Rebecca Reads

I loved the Bookworms Carnival on fairy tales, and I put so many books on my TBR list. After reading through HTR&W’s prologue all about irony and metaphor, I’ve turned to some of these great fairy tales this week for an escape to the world of imagination.
My community library only has a few of the [...]

In his introduction to a 1912 translation by V.S. Vernon Jones of Aesop’s Fables (available online here via Project Gutenberg), G.K. Chesterton claimed that Aesop’s fame “was all the more deserved because he never deserved it.” Chesterton continued:
“The firm foundations of common sense, the shrewd shots at uncommon sense, that characterise all the Fables, belong [...]

I love Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, so when I saw Eric Carle’s Fairy Tales and Fables, I thought I’d enjoy it too. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy his retellings of Aesop, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.

I read Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories because I wanted to read this Nobel-prize winning author and also because I remembered the imaginative premise of his magical world and wanted to experience his world as an adult. I very much enjoyed reading them again, although there are some “politically incorrect” stereotypes in them I hadn’t [...]