Book Spoils

[rachelmanija]

Like I have time to read MORE BOOKS. However, when I dropped by the library to return something, I saw that they were having a book sale…

Please comment if you’ve read or heard of any of these and want to prioritize my reading, snark, recommend, say, “Oh hell no,” etc.

Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America, by Margot Adler. Nonfiction on Wicca and neo-paganism in the US. I’ve read it before, I enjoyed it, I wanted to own it.

The Ghost Road (William Abrahams), by Pat Barker. Book 3 of the WWI trilogy; I will read Book 2 first.

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Vintage), by Bruno Bettelheim. I read this ages ago and figured it was time to read it again.

Surviving Madness: A Therapist's Own Story (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies), by Betty Berzon. Memoir by a “psychiatric patient, groundbreaking therapist, and gay pioneer.”

Ghost in the Water, by Edward Chitham. Puffin mystery; I often like obscure Puffin British kids’ books.

The Princess and the Hound, by Mette Harrison. I have been meaning to read this for ages.

A Taste of China: The Definitive Guide to Regional Cooking (Pavilion Classic Cookery), by Ken Hom. Memoir/cookbook/history of regional Chinese cooking.

Kingdom of the Winds Volume 1 (v. 1), by Kimjin. Manhwa set in a fantasy ancient Korea.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing. Classic survival nonfiction which I have not yet read.

Tales from The Red Rose Inn and Other Plays, by Don Nigro. This guy’s plays were always being advertised on Samuel French editions of other plays I was reading, and I always felt vaguely curious about him.

ETA: Oh, drat, I realized that I actually do know who he is. Due to vague curiosity, years ago I read his Seascape with Sharks and Dancer, which featured the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl, subtype Her Mental Illness Makes Her Beautiful. If I recall correctly, the hero fishes her out of the ocean after a suicide attempt and feeds her hot chocolate with marshmallows, which she obnoxiously adorably insists on calling "mushroons." (sic.) It turns out that her cathartically related Dark Trauma was that she used to live on an intersection where fluffy kittens constantly got squashed by cement trucks. And then, for bonus topical relevance and preachiness points, there was an abortion. Because she was Too Damaged to Bring New Life Into the World.

Empress of the World, by Sarah Ryan. Teen lesbians at summer camp for gifted kids. This premise could only be improved if they had psychic powers.

Elsewhere, by Gabrielle Zevin. Narrated by a dead girl. I usually dislike posthumous fantasy – it tends toward the soggily spiritual – but I liked the excerpt on the back cover.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm not a fan of Dundes, because I'm not a fan of Freudian folklore theory to begin with -- but he's certainly one of the most respected names in that corner of the field.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I realize this may be a question that cannot be reasonably answered in an offhand LJ comment, but if you have any suggestions on folklorists who you would recommend, I would love to hear it. (For reference, I am far from an expert, but I have an interested layperson's amount of knowledge, and I don't mind reading that's dry prose-wise if the ideas are interesting.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Well, what are you looking for? Folktale analysis specifically, or other stuff? And what do you want to know about the folktales (or other stuff)? I won't be any use if you want Marxist analysis; I'll just warn you of that now. :-)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ooh. Um. Good question! Let me think about that. (I think this may be a situation where I don't yet know enough to know exactly what I'm looking for.)

I'm not that interested in political analysis anyway, so that's cool. What I've read in the past has mostly focused on historical and social/cultural context and the evolution of the stories, because I came at it as side-reading in history classes, and I found that fascinating but wasn't sure where to go from there.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Marxist analysis, at least in folklore, isn't so much political as it is economic: in the case of folktales, for example, the writer would talk about how the Grimms' collection reflected and shaped the concerns of German bourgeoisie. Etc. But it, like Freudian analysis, tends unfortunately toward reductionism; EVERYTHING ends up being an expression of German bourgeois concerns. I would mind those two schools less if they were more willing to admit of other interpretations.

I ended up doing less research on folktales than I expected to, so I'm not the best source to consult, but you might try looking up Maria Tatar's work. Or, if you want to approach it more from a craft-ish side of what makes folktales go, Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (Russian-specific, but its general point is more extendable) and Max Luthi's The European Folktale may both be of interest to you.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a good place to start. Thank you!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Noting down recs.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

I, on the other hand, do recommend Alan Dundes. He was my professor, so I'm biased. He was also very funny and wonderful lecturer. You can get some of that from his essays, especially "Touchdown into the Endzone."

He wasn't a total Freudian purist, the one thing he did like about Bettelheim was Bettelheim's theory of womb envy, which makes so much more sense than penis envy.

One thing Dundes did a lot of was to make casebooks about certain legends, stories, creatures, etc. A book with a number of essays from different fields and points of view. The Cinderella Casebook was one of my favorites, he did the Flood Myth, Oedipus, Little Red Ridinghood and Vampires to name a few. He also wrote a couple introductions to folklore.

Thing about Dundes, and most of the stuff he had us read in folklore, was that he, and they, could write academic papers and still be reading and funny at times. Even for laypeople.

I'm afraid I took his courses long ago so am not sure what the latest good stuff is, but Richard Dorson was a big name and we read his introduction to folklore. Jan Harold Brunvand published a bunch of collections of urban legends (not myths!) but he never did anything with them. Dundes was a bear for interpretation, he thought we had collected a lot of folklore and now we needed to interpret it.

Lord Ragland wrote the original Hero Cycle, Dundes applied it to Jesus Christ, another good essay. (Dundes hated Joseph Campbell with a deep and fiery hatred, because what he did was not folklore at all) Anti Aarne wrote the first Tale Type Index and Stith Thompson added to it and wrote the first motif index. Those are mostly about the structure of narrative folklore (stories, ballads, jokes, legends, myths) but the motif index can give you an idea of how far flung, or how restricted, some motifs are. I've never thought about it but the motif index might be a fun thing for a writer to look at. It's six volumes so you'd probably need a university library to find it.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry that was so long! Feel free to delete it if it's too long!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

That was great, thanks!