Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale | 
so-soIt took 6 years for me to finish this short little book. The language is so academic that I kept sneaking in other books. Then I would return it to the library unfinished. Then I would be drawn to it again, start from the beginning, and the cycle would continue. This time I did finish and it did get me thinking more about the role of stories in our lives. To finishing more books in 2021!
#24in48 was such a great boost to my reading last weekend, I‘m doing my own mini-#readathon this #weekend to keep up my momentum. For my #12in2, I‘m hoping to finish the tagged book, What Alice Forgot and, if I have time, re-read The Husband‘s Secret. I‘m on a bit of a Liane Moriarty kick! 🧡
Christmas book and bookish stuff haul!
“Baba Yaga the ogress rides in a flying mortar and pestle, and uses the skulls of her victims for lamps.”
#babayaga #witchyreads #fairytale
Thank you all so much for making my first #photochallenge a success! I had so much fun this month, I want to do it again. I realize most of us — including me — have depleted our #OldCoolBooks collections, so I thought I‘d start a recurring #CoolBooks challenge. For the first month, the theme I picked is #fairytales, as that‘s where many of us started our own reading journeys.
Thank you for being your awesome selves, Littens! 😘😘😘
@scripturient Do you know that there is another steampunk festival at Zeche Zollern this weekend? 😉
#TBRtemptation post! I really like this cover. What's a fairy tale? Where do they come from? What do they mean? What do they communicate about morality, sexuality, society, etc.? Entangled with folklore & myth. Inspiration comes from the supernatural, imagination, nature, psychology, feminism. MW explores different manifestations on the page, the stage, the screen. Her goal: to show the genre's importance in identity. #blameLitsy #blameMrBook 😎
Ready to begin my fairy tale research! #amreading #amwriting ❤📚
Look what came in the mail! My first Once Upon a Time Book Club box. I haven't even opened it yet. I am very excited for this reading experience!
pickSigh. So good. A great little primer for _From the Beast to the Blonde_.
Genevieve Breillat's movie Barbe-bleue [...] ends with a tableau of the bride contemplating Bluebeard's head on a platter, a victorious Salome with the head of John the Baptist. This revenge eludes the protagonist of E L James' sadomasochistic sensation Fifty Shades of Grey; in this case, the author chooses to let Bluebeard have his way.
'A fairy tale,' Angela Carter once remarked, 'is a story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.'
By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, it would have already been impossible for Hansel & Gretel to walk more than 4 miles through any English wood without bursting back out into open fields. The landscape of forests is symbolic: 'The forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered.' -Francis Spufford
CS Lewis pointed out that fairy tales don't need to be especially well written to be unforgettable. Many of the most powerful tales are terse to the point of blankness, brimful of inconsistencies, & plotted with baffling lack of logic (why would a father decide to murder his 12 sons in favour of his daughter? why would another father cut off his daughter's hands?).
Coleridge praised 'motiveless malignancy' in narrative; it certainly excites a frisson, that mixture of cold fear and thrilling transgressive pleasure that is the characteristic smoky aroma given off by fairy tales.
In the 15th century, Paracelsus first classified elemental beings: he called them gnomes (earth), sylphs (air), salamanders (fire), and undines (water). Each was destined to spark the narrative imagination to such an extent they now appear generic fairytale characters.
Tolkien: "Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty."
