Readers of my Fayborn novels know that the story begun by Her Unwelcome Inheritance is a story full of other stories. As my namesake character in the novel puts it,
"The more stories I study, the more I become convinced that there is only one story; and that we are, all of us, engaged in telling it."
At the back of each Fayborn novel is a "Further Reading" Appendix. I included it both as a way to acknowledge the great storytellers and explorers of Faerie whose works have profoundly influenced my own, and as a way of introducing readers to those masters or helping them remember why certain phrases, people, and scenes in HUI and its sequels, The Eighth Square and the forthcoming A First or Final Mischief, may seem uncannily familiar.
Here is that reading list, so far. Titles are listed in the approximate order in which they are mentioned or otherwise referenced by the Fayborn books; titles by the same author are listed together only when referenced together.
A
Midsummer Night's Dream, by
William Shakespeare
Dracula,
by Bram Stoker
The
Screwtape Letters, by C. S.
Lewis
The
Magician's Nephew, by C. S.
Lewis
Lilith,
by George MacDonald
Grimm's
Fairy Tales, by the Brothers
Grimm
Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland, by
Lewis Carroll
Stories
from Times Past, by Charles
Perrault
Just-So
Stories, by Rudyard Kipling
The
Princess Diaries, by Meg
Cabot
The
Faerie Queene, by Edmund
Spencer
Metamorphoses,
by Ovid
The
Odyssey, by Homer
The
Prose Edda, by Snorri
Sturluson
The
Name of the Rose, by Umberto
Eco
The
Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe,
by C. S. Lewis
The
Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien
A
Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula
K. Le Guin
The
Last Unicorn, by Peter S.
Beagle
Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,
by J. K. Rowling
The
Aeneid, by Virgil
Russian
Fairy Tales, by Aleksandr
Afanas'ev
In
Search of Schrodinger's Cat,
by John Gribbin
The
Wind in the Willows, by
Kenneth Grahame
The
Willows in Winter, by William
Horwood
The
Nutcracker and the Mouse King,
by E. T. A. Hoffmann
The
Stolen Child, by W. B. Yeats
The
Tale of Peter Rabbit, by
Beatrix Potter
Ben-Hur,
by Lew Wallace
Tales
from the Perilous Realm, by
J. R. R. Tolkien
Nobel
Lecture, by Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn
The
Book of Joshua, unknown
author
Someplace
to be Flying, by Charles de
Lint
Tremendous
Trifles, by G. K. Chesterton
Coraline,
by Neil Gaiman
Notes
Towards the Definition of Culture,
by T. S. Eliot
Historia
Regum Brittaniae, by Geoffrey
of Monmouth
Timaeus,
by Plato
Orthodoxy,
by G. K. Chesterton
The
Selected Poems of Wendell Berry,
by Wendell Berry
Through
the Looking Glass, by Lewis
Carroll
Jonathon
Strange & Mr. Norrell, by
Susanna Clarke
Anastasia
Morningstar and the Crystal Butterfly,
by H. J. Hutchins
20,000
Leagues Under the Sea, by
Jules Verne
Girl
Genius, by Phil and Kaja
Foglio
The
Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle,
and The Tale of Mr. Jeremy
Fisher, by Beatrix Potter
Tales
of Oakapple Wood, by Jenny
Partridge
Works
and Days, by Hesiod
One
Thousand and One Nights
(unknown author)
Four
Quartets, by T. S. Eliot
The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin, by Thomas the Rhymer
The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis
Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, author unknown
Andersen's Fairytales, by Hans Christian Andersen
At the Back of the North Wind, by George MacDonald
Virginia Folk Legends, edited by Thomas E. Barden
The Illiad, by Homer
Germelshausen, by Friedrich
Gerstacker
The Sketchbook of Geoffrey
Crayon, Gent., by Washington Irving
Charlotte's Web, by E. B.
White
P.S. If this list resembles your bookshelf, nightstand, to-read list, curriculum, childhood favorites list, and/or wish list, why not give Her Unwelcome Inheritance a try? =)
I read the book and was amazed by this list. I'm so glad you posted it!
ReplyDeleteI just linked this list! http://apilgriminnarnia.com/2014/01/23/faerie/
ReplyDelete