Reading is my oldest and favorite hobby.  I literally can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to curl up with a good book.  Here are my reads for September, 2013…

The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag (Flavia de Luce #2), by Alan Bradley – I love Flavia!  This second installment in the mystery series about an eleven-year-old diabolical chemist who helps the police solve murders (whether they like it or not) was such fun.  It was even better than the first (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie), because there was no need to spend time introducing the characters.  Even so, Bradley takes his time setting up the mystery.  This might be irritating in another series, but I just enjoyed the ride here, chuckling over Flavia’s antics and her spats with her older sisters.  Of course, once the murder took place, the pace of the story picked up accordingly.  This was a perfect choice for moving weekend – light and funny reading over an emotional, tiring few days.  I’m looking forward to picking up the next in the series soon.

Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables #1), by L. M. Montgomery – Ah, Anne.  How I love thee.  Let me count the ways: your fiery red hair and your temper to match; your flights of imagination; your penchant for giving “poetical” names to every place you encounter; your talent for getting into “scrapes”; your thirst for pretty clothes; your energetic rivalry with Gilbert Blythe… Anne is an old, old friend from my childhood and I’ve been meaning to visit with her again for a very long time.  I’m working my way through the series, so look for posts about each of the eight Anne books coming soon.

Anne of Avonlea (Anne of Green Gables #2), by L. M. Montgomery – Oh, what fun.  Anne is teaching at the Avonlea school, struggling with her pupil Anthony Pye, who is convinced that a “girl teacher” can’t possibly be any good.  Anne is determined to make Anthony love her, even though the rest of Avonlea advises her not to waste her time – he’s a Pye, after all.  But other than her travails with Anthony, Anne’s life is sweet.  She’s enjoying her old friends (Diana) and new (Gilbert) alike, she’s found kindred spirits in little Paul Irving (another one of her students) and Miss Lavender Lewis (a recluse who lives in a quaint stone house).  And she and Marilla have adopted a pair of twins – no, Anne can’t get away from twins.  But these twins, Davy and Dora Keith, are full of sweetness (both) and mischief (just Davy), and they bring all kinds of additional joy to Green Gables.  Anne of Avonlea is, I think, my second favorite installment in this series.

Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam Trilogy #1), by Margaret Atwood – I couldn’t be the only person out of the loop when it comes to this trilogy, and with the third volume (MaddAddam) just released, I decided now was the time to get with the program.  Oryx and Crake opens with a scene of its main character, Snowman, sleeping in a tree.  As far as Snowman (who used to be called Jimmy) knows, he’s the only human being left on the planet after a plague has wiped out his species.  He’s surrounded by prowling animals – pigoons, wolvogs and rakunks – and has been cast in the role of protector of the Children of Crake, a tribe genetically engineered to replace humanity.  In need of supplies, Snowman travels to the Paradice Dome, the one-time domain of his erstwhile friend Crake, and Oryx, the beautiful, elusive woman beloved of both Snowman and Crake.  As he travels, Snowman reflects on his memories of Oryx and Crake and the chain of events which led to the near-extinction of humanity.  So.  That’s a long recap, but it’s a weird book, so it’s necessary.  This being Margaret Atwood, it was incredibly well-written and incredibly disturbing.  Atwood’s point is that we don’t know what will be the consequences of our current rage for scientific “improvements,” and she sprinkles in enough reality to make this a recognizable – and therefore scarier – world.  It was a page-turner, and I was up late reading it.  My only complaint: I could have done without the scenes of child abuse.  They weren’t necessary to the story, in my opinion.  (I understand the point she was trying to make: humanity was so desensitized, at this point, that it was normal.  But she could have stuck to the descriptions of televised violence that she also included, and made the point just as strongly.)  Anyway, I knew it was coming, so that helped a little (and if you want to read this book, be forewarned: you can’t avoid these parts), but it was still upsetting.  I guess that means Atwood did her job, but… Anyway, the rest of the book was just scary-disturbing enough, and provided plenty of food for thought, so I did like it.  It would have been a five-star book for me, but for the child abuse.  Prospective readers, beware.

Anne of the Island (Anne of Green Gables #3), by L. M. Montgomery – Now this one is my favorite book in the Anne series, and always has been.  Anne’s been working hard and saving her pennies for the last two years, and she finally gets to go to Redmond College!  With old friends Priscilla Grant and Gilbert Blythe, and new friend Philippa Gordon by her side, Anne learns to navigate the college scene.  She feels countrified and out of place at first, but she soon puts “soul-roots” into her new abode, and the result is four years of friendship, achievement, and… romance!  Loved every moment.

Anne of Windy Poplars (Anne of Green Gables #4), by L. M. Montgomery – In this volume, Anne has taken on the position of principal of Summerside High School, where she plans to serve three years during (spoiler alert!) her engagement to Gilbert Blythe.  She gets off to a rocky start, because the prickly Pringles, “the royal family of Summerside,” oppose her appointment as principal and decide to make her life miserable.  But thanks to kindness and a little bit of confidential information (which never hurts) Anne wins over the Pringle clan and everyone else in Summerside.  She spends three happy years under the roof of “the widows” of Windy Poplars, bantering with their housekeeper Rebecca Dew, communing with the cat, and meddling in other people’s love affairs (sometimes with good results, sometimes not).  And at the end, Anne has a store of memories to take with her into married life.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre has been my favorite book since I first read it, back in high school, and this read-through was no exception.  I noticed so many more things about the book than I did in previous reads.  For more, see my posts from the Septemb-Eyre readalong, hosted by Kerry of Entomology of a Bookworm, here: Chapters I-XI; Chapters XII-XXI; Chapters XXII-XXIX; Chapters XXX-End.

The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam Trilogy #2), by Margaret Atwood – I’m now completely hooked on the MaddAddam trilogy (I have the third volume, MaddAddam, out from the library right now, because I’ve got to know how this ends).  I actually liked The Year of the Flood better than its predecessor, Oryx and Crake.  It’s not a sequel so much as a companion volume; many of the events of The Year of the Flood take place simultaneously with the events of Oryx and Crake, and while the main characters differ, there is some overlap.  (Characters from Oryx and Crake that appear in The Year of the Flood include Brenda, a.k.a. Ren; Jimmy, a.k.a. Snowman; Glenn, a.k.a. Crake; Amanda; Bernice; Jimmy’s mom; Zeb, a.k.a. Spirit Bear; and Oryx, briefly.)  The Year of the Flood focuses on the God’s Gardeners, a religious sect that was mentioned a few times in Oryx and Crake.  The Gardeners, led by kindly Adam One, have long predicted a “waterless flood” that will wipe out humanity.  Now the flood has happened: a plague has all but obliterated the human race.  A few survive, however, including Toby, a God’s Gardener sheltering in the AnooYoo Spa-in-the-Park, and Ren, a trapeze dancer locked inside a quarantine zone in Scales & Tails, a high-end men’s club.  Both Ren and Toby must figure out how to make their ways through this strange new “garden” they find themselves left in.  Fascinating; still pretty violent, but without the upsetting child abuse from Oryx and Crake, and extremely chilling.  I liked The Year of the Flood much better than Oryx and Crake, and I can’t wait to read the conclusion of the trilogy!

Lexicon, by Max Barry – What a mind-bender… in a good way!  I grabbed this off the “new materials” shelf at the library and read it in just over 24 hours… couldn’t put it down.  It’s two stories going on simultaneously: that of Emily Ruff, who is snatched off the San Francisco streets and sent to a secretive high school, where she learns to “persuade” people using “word voodoo” and where the best students graduate as “poets,” take on a new name and go to work for an anonymous, but very powerful organization; and that of Wil Parke, who is brutally ambushed in an airport bathroom, jabbed in the eye, and told that he is an “outlier” immune to “segmentation” and the key to a shadowy conflict between the organization and its ex-poets.  Wil and his captor, T.S. Eliot, dodge assassins sent by Virginia Woolf.  The reader is left to piece together clues to try to determine the relationship between Eliot and Woolf, and who is really the villain.  Is it Woolf?  Eliot?  Someone else?  Nobody?  Everybody?  I kept telling hubby that I had no freaking clue what was going on in this book, but it was an awesome ride.

Anne’s House of Dreams (Anne of Green Gables #5), by L. M. Montgomery – Some of these later Anne books, I don’t remember as well.  When I was a kid, I loved the first few – telling the story of the young adult Anne – and the last, Rilla of Ingleside, about Anne’s daughter as a young woman.  I didn’t remember much of Anne’s House of Dreams, but now I think it’s going to take its place alongside Anne of the Island as one of my favorites.  There is so much in this book – humor, romance, Island atmosphere, and tragedy.  I was laughing out loud, turning pages feverishly, and soaking tissues multiple times while reading this book.  Loved.

The Rathbones, by Janice Clark – Hmmmm.  I was intrigued by the description of this novel as “The Odyssey by way of Edgar Allan Poe,” but in the end, I wasn’t as blown away as I expected to be.  The story of the Rathbone family’s fall from prominence, which mirrored the gradual disappearance of the sperm whales the Rathbone men hunted, and of the journey that young Mercy Rathbone and her cousin Mordecai take, was very well-written and intensely atmospheric, but it wasn’t as captivating as I had expected it to be.  Liked, but didn’t love.

So, there’s September for you!  I made plenty of time to read this month – even when I should have been unpacking – and I have quite a list to show for it.  Septemb-Eyre took up part of the reading schedule and was time very well spent; I still love Jane Eyre with all my heart.  But I also dove into some other, equally compelling, worlds – the Prince Edward Island of my dear old kindred spirit, Anne Shirley, and the post-apocalyptic world of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.  In October, I’m looking forward to cracking open MaddAddam and finishing out the trilogy, and to continuing my blissful stroll through the Anne books.  Fall 2013 is shaping up to be a very good reading season, indeed.