Spring is a magical time that promises new beginnings. It is also a great time to start a new book. For me, reading is a journey, an opportunity to enter into another world. Whether it is reading to gain new perspectives, or simply just for enjoyment. This list comprises of the best classics to read in Spring.
1. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnin, 1922.
This novel tells the story of four different women in nineteen-twenties England who leave their damp and rainy surroundings to go on a holiday to a secluded coastal castle in Italy. Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Wilkins, who belong to the same ladies’ club but have never spoken, become acquainted after reading an advertisement for villas for rent in a newspaper.
These ladies find common ground in that both are struggling to make the best of unhappy marriages. Having decided to seek other ladies to help share expenses, they reluctantly take on the waspish, elderly Mrs. Fisher and the stunning, but aloof, Lady Caroline Dester. The four women come together at the castle and find rejuvenation in the tranquil beauty of their surroundings, rediscovering hope and love.
2. East of Eden by John Steinbeck, 1952.
East of Eden is John Steinbeck’s most ambitious novel set in Salinas Valley, California. This powerful and ardent novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families- the Trasks and the Hamiltons. The Trasks generations hopelessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
“It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times.”
“It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times.”
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity; the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love’s absence.
This is a novel that stays with you for a long time after you read it. It is the perfect book to start reading this Spring.
3. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, 1908.
A Room with a View is a penetrating social comedy and a brilliant study of contrasts – in values, social class, and cultural perspectives – and the ingenuity of fate. Its heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, visits Italy with her prim cousin Charlotte as a chaperone, where she meets the unconventional, lower class Mr. Emerson and his son, George.
Upon her return to England, Lucy becomes engaged to the supercilious Cecil Vyse, but finds herself increasingly torn between the expectations of the world in which she moves and the passionate yearnings of her heart.
4. Middle March by George Elliot, 1832.
George Eliot’s influential and highly unusual book Middlemarch is, according to its subtitle, a “study of provincial life.” At its centre are the beautiful and inquisitive Dorothea Brooke and the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate, who both have to abandon their idealist views when faced with the reality of daily life.
The novel depicts small-town life in the 1830s with its class system, rivalries, and social restrictions in minute detail. She beautifully sketches even minor characters, letting the reader into their thoughts and struggles. This is considered to be one of Eliot’s best work.
5. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1908.
Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of aging brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a girl instead of the boy they had sent for. Thus begins a story of transformation for all three; indeed the whole rural community of Avonlea comes under Anne’s influence in some way. We see her grow from a girl to a young woman of sixteen, making her mistakes, and not always learning from them. Intelligent, hot-headed as her own red hair, unwilling to take a moral truth as read until she works it out for herself, she must also face grief and loss and learn the true meaning of love. Part Tom Sawyer, part Jane Eyre, by the end of Anne of Green Gables, Anne has become the heroine of her own story.
