Happy Windsday! (At lease in my neck of the woods...)

Today is Wed. check-in, and despite a sick kidlet and husband, I have made some progress on Aeris since Sunday.  I added about 3,000 words to that.  I probably won't find time to write today, however, because I got Compis back from type editing and there are a few things I need to decide on, change, and fix.  I'm so excited, because my world map should be finished this week, too!  That means all I have to do is stick it all together, format it, and then I will FINALLY be able to upload the first book in my Five Tribes series.  I've been wanting to do this for a while now -I'm not the most patient person on the planet- so this is big news in my life.

I was on the Kindle Boards yesterday and someone posed the question about people's once-a-year books.  As in: what book do you read every year?  I found the answersand also the time of year that people re-read their books to be so interesting.  A lot of the people who answered always read the same book at Christmas time, whether it was A Christmas Carol or Pride & Prejudice.


My answer was once a year I read a Jane Austen book.  Could be the above mentioned Pride & Prejudice, but I'm also partial to Emma (which is hilarious, in 1800 terms), Sense & Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion.  Jane Austen is probably not Shakespeare, for her time or any other, but her characters are worth loving and her love stories are always based on the characters getting to know each other over time (*gasp* it takes TIME to fall in love?  Who would have thought???).  Most people read Pride & Prejudice as their first Austen novel, but I tried that one in high school and it didn't connect for me.  A few years later, I picked up Emma and it was love, love, love for me.  So Emma is actually the book that made me love Austen and it is the one I always recommend to those wanting to try her out.

The other book I read every year is The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery (she's the author of Anne of Green Gables, for those of you who don't know her).  The goodreads description doesn't do it justice, so here is my version:  Valancy Sterling is 29, TWENTY-NINE and nothing good has every happened to her.  She gets sick every year, she's never been in love, and she lives with her mother and old maiden aunt.  Every Sunday she is subjected to family dinner with all her relatives, who she must please because they are all rich and she is poor.  The poor thing isn't even allowed to read novels!!!  One day she goes to the doctor is told that she's dying of a heart condition, her death could happen at any moment, and it will for certain in a manner of months.  Needless to say, Valancy decides she's had enough and a hilarious set of circumstances ensue.
This book makes me laugh out loud every time I read it and my sister and I have an unspoken pact between us to read it every year.  I highly recommend it!

An interesting side note to this story:  Colleen McCullough (author of the famous Thorn Birds) has a book she wrote about 80 years later called The Ladies of Missalonghi that is a complete ripoff of this book.  Old maid, lives with mother and aunt.  They are poor, and always dress her in brown.  Her relatives are all rich and she has to be nice to them, and she has a pretty cousin who gets everything while she gets nothing.  She even goes to the doctor and gets her heart attack warning.  It's still a good story in its own way and I own a copy of it, too, but it is EERY how similar these two books are.  I digress.

Are you a person who reads a book once and walks away or do you have a book(or two) you read every year?