Books to read before visiting Canada
*This post contains affiliate links, which means if you purchase a book through these links I’ll make a few cents at no extra cost to you!
If you would like to support your nearest independent bookstore, or the collective of indie bookshops, consider purchasing your books from Bookshop. Thank you for supporting the blog!
Prince Edward Island
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Anne is a high-spirited, optimistic, red-headed orphan with a huge imagination. Although the Cuthburt siblings of Green Gables originally meant to adopt a boy to help with farm work, when Anne shows up instead, she charms her way into their hearts and they decide to keep her. Despite her orphan background, and a number of entertaining foibles and scrapes, Anne slowly becomes beloved by the rest of Avonlea Village as well.
Montgomery not only makes her readers fall for the garrulous Anne and the Avonlea community, but also for the beautiful Prince Edward Island they call home. Anne often describes the island’s scenery with such fantastical names that one might wonder if Montgomery exaggerated the island’s beauty in her writing. You’ll be wanting to visit Green Gables and meet the inhabitants of PEI yourself after reading Anne of Green Gables!
Purchase all eight Anne of Green Gables books: Amazon | Bookshop
Read the post: Plan the Perfect Anne of Green Gables Vacation
The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery
If you’d like to find out more about Anne’s author and her real life on Prince Edward Island, you’ll want to read Lucy Maud Montgomery’s published selected journals. Montgomery, similarly to Anne, was raised by an elderly couple, her grandparents. Although they didn’t live in the house that inspired the novel’s Green Gables, they did live nearly next door to Montgomery’s relatives that lived in what is today Green Gables Heritage Place.
Anne of Green Gables was rejected by several publishers and the manuscript was put away in a hat box until Montgomery, luckily for us, decided to make one last attempt at publishing. Though after the book became a hit and her publisher requested she write a series of Anne books, Montgomery’s enthusiasm for writing the happy Anne waned as her personal life grew more difficult.
Finally, Montgomery, interestingly, provided us with the only female account of life on the Canadian home front during World War I.
Purchase The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 1: 1889-1910 via Amazon | Bookshop
Purchase The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Vol. 2: 1910-1921 via Amazon
Purchase The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Vol. 3: 1921-1929 via Amazon
Purchase The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Vol. 4: 1929-1935 via Amazon | Bookshop
Purchase The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Vol. 5: 1935-1942 via Amazon | Bookshop
Yukon Territory
The Best of Robert Service
Robert Service is known as the poet of the Yukon. Although only living in the Yukon a short time, and not actually being a prospector himself, he captured the strangeness of the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush and the landscape perfectly in his poetry. Even today a visit to the Yukon will show his words still ring true.
“There’s a land — oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back — and I will.”
–The Spell of the Yukon by Robert Frost
Purchase The Best of Robert Service via Amazon | Bookshop
Read the post: Follow Robert Service to the Yukon for a Winter Weekend
Get up to 2 books free!
Too busy to get through these books in print? Try listening to them via Audible! Sign up for Audible Premium Plus and you get up to two books free! I not only use Audible to multi-task at home, but when traveling I love listening to books while I walk around the location/s the story takes place.