I found the SurLaLune fairy tale pages when I ran out of bedtime stories for my daughter, and I’m staying for the density of the connections woven there: illustrations from half a dozen editions of each story, books and films inspired by the stories, related tales, annotations and interpretations for curious adults or for those questions you can’t quite remember the answers to (“Why does it say it sounds like a crocodile weeping, Mum?”)… The only annoyance is that the columns are fixed at a certain number of pixels so that when I up the size of the text for easy reading while slouching with child in sofa there are too few words on each line. We’re happy anyway, though.

This evening we’ll finish reading Oscar Wilde’s The Fisherman and his Soul,
which is an inversion of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. I’ve read both before but never beside each other like that. Maybe I’ll print some of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for my lass to colour while I read. And then we could either continue by reading more tales similar to the mermaid tales (we are by the beach after all) or we could read all the tales Rackham has illustrated or…

1 Comment

  1. Gianna

    Jill, I love the sound of all this and it makes me sad I’m on the wrong side of the digital divide, now that I have a child myself. Still, maybe one day!

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