Reading Review Week

Wow, is it really halfway through the semester already? It feels like it was just yesterday that I was reading my first unit for this course, some of Aesop's fables. However, at the same time it feels like I have done so much reading. Six weeks' worth of reading, a great number of individual stories. At the beginning of the course, I tried to pick units that I thought would relate to each other well, but now I base my choices on which units really interest me. This means that I have been reading a lot of fairy tales recently because I have always loved fairy tales. This does correspond to the reading I do in my spare time, which often includes modern rewrites or retellings of classic fairy tales.

The Lion and the Statue, one of my favorite stories from the course.
Illustrated by Walter Crane

I've been working on my storybook project Tragically Ever After, so I have been doing outside reading for this as well. As you might have guessed, it includes reading the classic princess fairy tales like Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Rapunzel, the Princess and the frog. You get the idea. I looked at multiple versions of each story and chose the ones that, in my mind, which represented the "classic" version of the story. I've had no trouble finding sources because there was a specific link to a website that compiles different versions of classic fairy tales for comparison. This was a much appreciated resource in the course of researching for my storybook.

While I haven't seen a lot of overlap between the classes I am taking this semester and this course, I have recognized several units of stories that were discussed in my children's literature class, which I completed last semester. It not only mentioned the obvious genre of fairy tales,  but also the likes of mythology, folktales from different regions and countries, the Jataka tales, Brer Rabbit, and many other types of stories that you can read in various units throughout the Un-Textbook. What's great about having taken these two courses is that I read an overview of the whole genre in Children's Literature whereas I have a chance to actually read some of these stories in Mythology and Folklore, so I've gotten breadth and depth in my study of literature.

In summary, I've really been enjoying the readings I've done for this class so far and I look forward to continuing to explore the vast world of mythology and folklore in the following weeks.