![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllI managed only four and a half rereads during the month of February, and I still haven’t completed the fractional! I intended to read more, but there you go. I needed something to drive me to reach for the ‘to reread’ pile, and this ventured did that. I reread and reconsidered a couple of books.
I also treated myself by rereading ‘The Blue Castle’ by L.M. Montgomery, which I love, although that didn’t blind me to some weaknesses. It’s a lovely sort of fairy tale. In John Foster’s books and Valancy and Barney’s traipsing, Montgomery gets to wax rhapsodic about nature. With the respectable Stirling clan of Deerford, she gets to poke at human nature and hypocrisies.
But there’s depth to Valancy’s plight. Fear and habit have made her complaisant and meek, and complicit in her own misery all her life. When she is told she has only a year to live, she faces up to the fact that she hasn’t lived before and it’s about time she started. Her family think she’s mentally unstable as she lets the things she’s always thought out, and does things because she feels they’re right, not because they’re respectable.
This leads to the love story with Barney Snaith, which is unconventional, topsy-turvy, lovely and, in some ways, disappointing – his speeches towards the end both explain the mysteries about him and don’t quite ring true. It’s also striking that the happy ending for them is less pure than their enchanted first year of marriage – because Valancy is now Mrs Bernard Redfern, with responsibilities to Barney’s father. With everyone now knowing that Barney is a multimillionare’s son and respected author in his own right, instead of the degenerate he was rumoured to be, the Stirlings have come around to the match marvellously. The couple have to leave the cabin on the island in the lake that Valancy dubbed the Blue Castle, after the dream castle that sustained her for so long. They will return and they have each other, both won because they loved each other for themselves, and they have the same chance of many years ahead of them as any thirtysomething couple did in their day.
But, as ever, this is one of Montgomery’s bests, and I loved rereading it.
So, I don’t think Rereading February was a worthless exercise, and if I don’t reread more books, I’ll probably set aside another month like that in future. It was weird, though, to continue buying new books – as if I’d walk past a charity shop or second-hand bookshop and not browse! – whilst having to admit to myself that I wouldn’t be reading the book I’d purchased forthwith. It’s rare that I do, but normally there’s the possibility I might, so there was that change in perspective.
I also treated myself by rereading ‘The Blue Castle’ by L.M. Montgomery, which I love, although that didn’t blind me to some weaknesses. It’s a lovely sort of fairy tale. In John Foster’s books and Valancy and Barney’s traipsing, Montgomery gets to wax rhapsodic about nature. With the respectable Stirling clan of Deerford, she gets to poke at human nature and hypocrisies.
But there’s depth to Valancy’s plight. Fear and habit have made her complaisant and meek, and complicit in her own misery all her life. When she is told she has only a year to live, she faces up to the fact that she hasn’t lived before and it’s about time she started. Her family think she’s mentally unstable as she lets the things she’s always thought out, and does things because she feels they’re right, not because they’re respectable.
This leads to the love story with Barney Snaith, which is unconventional, topsy-turvy, lovely and, in some ways, disappointing – his speeches towards the end both explain the mysteries about him and don’t quite ring true. It’s also striking that the happy ending for them is less pure than their enchanted first year of marriage – because Valancy is now Mrs Bernard Redfern, with responsibilities to Barney’s father. With everyone now knowing that Barney is a multimillionare’s son and respected author in his own right, instead of the degenerate he was rumoured to be, the Stirlings have come around to the match marvellously. The couple have to leave the cabin on the island in the lake that Valancy dubbed the Blue Castle, after the dream castle that sustained her for so long. They will return and they have each other, both won because they loved each other for themselves, and they have the same chance of many years ahead of them as any thirtysomething couple did in their day.
But, as ever, this is one of Montgomery’s bests, and I loved rereading it.
So, I don’t think Rereading February was a worthless exercise, and if I don’t reread more books, I’ll probably set aside another month like that in future. It was weird, though, to continue buying new books – as if I’d walk past a charity shop or second-hand bookshop and not browse! – whilst having to admit to myself that I wouldn’t be reading the book I’d purchased forthwith. It’s rare that I do, but normally there’s the possibility I might, so there was that change in perspective.
