What is your favorite book?

I have so many favorite books. It is hard to choose from among them! However, spring always makes me long for my favorite literary character, Anne of Green Gables. Springtime on Prince Edward Island (although it arrives later there than here) is such a beautiful time, and Lucy Maud Montgomery does an amazing job of capturing the essence of the season throughout the eight Anne books. It is an annual tradition for me to re-read these books to celebrate the coming of spring. (After all, C.S. Lewis said: "It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.")

If you would like extra credit in English class, make a poster for your favorite book. Make sure you include some pictures, the bibliographical information, a quote from the book, and an explanation for why you love this book. Why do you read it over and over? You may use my sample below as an example. This will be due on April 1, 2011 at 7:50 a.m.

Craving for Spring

Spring is almost here! In the meantime, we have the end-of-winter dreary weather with frequent rain and clouds (to help the trees and flowers in their growth).

Anyone who writes out this portion of the poem "Craving for Spring" by D. H. Lawrence in green ink and turns it in by Friday, March 11, at 7:50 a.m. will receive extra credit in English.

Craving for Spring
by D.H. Lawrence

I wish it were spring in the world.

Let it be spring!
Come, bubbling, surging tide of sap!
Come, rush of creation!
Come, life! surge through this mass of mortification!
Come, sweep away these exquisite, ghastly first-flowers,
which are rather last-flowers!
Come, thaw down their cool portentousness, dissolve them:
snowdrops, straight, death-veined exhalations of white and purple crocuses,
flowers of the penumbra, issue of corruption, nourished in mortification,
jets of exquisite finality;
Come, spring, make havoc of them! . . .

I wish that spring
would start the thundering traffic of feet
new feet on the earth, beating with impatience. . . .

Ah come, come quickly, spring!
come and lift us towards our culmination, we myriads;
we who have never flowered, like patient cactuses.
Come and lift us to our end, to blossom, bring us to our summer
we who are winter-weary in the winter of the of the world.
Come making the chaffinch nests hollow and cosy,
come and soften the willow buds till they are puffed and furred,
then blow them over with gold.
Coma and cajole the gawky colt’s-foot flowers. . . .

Oh, if it be true, and the living darkness of the blood of man is purpling with violets,
if the violets are coming out from under the rack of men, winter-rotten and fallen,
we shall have spring.
Pray not to die on this Pisgah blossoming with violets.
Pray to live through.
If you catch a whiff of violets from the darkness of the shadow of man
it will be spring in the world,
it will be spring in the world of the living;
wonderment organising itself, heralding itself with the violets,
stirring of new seasons.