“Anne of Windy Poplars” by Lucy Maud Montgomery

This was a pleasant enough read, but many of the occurrences are becoming cliches. Anne always prevails.

“The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories” by Penelope Lively

This was an amusingly cynical collection of short stories. I like the author’s dry wit.

“1Q84” by Haruki Murakami

This was 1000 pages of oddness. I suppose the message was that reality is not fixed. Murakami is a world famous author and the writing must have been decent enough to keep me going until the end. Two moons vs one moon. Little people. Etc etc  To the reading world, this book was a great literary disappointment. I wonder how I would like his more successful novels.

“The Dark Half” by Stephen King

This was a very ugly, unpleasant and predictable book which I ended up skimming. I also did not like the fact that the book was self-referential. Its descriptions of the writing process were so detailed that they took me out of the story and made me think about King instead. Why do I keep going back to him? All his characters and locales have become the same. I can whiff his writing style immediately.

“Anne of the Island” by Lucy Maud Montgomery

I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It was well written, and I, of course, was quite pleased when Anne and Gilbert found true love.

“How to Behave in a Crowd” by Camille Bordas

I enjoyed this book. It was a good light read for Antigua, but it was also clever and insightful about human nature. The narrator, a young teenage boy in a family of genius siblings, was appealing because he didn’t recognize his own worth until the end, when he read the last pages of his brother’s thesis. The black humour made me laugh a few times.

“Leonardo da Vinci” by Walter Isaacson

This was an interesting enough book that took me forever to finish. The author was so firm in some of his artistic opinions that he made me wonder whether or not he was qualified enough to have those opinions.