L.M. Montgomery,” to be published in the Journal starting in November 2024, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Montgomery’s birth.

The call for submissions says “We encourage contributors to explore a wide range of Montgomery’s works—her adult novels, the Emily series, short stories, non-fiction, scrapbooks, photos, any of the Anne books, aspects of her biography. The work may be analytical, critical, personal, approving, disapproving—but it must come from artists. We seek responses from as many points of view, cultures, countries, backgrounds, and identities as possible. Montgomery’s appeal has been deep, enduring, and widely international. This special anniversary collection aims to reflect that.” More details are available here.

Yesterday, on the 149th anniversary of Montgomery’s birth, Benjamin Lefebvre published an essay by LMM that as far as he knows hasn’t been reprinted since its first appearance in February 1939, in the Dalhousie Gazette. It’s called “An Author Speaks,” and if you’re interested, you can find the full text at L.M. Montgomery Online. I like the advice Montgomery gives to writers: “Before attempting to write a book be sure you have something to say. It need not be a very great or lofty or profound something. … But if we have something to say that will bring a whiff of fragrance to a tired soul or a weary heart, or a glint of sunshine to a clouded life, then that something is worth saying and it is our duty to try to say it as well as in us lies.”

I also want to recommend this piece by Jillian Hess about “Creative People and Their Notebooks,” from her Substack newsletter, Noted. As a gift idea, she suggests the same kind of notebook the person’s favourite author, artist, or musician used. Octavia E. Butler, for example, used Mead’s Five-Star notebooks, and Toni Morrison used yellow legal pads.

I like what Morrison says about catching ideas before they disappear: “I have so many things to do: I have to get it down someplace so that I can refresh my memory about certain things, not about the overall work I’m doing, but about the details which could slide by me and slip away.”

Please do write and tell me what you’re reading, or looking forward to reading next. (And/or tell me about your favourite notebooks!)

Here’s the last flower from my mother’s garden, still thriving in late November:

And here are some recent photos from a visit to the look-off at Herring Cove Provincial Park:

And photos by Brenda Barry, sent to me by her sister Sandra: some “amazing leafy lichen,” ice on the Mersey River Trail, “a luminous leaf at the Historic Gardens” in Annapolis Royal, and “a lovely female American Black Duck resting on the pond at the French Basin Trail.”

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. I’m always interested to read your comments and messages. Thanks for reading!