The other night, feeling overwhelmed by life, I crawled into bed early with Anne of Green Gables and a beer. And let me tell you, what I had there was a winning combination.
I own the best edition of Anne ever. It’s the 1997 Oxford University Press Annotated Anne of Green Gables and every page has sidebars crammed with definitions (What is a gimlet?); explanations of Anne’s references (Who had the first alabaster brow?); photos (What would Matthew’s horse and buggy have looked like?); etc., etc. Best of all, none of it is obtrusive. If you don’t feel like learning extra stuff and you just want to read the book (which was the case the other night when I curled up with the beer), you can do that. Or, you can take as much time as you want, reading every single annotation. It is a divinely beautiful reading experience.
In fact, it is so divinely beautiful that it has inspired an Anne-related poll. Please vote!
(Btw, if you’re reading this post somewhere other than on my actual site and want to vote, just click on my question below, or preferably, click here.)
