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I finished "A Treasury of New England Folklore" (edited by B. A. Botkin) today. It has been just barely under a month since I started it. Part of why it took so long is because it consists of a lot of short passages, varying in length from a paragraph to a page, and I couldn't read too many in one sitting without getting overloaded.
I don't have much use for the bits that Botkin added. He alternates between repeating himself, referring to other books that you must have already read or you simply wouldn't be breathing, and building the academically necessary, Escherlike sentences. But the base content that he didn't mess with, the stories and songs, are a lot of fun. Most of these stories were collected by the WPA writer's project back in the Great Depression. They interviewed the oldest people they could find to collect the oldest living stories about the area. These bits of captured interviews, stories told by people just remembering the old stories, are the best part of the book.
This is a pretty long book for reading straight through. It might better serve as a camp or cabin book, that you can pull down and sample a story or two during an afternoon rain, then put back on the shelf when the sun comes out.
8. "A Treasury of New England Folklore" edited by B. A. Botkin
I don't have much use for the bits that Botkin added. He alternates between repeating himself, referring to other books that you must have already read or you simply wouldn't be breathing, and building the academically necessary, Escherlike sentences. But the base content that he didn't mess with, the stories and songs, are a lot of fun. Most of these stories were collected by the WPA writer's project back in the Great Depression. They interviewed the oldest people they could find to collect the oldest living stories about the area. These bits of captured interviews, stories told by people just remembering the old stories, are the best part of the book.
This is a pretty long book for reading straight through. It might better serve as a camp or cabin book, that you can pull down and sample a story or two during an afternoon rain, then put back on the shelf when the sun comes out.
8. "A Treasury of New England Folklore" edited by B. A. Botkin
