The Blue Castle

It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, what the rest of the family and I have been reading and watching, and what I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.

As I am starting this post on Saturday night, we had temps — er – temp of 5. In the morning snow is supposed to start and when it all ends Monday night, we are supposed to have close to 18 inches of snow.

I really hope we don’t get as much as they say, though, because the high temp is supposed to be 15 degrees, which I think means this will be a very heavy, wet snow. We live in a rural area so that could mean power outages. We have a woodstove that could keep us warm downstairs but we would have to worry about our pipes freezing since we do not have a generator. I believe that’s something we will need to invest in at some point soon. Our neighbors have generators, which I think they purchased after a tornado hit here on our street about six years ago, wiping out power for several days.

I’m sure many of you, if you are in the Northern and Middle U.S. are facing a similar situation as us. Stay safe out there, everyone.

Since we are going to be snowed in, I have been planning how to get through it all without worrying too much. I plan to watch movies, read books, and sip tea or cocoa.

To keep themselves occupied, Little Miss has been video chatting with her friend and The Boy has been chatting with his friend and playing video games. The Husband has been cleaning the house (he’s much better at that than I am) and reading and doing a little work for the newspaper he is at the editor at.

He expects to be snowed in Monday and will work from home. As long as we have power that is.

Erin (www.crackercrumblife.com) and I held our Crafternoon Zoom call yesterday and it was very nice to chat with people from all over the world. We chat while we craft and if you are interested in taking part, please let me or Erin know. It is just a relaxed time to chat, make new friends, and forget about our troubles. We keep conversations as free of politics or hard stuff as much as we can.

UPDATE:

It is 12:24 P.M. as I am finishing up this post and it is about 10 degrees out (-12 C) and we have about six inches of snow on the ground. The snow is supposed to stop sometime tonight and we are expected to have up to 18 inches of snow when it is all done.

What I/We’ve Been Reading

Just Finished

I didn’t finish anything this weekend.

In Progress

I’ve been reading Miss Read’s Village Diary by Miss Read, The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery (a reread), and just started Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien.

I’m enjoying all three. Miss Read’s books are such easygoing, relaxing reads.

Up Soon

I hope to finish Miss Read this week so I can add The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham to my reading line up.

I read the first few pages about a month ago and it intrigued me.

Cat from Cat’s Wire needs to let me know if it is good or not. *wink*

After that I plan to start the February Agatha Christie Read for the Agatha Christie challenge, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead.

What The Family is Reading

Little Miss and I started The Singing Tree by Kate Seredy. We’ve also been listening to Winnie The Pooh on Audible.

The Husband is reading….

What I/We’ve Been Watching

I loved this YouTube video about how to read more classic books.

And this video about how to cut back on buying books you never read.

I watched After The Thin Man, the second movie in The Thin Man series, yesterday, and earlier in the week I watched episode two of season six of All Creatures Great And Small.

Today I hope to watch another old movie, probably a James Cagney, for my Winter of Cagney.

I’ve had to change my schedule of Cagney movies again because I have found yet another movie that is not streaming anywhere and can’t be found for very cheap on DVD. Two movies now, Man of a Thousand Faces and Angels With Dirty Faces, are going to have to be taken off my list as I figure out how to watch them in the future.

The Husband says these movies are most likely no longer in print and have not been licensed for streaming, hence my challenge in finding them. Man of A Thousand Faces costs $40 most places and is mainly on BluRay and Angels With Dirty Faces (a movie with Cagney and Humphrey Bogart) is on DVD but $19.95. I will probably set the aside for another time and slide two Cagney movies that I can find streaming into my list instead.

What I’ve Been Writing

Last week on the blog I shared:

What I/We’ve Been Listening To

David Phelps with Laura Osnes singing a song from The Phantom of the Opera.

Photos From Last Week

Some Housekeeping

Erin (Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs) and I host a monthly bookish link party called A Good Book and A Cup of Tea. This link-up is for book and reading posts or anything related to books and reading (even movies based on books!). Each link party will be open for a month. You can find that link up for this month here.

Each week, I host the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot with some great hosts. It goes live Thursday night but you can share any kind of blog posts (family-friendly) there until Tuesday of each week. You can check my recent posts on the sidebar to the right for the most recent link-party.

Now It’s Your Turn

What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.

This post is linked up with The Sunday Post at Kimba at Caffeinated Reviewer, The Sunday Salon with Deb at Readerbuzz, and Book Date: It’s Monday! What are you reading hosted by Kathyrn at The Book Date. Stacking the Shelves is hosted by Reading Reality.

Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.

You can find my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.

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If you would like to support my writing (and add to the fund for my daughter’s online art/science classes), you can do so here.

I cannot even begin to explain how much I loved The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery.

This was the first book I had read by her that was not in the Anne of Green Gables series and I was blown away by it.

The voice in this book was eons away from what I’d read in Anne of Green Gables and that’s not meant to disparage Anne. I absolutely loved Anne of Green Gables and a couple of the other books in the series (a couple I did not like at all ) but The Blue Castle was even more bold and romantic and poetic.

It read more like a book that would have been written at a time later than 1926. Way beyond its years, this book captivated me with its boldness and enchanted me with its heartwarming essence.

I love the main character, even if I wouldn’t have made some of the choices she made – though, maybe I would have if I had been in the circumstances she had been.

Valancy is 29 years old but is treated like a child by her mother, cousins, aunts, and uncles. They refer to her as overweight, boring, half-witted, and expect her to do what they say. They act like she’s always sick or going to get sick. She never does anything exciting and wants to be in love but never has or had anyone love her.

To get herself through her mundane days, she imagines a “blue castle” where everything is bright and beautiful and handsome suitors come to court her. She dreams of a day where someone will love her and take her away from the dark sadness of her life. She reads books about nature and how to connect with it by a man named John Foster, escaping from her world through his beautiful words.

She’s been having pains in her chest, though, and she doesn’t like doctors but she finally decides to go to one. When she does, her entire life changes. Her life begins right before she is told it will end.

She begins to change how she acts and acts completely differently from how she has acted all of her life. Her change in her future shakes her awake and she begins to go after what she wants instead of waiting for it to happen.

There are so many great quotes in this book. I was underlining like a madwoman. I don’t usually mark up a book but I felt like I had to for this one.

Here are a few that I either underlined or marked in my Kindle version:

“If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you’ll never be and you need not waste time in trying.”

It was three o’clock in the morning – the wisest and most accursed hour of the clock. But sometimes it sets us free.

“Just to love! She did not ask to be loved. It was rapture enough just to sit there beside him in silence, alone in the summer night in the white splendor of moonshine, with the wind blowing down on them out of the pine woods.”

“But though she was not afraid of death she was not indifferent to it. She found that she _resented_ it; it was not fair that she should have to die when she had never lived. Rebellion flamed up in her soul as the dark hours passed by—not because she had no future but because she had no past.”

“I’ve been trying to please other people all my life and failed,” she said. “After this I shall please myself. I shall never pretend anything again. I’ve breathed an atmosphere of fibs and pretences and evasions all my life. What a luxury it will be to tell the truth! I may not be able to do much that I want to do but I won’t do another thing that I don’t want to do. Mother can pout for weeks—I shan’t worry over it. ‘Despair is a free man—hope is a slave.’”

One of my favorite quotes was: “Fear is the original sin. Almost all of the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something. It is a cold slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear, and it is of all things degrading.”

I have other favorite quotes but they would be spoilers and I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.

If I was going to express anything negative about this book it would probably be that the beginning of Valancy’s story, where she is stuck in depression and lack of love from her family, goes on for a bit too long for me. It’s a slog to get through it and I almost thought of putting the book down. I probably wouldn’t have made it through if it hadn’t been for the way Montgomery wove some humor and sarcasm into those chapters.

Some readers have criticized how Valancy acts toward her family after she’s been told she will die soon and, yes, she is harsh to them, but I think we as the reader really need to put ourselves in her shoes. She was treated horribly for 29 years and now that she believes she doesn’t have much longer to live, she’s letting loose. I am pretty sure I’d do the same thing for at least a little while and then I’d tone it down some.

This is a book that could have been filled with heartache and bitterness but instead it is a book full of hope and a type of awakening to how precious life is. To me, the message is that we need to grab ahold of every moment and experience we can because we never know when we will lost the opportunity to do so.

Have you read The Blue Castle? What did you think of it? Are there any other L.M. Montgomery books you enjoyed?