Week 1: Storybook Favorites

In order to get some ideas for my semester-long storybook project, I browsed through past student's projects. Here are some of my favorites:

1. Arthurian Women: Queens, Damsels, and Villainess highly interests me for several reasons. First, I always enjoy learning more about the women of history because so often history books are written by bigoted men who exclude the women's stories on purpose. Second, I am a huge fan of the movie Monty Python and The Holy Grail, and as such, I am familiar with the characters that are represented in this storybook. Third, I love the writing style this student used. The way the introduction opens as if the speaker has suddenly bumped into me in the hallway instantly drew me in, and her secretive and teasing nature made me want to know more about her stories.

2. Flipped Secrets: History, Written by the Vanquished
I clicked on this storybook because as I mentioned above, history is typically written by men, and always written by the winners. This tends to distort what actually happened. I love the narrators, Puff the Magic Dragon and The Dude, that this student introduced to shed a comical eye on the dark stories of these villains.

3. The Unanswered Questions of Pooh and Friends
My roommate and I were just talking about Winnie the Pooh last night, and she told me that when her little brother learned that the characters symbolized the array of children's emotions, it ruined the show for him. On the contrary, I find Eeyore's portrayal of depression and Rabbit's grumpiness to be quite helpful to children and myself. This storybook plays on these ideas by talking about the character's differences.

All of this reading has reminded me of one of my favorite blogs, Hyperbole and a Half. Allie Brosh has had me crying from laughter many times while reading her stories, and I would like to draw inspiration from her humor for my storybook project. Her child-like illustrations that accompany her posts really round out the experience. So I think it would be fun to experiment with something like that, even though my artistic abilities in that area leave something to be desired.