King Arthur Movie Tristan

title: The Ugly Duckling

author: Hans Christian Andersen

published: 1844

genre: short story/fantasy/classic/fairy tale


source: http://www.americanliterature.com/

first line: It was lovely summer weather in the country, and the golden corn, the green oats, and the haystacks piled up in the meadows looked beautiful.




In this classic children's fairy tale, a mother duck waits for her eggs to hatch.

All but one large egg have hatched and she begins to wonder if it's not a turkey egg. When the egg finally hatches, an 'ugly duckling' emerges.
She thinks he is not so ugly, and takes him into society to introduce him to the other animals on the farm.


The other animals begin to pick on the ugly duckling saying he does not belong with them because he looks different.
The bullying is so bad, he runs away.

"He is too big," they all said, and the turkey cock, who had been born into the world with spurs, and fancied himself really an emperor, puffed himself out like a vessel in full sail, and flew at the duckling, and became quite red in the head with passion, so that the poor little thing did not know where to go, and was quite miserable because he was so ugly and laughed at by the whole farmyard. So it went on from day to day till it got worse and worse. The poor duckling was driven about by every one; even his brothers and sisters were unkind to him, and would say, "Ah, you ugly creature, I wish the cat would get you," and his mother said she wished he had never been born.

He stumbles upon an old woman living in a cottage. She is half blind and doesn't see how different the duck looks, so she takes him in. Three weeks pass and he decides he wants to set off and explore the world. He comes upon beautiful swans and can't believe his eyes. He wants to be just like them.

One evening, just as the sun set amid radiant clouds, there came a large flock of beautiful birds out of the bushes. The duckling had never seen any like them before. They were swans, and they curved their graceful necks, while their soft plumage shown with dazzling whiteness. They uttered a singular cry, as they spread their glorious wings and flew away from those cold regions to warmer countries across the sea.

The ugly duckling endures a harsh and lonely winter, almost freezing to death in the water and nearly starving.

When Spring finally arrives, he stretches his wings and comes upon beautiful swans again. He swims to them and bows his head, asking them to kill him.
But when he bows his head, she sees his reflection in the water. He himself has become a beautiful swan and is welcomed by the others.

He now felt glad at having suffered sorrow and trouble, because it enabled him to enjoy so much better all the pleasure and happiness around him; for the great swans swam round the new-comer, and stroked his neck with their beaks, as a welcome.

The ugly duckling appreciates everything he has now, because of all he has suffered.

..he was so happy, and yet not at all proud. He had been persecuted and despised for his ugliness, and now he heard them say he was the most beautiful of all the birds.

I think the story of The Ugly Duckling is timeless. Many of us can relate to going through that awkward phase in life and coming out stronger because of it, myself included.
This is one of my favorite fairy tales.



This is a statue in Central Park, NYC, of Hans Christian Andersen.







About the author:

During his lifetime he was acclaimed for having delighted children worldwide, and was feted by royalty. His poetry and stories have been translated into more than 150 languages. They have inspired motion pictures, plays, ballets, and animated films.

title: Through the Looking Glass


author: Lewis Carroll

genre: classic/fantasy/childrens

published: 1871

source: http://www.americanliterature.com/

first line: One thing was certain, that the WHITE kitten had had nothing to do with it:--it was the black kitten's fault entirely.

rated: 4 out of 5 stars










I recently read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and it became an instant favorite. After being a bit biased against Carrol, he won me over with his fun and bizarre classic, so I decided to read Through the Looking Glass, which is the sequel to Alice's Adventures.




This story opens with Alice speaking to her cat Dinah and her kittens. She holds up one of the kittens to the mirror, so it can see the looking glass world where everything is the opposite, even the letters in books are backwards.

Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking- glass House! I'm sure it's got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through--' She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass WAS beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

Alice herself passes through the looking glass, into this other world. She is in her house, yet things are not the same. She decides to investigate this mirror world and have an adventure before going back through the looking glass and going back home.
Through the looking glass everything is backwards, time itself runs backwards and if Alice wants to get someplace, she has to move in the opposite direction to reach it.
When she leaves her house, she comes upon a sunny garden.

The countryside is set up in squares like a giant chessboard and as Alice explores it, she comes across some curious characters. Talking chess pieces, talking flowers, The Red Queen and Tweedledum and Tweedledee, a knitting sheep and Humpty Dumpty are a few of the characters she meets.








Where Alice in Wonderland is based on a deck of cards, Through the Looking Glass is modeled after a game of chess. Lewis Carroll's fantastic imagination is evident throughout, and I wish I had read these as a child. I'll be sharing both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass with my daughter.

'And you do Addition?' the White Queen asked. 'What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?'


'I don't know,' said Alice. 'I lost count.'


'She can't do Addition,' the Red Queen interrupted. 'Can you do Subtraction? Take nine from eight.'


'Nine from eight I can't, you know,' Alice replied very readily: 'but--'


'She can't do Subtraction,' said the White Queen. 'Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife--what's the answer to that?'

This has been a part of Once Upon a Time

title: The Little Mermaid


author: Hans Christian Andersen


genre: short story/fantasy/classic/fairy tale


published: 1837


first line: Far out in the ocean the water is as blue as the petals of the loveliest cornflower, and as clear as the purest glass.


source: http://www.americanliterature.com/






The original story of The Little Mermaid is one of my favorite fairy tales. As a child I watched an animated version (non Disney) and enjoyed the beauty and sadness of the story.

This bittersweet fairy tale is about a little mermaid who gives her life up in the sea for the chance to have a human soul and to be with her true love, a Prince.






In Hans Christian Andersen's version, the little mermaid lives in the ocean with her father, grandmother and five sisters.

They were six lovely girls, but the youngest was the most beautiful of them all. Her skin was as soft and tender as a rose petal, and her eyes were as blue as the deep sea, but like all the others she had no feet. Her body ended in a fish tail.

When she sees a young Prince, and saves him from drowning, the little mermaid falls in love with him and cannot think of anything else. She longs to have human legs and live on shore with her Prince.


I found it sad how the mermaid longs to be something she is not. After she rescues the Prince, she often visits the shore just outside his home in hopes of seeing him.

Many evenings and many mornings she revisited the spot where she had left the Prince. She saw the fruit in the garden ripened and harvested, and she saw the snow on the high mountain melted away, but she did not see the Prince, so each time she came home sadder than she had left. It was her one consolation to sit in her little garden and throw her arms about the beautiful marble statue that looked so much like the Prince. But she took no care of her flowers now. They overgrew the paths until the place was a wilderness, and their long stalks and leaves became so entangled in the branches of the tree that it cast a gloomy shade.

The little mermaid goes to the sea witch and asks her to make her human. This part of the story was creepy. The witch agrees to give the mermaid a potion that will give her human legs....but for a price. The witch wants her beautiful voice in exchange for the potion.

The witch tells the mermaid that her human legs will be always unbearably painful, like walking on knives. She also tells her that if the prince doesn't love her completely and marry her, she will die.

If he marries someone else, your heart will break on the very next morning, and you will become foam of the sea.

Despite all of this, the mermaid agrees and the sea witch cuts off her tongue and gives her the potion.





The little mermaid takes the potion and finds her Prince. He does end up loving her, but eventually he marries someone else. She gave her life and her family up for him and she saved him from the shipwreck, but the little mermaid can't explain herself to him, since she is now mute.



All she can do is watch the wedding ceremony brokenhearted, knowing that this will be her last night alive. She was always taught that mermaids do not go to heaven after they die, there is no afterlife for them.



Her sisters appear to her that night and give her one chance to save herself. The cost would be to stab the prince with the sea witches knife. The little mermaid cannot kill her true love, so the following morning, she becomes the foam on the sea.



But when she dies, the mermaid becomes a spirit, because of the selfless act she committed by not stabbing the Prince to save herself.
She now has a chance of going to heaven if she does good deeds for 300 years. So the little mermaid gets a chance at her happy ending after all.





For me this is the most moving moment in the story since mermaids cannot cry because they have no tears. However after the little mermaid dies and becomes a spirit, she can finally cry:

The little mermaid lifted her clear bright eyes toward God's sun, and for the first time her eyes were wet with tears.

Hans Christian Andersen's story is beautiful, sad and scary all at once. I enjoyed the descriptive storytelling, and found myself easily able to imagine the mermaid's undersea world. The part where the sea witch chops off her tongue was creepy, I would think young children would be scared by that.





One thing I wasn't thrilled with was the part at the end where the little mermaid would get to heaven after 300 years of helping children. Seems a bit harsh no?
I would have thought she had already redeemed herself by sacrificing herself instead of the prince.




All in all, this is a favorite fairytale of mine and I enjoyed reading it.

Moral of the story? Perhaps that we shouldn't try to be something we are not? Or maybe that selfless acts will grant us a spot in heaven?












The photo above is of the Little Mermaid statue located in Copenhagen, Denmark.







This has been a part of Once Upon a Time

title: The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure


author: William Goldman


genre: fantasy/romance/humor

published: 1973

pages: 414

first line: This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

rated: 4 out of 5








What can I say about The Princess Bride? I both liked it and disliked it. I liked the story overall.


For the most part it's a unique and fun read. I like that it's a fairy tale with romance, adventure and humor.




What I disliked was that author William Goldman makes it seem as though S. Morgenstern wrote the book, and that Goldman's version of the story is the 'good parts version'. That annoyed me so very much!



And the amount of writing that he used during the beginning and the end of the story to re-inforce this was a bit much for me. I didn't so much mind his commentary within the story, some of it made me laugh.



It's funny because in the introduction Goldman tells a convincing tale about this being abridgement of an earlier novel. So I fell for it. I tend to google 'new to me authors' and anything in a book that I'm unfamiliar with, so I googled S. Morgenstern only to find out Goldman invented him. Which made perfect sense to me then because I kept thinking this really sounded far-fetched. Especially when Goldman brings Stephen King into the mix as a native of Florin who is in cahoots with the curators at the S. Morgenstern museum.





Anyway, once the story takes off, the beautiful Buttercup lives in the countryside in Florin and is the envy of all the females in town because of her beauty. Long story short, Buttercup falls in love with the Farm Boy Westley. Westley tells her he is leaving for America to claim his fortune so he can return and marry her.
Buttercup is overjoyed and the two finally have their first kiss.

There have been five great kisses since 1642 B.C., when Saul and Delilah Korn's inadvertent discovery swept across Western civilization. (Before then couples hooked thumbs.) And the precise rating of kisses is a terribly difficult thing, often leading to great controversy, because although everyone agrees with the formula of affection time purity times intensity time duration, no one has ever been completely satisfied with how much weight each element should receive. But on any system, there are five that everyone agrees deserve full marks.


Well, this one left them all behind.

Westley isn't gone too long before Buttercup receives news that he has been killed by the Dread Pirate Roberts. She swears to never love again. She ends up being engaged to Prince Humperdinck, but lets him know that she will never love him. One day while Buttercup is out on one of her horse rides, she is kidnapped by a Sicilian, a Spaniard named Inigo and a giant named Fezzik. Soon after the kidnapping, the trio realize they are being followed by a 'man in black'.






There is so much to The Princess Bride that I can't really go into it all. I think most of us have seen the film. The book captivated me as soon as the actual story started.



I really enjoyed the witty dialogue and all the characters. Besides Buttercup and Westley, Inigo and Fezzik quickly became favorite characters as well. I enjoyed how Goldman went into their story lines and backgrounds also.


The dialogue was funny throughout the book.
This is Buttercup's parents debating over who would go see what the Count and Countess want when they arrive at the couples doorstep:

"What could they want to ask me about?" he said.


"Go see, go see," Buttercup's mother told him.


"You go. Please."


"No. You. Please."


"We'll both go."


They both went. Trembling...

For the most part I thought it was fun the way Goldman comments throughout the story in (parentheses) and italics. But as I said before, the way he kept going on and on about S. Morgenstern and the original Princess Bride got to be too much for me. All in all, I'm glad I read it and would recommend it. Because of the storyline, the dialogue and the great characters I gave it a 4 star rating. There's some great lines in this book.






Here's a few of my favorite tidbits:

"If you're teasing me Westley, I'm just going to kill you."


"How can you even dream I might be teasing?"


"Well, you haven't once said you loved me."


"That's all you need? Easy. I love you. Okay? Want it louder? I love you.
Spell it out, should I? I ell-oh-vee-ee why-oh-you. Want it backward? You love I."

Her heart was a secret garden and the walls were very high. "I loved once," Buttercup said after a moment. "It worked out badly."

The six-fingered sword.


How it danced in the moonlight. How glorious and true. Inigo brought it to his lips and with all the fervor in his great Spanish heart kissed the metal...

But just as he knew that the sun was obliged to rise each morning in the east, no matter how much a western arisal might have pleased it, so he knew that Buttercup was obliged to spend her love on him. Gold was inviting, and so was royalty, but they could not match the fever in his heart, and sooner or later she would have to catch it. She had less choice than the sun.

I think the film is fantastic. They did a great job bringing this story to the big screen, and the actors portrayed the characters really well. The book and movie are very similar, and some of the book is directly quoted in the film.

title: Coraline


author: Neil Gaiman



pages: 162


first line: Coraline discovered the door a little while after they moved into the house.



rated: 5 out of 5 stars





I have finally read a Neil Gaiman book. Wow!

I kept hearing great things about this book and about Neil Gaiman. I wanted to see what all the fuss is about.

Okay, let me say, I loved this book. I began reading one evening, and finished it that same night. I literally couldn't put this book down and was sad to see it end.




It was entertaining, magical, and very creepy.


Little Coraline lives with her parents both of whom don't pay much attention to her because they are too busy. Coraline is on break from school as is always looking for something fun to do. She wonderes what's behind the locked door in the drawing room, and her when her mother opens the door, it opens to a brick wall. One day when Coraline's mother is out shopping, Coraline opens the door. This time a passageway mysteriously appears. She walks through and finds an apartment same as her own, only oddly different.

There she finds her "other" parents, creepy people with big buttons for eyes.

'It sounded like her mother. Coraline went into the kitchen, where the voice had come from. A woman stood in the kitchen with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline's mother. Only...

Only her skin was white as paper.'

Once Coraline leaves this alternate world, she comes back through the door and into her own apartment to find her real parents missing. She knows the 'other mother' must have taken them and she needs to go back through the door and bring them home. All throughout the story she faces terrifying creatures and scary situations and keeps telling herself she is not afraid.

'Coraline took a deep breath and stepped into the darkness, where strange voices whispered and distant winds howled. She became certain that there was something in the dark behind her: something very old and very slow. Her heart beat so hard and so loudly she was scared it would burst out of her chest. She closed her eyes against the dark.'

Another very creepy thing about this book is the illustrations.

Images show up every once in a while throughout the book, and this is the kind of book that really hooks you, so I was really into reading, then an unexpected image like this would show up:






This book was cute and creepy all mixed up together. You can't help but like Coraline and hope she makes it out ok.





'Coraline' is being made into a film, due in theaters February of 2009.

click here for details on the film

Dakota Fanning is Coraline (voice) &
Teri Hatcher as Coraline's Mother/Other Mother


here is a sneak preview:








this read was part of the following reading challenges:

once upon a time

triple 8


twisted fairy tales


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this book has also been reviewed by:

dewey

finding wonderland

1 more chapter

nymeth

Well, I'm currently reading Dan Brown's "Angels & Demon's" & Ronald Cutler's "The Secret Scroll". Both of these novels have religious themes involved. Angel's & Demon's deals with religion & science and a vendetta against the Catholic Church. The Secret Scroll is about the discovery of an ancient piece of writing presumed to be written by Christ. I'm enjoying both books and will have reviews up soon.

After I'm done with these novels....I'll be wanting to read something a bit 'lighter'. Read on and let me know if you have any suggestions for my next reading selection....which I hope to be a fairy tale, preferably one with a bit of romance.







I recently watched Enchanted.

The movie begins in the animated world of Andalasia. Prince Edward and Giselle fall in love and plan to marry the following day.


Giselle is thrown out of her magic kingdom by a curse from her evil potential mother-in-law on her wedding day. She ends up in real-life New York City where Robert and his young daughter come to her aid. Throughout the film, Giselle spontaneously bursts into song and dance, and goes on and on about 'happily ever after'. All the while waiting for her Prince Charming, Edward to come and rescue her.





This movie has magic, humor, romance, an evil queen and a poison apple in it...all the makings for a great fairy tale.






This is one of the cutest movies I've ever seen, and I am a sucker for a good love story so of course I enjoyed this one.

Another thing I loved about the film was that it has so many other references to Disney movies in it. Like 'The Little Mermaid', 'Snow White' and 'Cinderella'.







So, I'm definitely in the mood to read a fairy tale type book...any suggestions?
I'm wanting to get started on the Once Upon a Time reading challenge.
I'm thinking Ella Enchanted and The Princess Bride for starters...does anyone know of any other good ones?

I found a couple new reading challenges and couldn't help myself, so I joined them. They sound like fun and I can't wait to get started.




There is only one rule:

1) You must commit to reading 6 historical novels over 6 months.


my picks:


After reading 'The Constant Princess', I'm hooked on Philippa Gregory...




Queen's Fool
by Philippa Gregory






Virgin's Lover
by Philippa Gregory





The Other Boleyn Girl
by Philippa Gregory




Atonement
by Ian McEwan




(of course I had to throw in a Jane Austen book here)



Persuasion by Jane Austen








The Viscount Who Loved Me
by Julia Quinn






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Quest the First



Read at least 5 books that fit somewhere within the Once Upon a Time II criteria. They might all be fantasy, or folklore, or fairy tales, or mythology…or your five books might be a combination from the four genres.

my picks:



Enchantment
by Orson Scott Card





Coraline
by Neil Gaiman





Eragon
by Christopher Paolini





Ella Enchanted
by Gail Carson Levine








Princess Bride by William Goldman

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