A Fan's Playground

A few months ago, I found out that someone I know second-hand was downsizing his books collection and getting rid of more than a hundred folk-and-fairy-tale books. So obviously I took the lot off his hands. Something like half of them I took away to the thrift store immediately because they were clearly poor-quality (culturally appropriative "retellings" by a white person of stories not from their cultural background, for example) or because I already owned a copy. But that still leaves a large pile of books! I don't want them to just molder unread on my shelves forever, so I'm making a stab at reading through all of them, or at least making a start at all of them before deciding if they're worth keeping or not. So here's a first look at three books from the collection I'm keeping. More forthcoming in future reviews, hopefully!

Tales the Elders Told: Ojibway Legends, by Basil H Johnston

A nice little collection of stories, put together by someone who is himself Ojibwe. Enjoyable and quick read. Mostly animal stories, and a number of them are the sort of story explaining why something is the way it is. Originally published by the ROM back in the 80's apparently, which is interesting! I didn't know that was the sort of thing they did. Oyate (which is "a Native organization working to see that our lives and histories are portrayed with honesty and integrity") thinks well of this book, which is nice to hear.

Tales from the Igloo, edited & translated by Maurice Metayer

One of those collections of stories which are traditional to a specific people group but with an editor who is not from that culture, which can be so variable in reliability. This one, which is from the 1970's, says the right things in the preface about being as faithful as possible in translating the stories recorded from the Inuit tellers, but also the foreword and preface contain that uncomfortable mix of trying-really-hard-to-not-be-racist-while-being-obviously-racist. So. Not 100% sure how much I trust this book, but it's definitely at least making an effort? At any rate, I'm interested in how, in this collection, I was so rarely able to predict whether characters would end the story alive or dead, punished or victorious.

Black Folktales, by Julius Lester

This is a book of African American folk stories clearly written by a black person for a primarily black audience, and I respect that. It kind of gentles you in but by halfway into the book it is not messing around with its powerful language and imagery around white-black relations. This is not the kind of folktale book that gets paternalistically handed to white children to teach them about the ~quaint~ ways of other folks. But the author talks in the introduction about how this collection isn't just for black people, it's for everyone, and I appreciate him welcoming me in to hear his stories too.

Back in the days after I'd started keeping a list of all the books I read each year but BEFORE I started posting reviews of them, I kept desultory personal notes (ranging from a single word to quite a few paragraphs) on some of the books. And I always vaguely forget I have, and forget where exactly to find them, and I'd like to just have them on my dw so they're FINDABLE again for me. And also some of you might find these interesting/amusing? (N.B. some of these contain what I would now classify as INCORRECT OPINIONS.)

SO HERE'S THREE YEARS' WORTH OF BOOKS IN ONE POST, OKAY GO.

( expand this cut to see nested cuts listing all the books )

Okay wow I'm not sure exactly where to start in discussing this book? It's very good, and pretty weird (although actually not as weird as I thought it was going to be), and also very famous. I remember it from high school days when I helped reorganize the collection of books the English department owned; I remember thinking at the time that it looked like it might actually be worth reading, unlike a lot of the books a high school English department has.

Cue the passing of many years in which I did not read it.

Then a recent episode of Crash Course Literature was about Slaughterhouse-Five, and - okay, here's the thing. Generally speaking when I watch Crash Course Literature episodes about books I've read, I disagree with the majority of the stuff John Green says. He's just.... so literarily pretentious? And the things he thinks are important to talk about are often very different than the things I think are important to talk about. So it's always odd watching Literature episodes about books I HAVEN'T read, because everything Green says sounds very plausible and he's very passionate about what he says, but when I remember what I usually think about his opinions of books I have to be suspicious. Regardless, when I watched the episode about Slaughterhouse-Five, I was really intrigued by the book, so I decided to put it on my to-read list. And when I was wandering a used bookstore not long after and saw a super-cheap copy, I picked it up.

And then last week a friend was over for dinner and saw my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five sitting out and said some vastly complimentary things about it so I decided to bump it up on my priority list.

And now I've read it and I don't know what to say about it. ( In which I say things about it. )