Outlaw: The Legend of Robin Hood by Tony Lee

I was not in the mood for trying to write about Paradise Lost last night, so I thought I’d take a Milton break and read something else on my shelf. After I finished I Kill Giants (read my thoughts) two weeks ago, I’d felt a strange compulsion to go check out some more graphic novels. It’s only strange because I have never felt that before! Outlaw: The Legend of Robin Hood caught my attention from the YA shelf at the library, and last night was the perfect time for a little folkloric fun. Continue reading »

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkein

As I think everyone knows, The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkein continues where The Fellowship of the Ring left off. The Two Towers is split in two halves, with the first part focusing on the remaining members of the broken fellowship and the second half focusing on Frodo and Sam’s journey. While I had found some delightful things in Fellowship, this book was dark, and it just kept getting darker. I am delaying starting the final book of the trilogy. Continue reading »

Genre Fiction: A Tolkein, A Heyer, and A Verne

During the first two weeks of March, I read three lighter genre classic authors. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring took me to the fantastic Middle Earth, Georgette Heyer’s The Talisman Ring was an amusing foray into romantic historical fiction (albeit an unrealistic one), and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was an incredibly convincing science fiction novel that visited not space, as modern science fiction does, but the unknown seas of the nineteenth century.
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Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston

The introduction to my volume of Zora Neale Hurston’s retelling of the Biblical Exodus calls this a “badly flawed novel” and I’m sure it is. Hurston is basing her novel on a Biblical tale that lacks strong women characters, and she’s trying to make it feel modern. The introduction also criticizes the stereotyped way in which Hurston tries to capture black speech. It’s not written in dialect, but it does capture idioms and mannerisms.

All that said, I really liked reading Moses, Man of the Mountain. I have a fascination with retellings of the Exodus.* Because of that interest, then, I liked Hurston’s novel simply because of the premise: tell the story of Moses and the Hebrews basing it on African-American folkloric practices (hoodoo and magic). Continue reading »

Castle Waiting by Linda Medley

In Castle Waiting, Linda Medley delightfully tells some new fairy tales. Some of the tales are reminiscent of traditional fairy tales, but most of them are original in some clever way.

Castle Waiting is a rundown castle that is a refuge for a small community of outcast creatures. It is a place for acceptance, and learning the stories of the remarkable characters in the castle helps us to do so. Continue reading »

The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy

It’s bawdy. It’s erotic. It may be inappropriate for young minds. It’s irreverent, especially considering a strict Islamic world such as the 1500s when they were written. And yet, The Arabian Nights has historically been an immensely popular collection of stories.

As The New Lifetime Reading Plan reminds me, these were one of the first “best-sellers,” the popular fiction of centuries past. I read the tales to gain a better understanding of a traditional literature.

It’s easy to see the appeal.  The stories remind me of the Grimm brothers’ tales in that magical things take extreme directions. But while Grimms’ tales had morals and were told in the guise of children’s tales, The Arabian Nights tell plain crude stories that cater to the basest of instincts: sex, betrayal, alcohol, and thievery to name just a few. But beyond the magical elements and the crudity, the tales themselves claim a higher place as they emphasize the import of story-telling in general. Continue reading »

Caldecott Corner Author Spotlight: Simms Taback

Simms Taback has an illustration style all his own. His children’s picture book illustrations are often a blend of watercolor, gouache (an opaque watercolor painting), pencil, ink, collage, and I even observed some crayon illustrations. His colors are bright and his books have subtle jokes in the illustrations (for the parents to find). So far, he has won the Caldecott Medal once (in 2000 for Joseph Had a Little Overcoat) and he was a Caldecott Honor once (for There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly). Continue reading »

The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi is almost a fairy tale. There is a magical fairy, there are talking animals, and of course, there is talking marionette who wants to be a real boy. And yet, Collodi’s tale fell just a little short of fairy tale status because of the obvious moralizing lessons: the lessons substantially subtracted from the fairy tale-like charm. Nonetheless, children may enjoy Pinocchio’s adventures, and they will probably also learn from Pinocchio’s mistakes and scold him for his foolish choices as they follow him along the path to becoming a real boy. Continue reading »

Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales

Reading Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales was a repetitive process. My 630-page leather edition (from Barnes and Noble Books; not same version as the Amazon link at left) included numerous retellings of stories very similar; it felt as if the compilers were taking translations from multiple sources. Then again, maybe the Grimm brothers wrote down similar stories with similar themes multiple times for their readers. They were, after all, trying capture the folk tales of the era; maybe those folk tales were likewise repetitive.

The Barnes and Noble edition I read did not include an introduction, so my experience was simply with the stories themselves. Despite the repetition of stories, I highly enjoyed reading the collection, especially as I took them slowly, reading a few stories (up to 20 or 30 pages) a day, mostly in the evening before bed. True “bedtime stories.”

But these stories probably aren’t for children, unless the children are pretty thick-skinned. (Note that I classify it, on this site, as Fiction, not Children’s Literature.) Grimm’s stories had blatant morals (such as how laziness leads to your death and wicked stepmothers who abuse children must, in the end, meet their horrendous end) and gruesome violence (such as stepmothers who decapitate stepchildren, girls so desperate to get a man they cut off their toes, and travelers who blind starving fellow travelers as payment for food).

Nevertheless, I still enjoyed the retreat into a world in which the animals one meets on the path are really princes in disguise, in which the dead come back to life, and in which magical fairies and witches regularly rescue those who really are deserving of assistance.

I don’t want to live in the world of the Brother’s Grimm. The violence and retribution is horrendous. Yet, the fairy aspects of the tales made some of them magical, and I look forward to visiting other fairy tales in the future – including Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen.

Have you read Grimm? What was your verdict: Violent or Magical? I, personally, am torn between the two. Continue reading »

The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkein

In flowing, beautiful language, The Silmarillion tells the origin and early tales of J.R.R. Tolkein’s middle-earth. Written as “Elven” songs, The Silmarillion is dense at times. Yet as the tale of the creation of Arda and the children of Ilúvatar (both Elves and men) unfolded, I was in awe of not just Tolkein’s incredible control over language but with his unbounded imagination in creating a new world with new gods, fantastic creatures, and a familiar story of good versus evil.

I’ve been told that The Silmarillion is not for the faint of heart. I’ve been told that The Silmarillion is only for die-hard fans of The Lord of the Rings. I’ve been told that The Silmarillion is impossible to understand and get through.

I don’t think so.

I have never read The Hobbit. I have never read The Lord of the Rings (although I started once). I watched the movies and was entertained. And then, as my husband and I read The Silmarillion together over the past six months, reading about 20 pages a week, I personally have come to love the style, the stories, and the world Tolkein has masterfully created. Continue reading »