Spring in Kashmir: Grab a cuppa and read these five masterpieces this season

Srinagar: Spring is what we look forward to all through the dark and snowy days in Kashmir. With new life and blossoms showing up everywhere, it’s time to set aside our winter reads and re-evaluate our bookshelf with some fresh reads. 

The Kashmir Monitor has compiled a list of five books that are just like spring and promise an optimistic and hopeful reading.

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery: A much-loved classic is perfect for sunny and fragrant days. It talks about an orphan finding her place in a new world and explores all the vulnerability, expectations, and dreams of a child growing up. It is also a wonderful portrait of a time, a place, a family… and, most of all, love.

A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell: Sue Hubbell writes about her solitary life after her thirty-year marriage broke up. She found herself alone and broke on a small Ozarks farm. Keeping bees, she found solace in the natural world. She began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things that she cared about.

The result is one of the best-loved books ever written about life on the land, about a woman finding her way in middle age

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame: For many years, this book has enchanted children of all ages. The Wind in the Willows begins with Mole spring-cleaning his home. (He soon grows exhausted and decides to heed the call of spring and head above ground to enjoy the warm weather.) What follows is a celebration of Mole’s spring fever as he sets forth into the world with Mr. Toad, Badger, and Ratty in one of the most charming pieces of English literature.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Since its immediate success in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work “her darling child” and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, “as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.” There is something about this book that makes it an ideal read for the fresh and crisp days of spring.

Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl: Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents–her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father–and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to the caregiver. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies, and native bees.