The Telling Tales Challenge 2012!!

Picture credit: the Cheeseninja

Welcome to An Armchair by the Sea’s first reading challenge! Some of you may know about my love of/obsession with/totally crazed mania for all things fairytale and mythology based. While chatting with my sister Esther about our shared love of reading challenges and desire to set up a challenge of our own, we came up with an idea (inspired by the Once Upon a Time Challenge) for a challenge based around reading things to do with mythology, fairytales, legends and folklore, and so here it is!

The Telling Tales Reading Challenge 2012

Rules:

·         Challenge runs from January 1^st 2012 to December 31^st 2012. You may sign up to participate at any point between these dates.

·         Any genre counts as long as it is related to fairytale, folklore, or mythology in some way. If you’re not sure if it counts – as long as you can make a case for why it should, then it does!

·         You can re-read books for this challenge as long as the reviews you link are written during 2012, and the challenge can also overlap other challenges.

·         Whatever you read must either be a version of a fairytale or myth, or contain fairytale or mythological characters, settings, or sequence of events.

·         Every month there will be update posts either here or on my sister’s blog. Please link up your reviews for that month on this post.

That’s it!

Now, the important bit.

The Categories

These are the levels:

Level 1: Read 5 books

Level 2: Read 10 books

Level 3: Read 15 books

Level 4: Read 20 books

Level 5: Read 25 books

You can sign up for any level, and choose to read either purely the categories listed below, or to participate in the Mix n Match category, or the Adaptation Amalgamation category, or all of them if you're that brave!

Categories:

Twisted Fairytales – retellings or modern interpretations of fairytales or myths. For inspiration, look here.

Classics – Myth and fairytale from the classics genre (e.g. Homer, Grimm, Virgil, Hans Christian Andersen)

Graphics – Graphic novels and comics based around or containing elements of mythology and fairytale. Examples include Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series and Bill Willingham’s Fables series among others. For a list that barely scrapes the surface, go here.

Poetry & Drama – We’ve put this in because we’re sure there must be some. I've managed to find some, but if you know of any others please let us know!

Non- Fiction – Anything about myth, fairytale, folklore or fantasy in general that doesn’t belong to the fictional genre.

Extra Categories

Adaptation Amalgamation – Watch a film and read the book it is based on. This category can incorporate as many other categories as you like (i.e all your films do not have to be based on graphic novels, but some can be, and some twisted fairytale, some non-fiction etc)

Mix n Match – Exactly what it says. Sign up for a level and pick that number of books from any or all of the other categories.

As you can probably tell, Esther and I like to make lists. If this seems incredibly convoluted and off-putting, we apologise and take solace in the fact that we have each other, so neither of us will be doing the challenge alone! We do hope that other people will join us though, as it’s always fun to find out about new books, and the more people that do it, the more likely we are to finish it!

If you’d like to join, please leave a comment with a link to your sign up post. 

Participants:
1.Bex  (An Armchair by the Sea)
2.Esther (Always Look on the Bright Side of Life)
3.Jennifer (An Abundance of Books)
4. Hannah (Once Upon a Time)
5. Kailana (The Written World)
6.Tom (Life, Love and the Universe)
7. Lindy
8. Alberta (Alberta Reads)
9. Nicola (Back to Books)
10. Kim (Page After Page)
11. K (Very Simple Secret)  
12. West Virginia Red (West Virginia Red Reads)
13. Tobe (Wading Through the Ocean of Life)
14. Michelle (The True Book Addict) 
15. Jenny (Stone Soup Books)
16. Jackie (Books n Tea)  
17. Mirjam
18. Ricki (Reading Challenged)  
19. Eden Mabee (A Garden of Delights)
20. Michele A (NinjaInk)
21. Lisa (Lit and Life)
22. Hanna (Booking in Heels)
23. Kristen (A Writer's Wife)
24. Sary (Some People Use Their Imagination)

  
Master list of reviews here.

Review: Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith

This is the first book I decided to tackle in my self -set Myth Series Challenge. There were lots of reasons why I decided to read Dream Angus first. For starters, I am a big fan of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, and enjoy his style of writing, therefore I was hoping to enjoy this book, and I wasn't disappointed. Also, I am, as my profile would indicate, 'into' dreams. Having them, pursuing them, interpreting them... and so I also had a personal interest in reading this book.

So. Dream Angus is the Celtic God of dreams, love, and youth. The traditional story is that he fell in love with a woman who came to him in his dreams. When she would not stay with him, night after night, he stopped eating and made himself ill, until his worried parents started a search for her. Eventually, they found her, but it turned out that the girl, Caer, (also the Celtic goddess of love) had a problem, in that she turned into a swan every other year, and Angus must overcome this to be with her.

In Alexander McCall Smith's retelling, he has interspersed the story of Angus with modern stories of love and dreams. My favourite quote from the book was actually in the Introduction, when McCall Smith says that "Angus... represents youth, and the intense passionate love that we might experience when we are young but which we might still try to remember as age creeps up. Age and experience might make us sombre and cautious, but there is always Angus within us - Angus the dreamer". As I love mythology in general, I really enjoyed reading a story that I had not previously known, and thought the way that it had been redeveloped was very engaging. I really enjoyed the style of the book, as it was very lightweight and easy to read: I finished it in an hour...

Rating ****

Next up: Baba Yaga Laid an Egg...