The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery

I read this almost in one sitting and it was like balm on my soul. Very predictable story, but filled with well-drawn characters and beautiful images. Sometimes it's nice to read a book with a happy ending :)

"'There is no such thing as freedom on earth,' he said. 'Only different kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. You think you are free now because you've escaped from a peculiarly unbearable kind of bondage. But are you? You love me -- that's a bondage.'

'Who said or wrote that "the prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is"?' asked Valancy dreamily, clinging to his arm as they climbed up the rock steps.

'Ah, now you have it,' said Barney. 'That's all the freedom we can hope for -- the freedom to choose our prison. But, Moonlight' -- he stopped at the door of the Blue Castle and looked about him -- at the glorious lake, the great, shadowy woods, the bonfires, the twinkling lights -- 'Moonlight, I'm glad to be home again. When I came down through the woods and saw my home lights -- mine -- gleaming out under the old pines -- something I'd never seen before -- oh, girl, I was glad -- glad!'

But in spite of Barney's doctrine on bondage, Valancy thought they were splendidly free. It was amazing to be able to sit up half the night and look at the moon if you wanted to. To be late for meals if you wanted to -- she who had always been rebuked so sharply by her mother and so reproachfully by Cousin Stickles if she were one minute late. Dawdle over meals as long as you wanted to. Leave your crusts if you wanted to. Not come home at all for meals if you wanted to. Sit on a sun-warm rock and paddle your bare feet in the hot sand if you wanted to. Just sit and do nothing in the beautiful silence if you wanted to. In short, do any fool thing you wanted to whenever the notion took you. If that wasn't freedom, what was?" (154-155)

"...white birches shining among the dark spruces like beautiful women's bodies -- winter snows and rose-red sunset fires -- lakes drunken with moonshine..." (205)

"She recalled all his friendly looks and quips and jests -- his little compliments -- his caresses. She counted them all over as a woman might count her jewels -- not one did she miss from the first day they had met." (205)

(1926. New York: Bantom, 1989)

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer

"In 1858, a year after the massacre, Brigham Young reluctantly agreed to admit federal troops into Utah and to step down as territorial governor, bringing an end to the threat of all-out war between Saints and the United States. But persistent rumors that Mormons had committed unspeakable atrocities against the Fancher wagon train kept drifting up from the southern settlements, threatening the fragile peace.

President Buchanan's secretary of war ordered army brevet major James H. Carlton to investigate the matter. Arriving at the Mountain Meadows in the spring of 1859, Carlton was sickened to discover that, nearly two years after the event, the valley was littered with skulls, bones, clumps of women's hair, and scraps of children's clothing bleaching in the sun. An army surgeon reported that many of the skulls 'bore marks of violence, being pierced with bullet holes, or shattered with heavy blows, or cleft with some sharp-edged instrument.' The nature of the bullet wounds, he concluded, 'showed that fire-arms had been discharged close to the head.'

'There has been a great and fearful crime perpetrated,' Carlton declared. His soldiers gathered up whatever bones they could find, interred them in a common grave, and then laboriously hauled stones from the surrounding hillsides to build a massive, if crude, monument above it. At the apex of this rock pile, which was twelve feet high and fifty feet in circumference, they placed a wooden cross inscribed with the epigraph 'Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.'

In May 1861, Brigham Young happened upon this memorial as he was passing through the meadow during a tour of his southern settlements. According to Apostle Wilford Woodruff, who was accompanying the prophet, when Brigham read the inscription on the cross he pondered it for a short while and then proposed an emendation: 'Vengeance is mine,' the prophet smugly asserted, 'and I have taken a little.' A moment later one of the Saints in his entourage threw a rope over the cross and pulled it down, while others began dismantling the stones and scattering them. By the time Brigham's party departed the Mountain Meadows, the monument to the slaughtered emigrants had been obliterated." (231-232)


"The men who run the modern LDS Church deem the history of their religion to be sacred, and have long tried to retain tight proprietary control over how that history is presented to the world. Indeed, LDS leaders have explicitly stated that they believe accounts of Mormon history should be, above all else, 'faith promoting' -- that is to say, accounts of Mormon history should be celebratory rather than critical, and should downplay, omit, or deny sensitive or unsavory aspects of that history. As Apostle Boyd Packer (presently second in line to become LDS President and Prophet) declared in an infamous 1981 speech, 'There is a temptation . . . to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith-promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful. . . . In an effort to be objective, impartial, and scholarly, a writer or a teacher may unwittingly be giving equal time to the adversary. . . . In the Church we are not neutral. We are one-sided. There is a war going on, and we are engaged in it.' This war is for the minds and souls of the earth's population -- a war that Latter-day Saints wage with all the resources at their disposal." (362)

(New York: Anchor Books, 2004)

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

"And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach." (47)

"Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down. Out on the pale criss-crossed sand, high-stepping, fringed, gauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was still enlarging the pool), and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountain side. And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the smoke of steamers made waver upon the horizon, she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves, crouching over the pool, she brooded." (75-76)

"Lily Briscoe watched her drifting into that strange no-man's land where to follow people is impossible and yet their going inflicts such a chill on those who watch them that they always try at least to follow them with their eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have sunk beneath the horizon." (84)

"...let the tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock..." (116)

(1927. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989)