Storybook Favorites from the Myth-Folklore Storybook List

     It was interesting looking through this list: I wanted to search for stories that modeled the way I ultimately wanted to write my final project. Even though some of the stories I looked through were funny, well-paced, among other catchy qualities, I only found myself really interested in the stories that were "well-grounded". What I mean by that is that these stories and the myths surrounding them were well researched by the authors, OR at least thoroughly imagined: the writing in the tales I list below made it evident that there was plenty of background and subtle information about the plot and characters without being bogged down. It seemed the authors to each of these stories made sure to conceive the entire world of the story, and they were therefore able to draw on the multiple layers of events, characters, and places forged from that. These stories all seem to be "well-cultured" too: the audience is thrown into the flow of the world in the story, so you have to do your best to understand the social and personal influences driving the story. This makes for compelling reading that I would like to emulate.

1) Story: Heroes Revealed, link

    This is the first story that really kind of hooked me, primarily because it opened with how various heroes of legend met their ends. The reader visits the heroes in their society's version of the afterlife, and the heroes give personal backgrounds about themselves. Reading the subtle details about differing perspectives of the tales the heroes were famous for really added to the universe that the story was taking place in.

2) Story: Lost in Wonderland, link

Wonderland's world has been visited many times, various spin-off tales in popular culture. However, most of these popular interpretations of Alice's world commonly become more dark in their content, whereas Lewis Carroll's source material toed more of a gray area between dream and nightmare. This story in particular is a more light continuation of the story in Alice in Wonderland, and yet it doesn't deny its more disturbing past.


3) Story: The Dark Side of Fairy Tales, link

I like to see fresh, deeper interpretations of fairy tales that may have been made more superficial in the wake of popular culture, even if the motif is "dark" (as it's commonly been known as). This compilation adds many anguishing aspects to the most famous of the Grimm stories, making the characters more raw and their problems that guide the story even murkier.


4) Story: Tales of Beauty and the Beast, link

Again, this is a rendition of a classic story, and the author has chosen to elaborate on the circumstances surrounding  it. In particular, the author has chosen to enrich the back-stories of the characters, Beauty and Beast, leading up to their fateful meeting. This makes the interactions further on in the story resonate with more meaning than the traditional telling, which doesn't lend much to either character's history other than what is necessary to set up the main plot. In the end, there's so much evident, hard-thought concepts interwoven into the story that it makes a totally new tale all together.