Comfort Books

If you have followed my blog long enough, you know that I am dedicated to, apart from other things, recommending only the best books I have ever read. Rarely will I recommend a mediocre book, unless I think it would be beneficial or interesting to others, putting aside my own preferences.

You may have kids, so you’ll want to pay particularly close attention to this week’s recommendation.

The children’s section at your local bookstore is chock-full of all sorts of books about kid vampires and zombie dogs and mindless babble. The teen section is loaded with slutty “role models” and adolescents discovering their “true selves” coming out of the closet.

And the adult section of the fiction genre is no different from the kids and teens books combined. It takes hard work to dig out the gems of fiction from all the excrement dripping off the shelves with price tags of  $9.99 and up.

Ironic, isn’t it? That a guy who writes fictional books hates fiction so much. It’s not that I hate fiction… there’s just so much bad fiction, both in content and story. One gem of fiction that I keep coming back to after my wife introduced me to them several years ago is the Anne of Green Gables books by Lucy Maud Montgomery (there are eight in all). Now, don’t be too quick to write these books off as just some old books that wouldn’t be their worth in gold today. In fact, we’re more in need of this kind of writing more than ever. And yes, it is possible for good wholesome drama to still be enormously  successful in this day and age just as it was before. (I think I need only to mention Downton Abbey.)

In the Anne books, the characters are very real, and very relational. Anne is not some goody-two-shoes who dresses properly and goes to church every Sunday. Though the story is set in the turn of the twentieth century, none of the characters fit the clichéd prototype we “advanced thinkers” have coined historical figures with.

Often funny, sometimes sad, this set of books is absent of gratuitous sensuality and meaningless perversity that too many authors feel obligated to smear their books with today. Your daughters will embrace these books as their favorites all their lives, and men who appreciate solid storytelling and in-depth character-development will not want to miss out on this timeless, classic series of books.

(And did I mention that adoption is a BIG theme in these books?)

And by the way. I know Kevin Sullivan put out a wonderful tribute to the Anne books a long time ago, but glancing at the picture of Anne above, don’t you think Disney would do well to make an animated adaption of the series? What are you thoughts?

Check out the website for my Image Credit.

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