Thanksgiving holiday! I finished/read THREE books with my time off! It was awesome!!
The Grey Fairy Book
Edited by Andrew Lang
387 pages
Dover Publications, Inc., 1967
(An unabridged and unaltered replication of the work originally published in 1900)
One day, while stumbling around Wikipedia, I came across a bizarre little fairy tale simply titled The Bear. Long and short of it: a king loves his daughter so much, he locks her up and never lets her leave the castle. This makes her sad, so her fairy godmother or some such instructs her to ask the king for a bear's skin and a wheelbarrow. The fairy then places a spell on the wheelbarrow so it will take the Princess anywhere she wants to go. So, disguised as a bear riding in a magic wheelbarrow, the Princess escapes without drawing any attention to herself whatsoever. She's eventually captured by a Prince of another kingdom, who takes the amazing talking bear home to do chores for him. Eventually he falls in love with her (sans bear skin) at a party, and they get married.
Wikipedia told me this and other similarly strange, obscure fairy tales had been collected into a volume called The Grey Fairy Book, and I knew I had to read it. So I did.
These stories were collected from all over Europe and north Africa and it really showed, as the style and subject matter varied from demon ponies to fairy charms to thieving Jews to cannibals. Some of our heroes slaughtered people in gruesome ways due to a simple insult. In one story, a boy who could see two days into the future (more or less) killed his mother and father as well as an old woman, seven young boys, and his uncle's boss, mostly because his uncle was a fool. Many of these stories were just a random sequence of events that seemed to end only when the storyteller grew bored, at which point everything wrapped up in about three sentences. Just weird, weird stuff.
There were one or two tales I really did enjoy, however. And it was really very cool to get a glimpse at the many different types of fairy tale tradition. I don't know that there's a lot in here for me to adapt into a children's theatre format one day, but you never know. That delightful story where the sparrow tricks a carter into killing both of his horses before tricking his wife into cutting off his head because the man ran over her friend the dog is just screaming to be made into a musical!
The Green River Trail
by Ralph Compton
304 pages
St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2011
I'm not sure when this was originally published, but it wasn't 2011. Actually, the copy I read was an older print, but I don't have that publishing information at hand, so I'll just use the newer info.
I haven't decided yet if I like westerns or not. This is only my second, and I've enjoyed both of them, for what they are. It seems to me the strength of the western is generally the Wild West mystique rather than the story itself. Green River Trail was a pretty standard trail drive story. Four guys decide to drive some cattle from Texas to Utah. They buy horses, they take wives, they hire some cowboys, they drive to Utah. There are savage Indian attacks, desperadoes, crooked sheriffs, stampedes, and all that jazz. The women are tough, the men are tough, everybody's tough. And then they get where they're going. So if you're into that, pick up Green River Trail. It's a pretty entertaining little read.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
by Salman Rushdie
224 pages
Penguin Books, 1991
For those who say I've completely abandoned my original reading project list, I submit to you Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Boo-yah.
This was a very clever book. Not necessarily in the popular "Wit-as-humor" way, but in the way the idea was plotted into a story and the care with which the idea was executed within the narrative. It's fairly silly, and the author knows and uses that effectively. It is a story written for those who love stories. Even if it's fairly obvious at times where the story is going, it's still a remarkably charming tale. And a quick read, too. I finished the first 75% of the book in a single sitting. (And I would have finished it, but it was after 2 a.m. and I had a rehearsal the following morning) So if you're looking for something that's altogether silly, charming, adventurous, light-hearted, and fast, then this is one I'd recommend.
Am currently reading The Sacred Romance (note: Also from the original reading list) and The Great Hunt, book 2 of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. For some reason, Green River Trail really made me want to re-read Eye of the World, but since that book's only available via interlibrary loan (until I one day own it) I figured I'd go with the more readily-available second book in the series.
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