Recently, rereading Anne of Green Gables, I had to stop and ask myself why. The answer was, “Because it was the first thing I grabbed on my way to the subway,” but the general idea is that the book is a little weird.

Long the domain of spinsters-in-training, children’s literature enthusiasts, and hordes of preteen Japanese schoolgirls, Anne of Green Gables is a classic of literature, and the prototype for all those young adult books where a spunky young woman messes up for 200 pages and then everthing is fine again. However, this genre is hard to translate for the men in your life – your boyfriend, your dad, your priest. They only understand Man Things, like HTML code!

If you’ve ever wanted to explain why the sight of a redhead with braids makes you scream “KAWAII!” and lunge for a camera, use the handy HTML psuedocode below.

NOTE: I don’t know how to write code, so please don’t email me and tell me my loop is faulty, because seriously, where would you even implement Anne of Green Gables HTML?

then insert=”wacky situation” [involving “overly imaginative absentmindedness”]

introduce item [class = “Avonlea”] for = “opinions”

learn=”lesson”

counter +1>

then insert = “academic ambition”

insert = “Gilbert”

learn = “slightly more mature lesson”>

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Genevieve is a prolific writer of speculative fiction living in New York, but you’ll never find her there because millions of people live there and Genevieve likes her privacy. Examples of her fiction can be found in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Federations, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Her first novel is forthcoming in 2011. Also? She has terrible taste in movies.