It’s Myth and Legend Week here on A Pilgrim in Narnia (see “On Leprechauns” and “CSL and the Music of the Spheres“). J. Aleksandr Wootton is the author of the Fayborn series, a modern, urban threshold fantasy trilogy. I’ve read the first book, Her Unwelcome Inheritance, with great enjoyment. This is the fairy tale for true lovers of faerie, laced with references to Narnia, Middle Earth, and a dozen other imaginary worlds. Mr. Wootton includes at the end of Her Unwelcome Inheritance an incredible reading list. It is really about showing his hand, revealing the imaginative sources of his creation. But it also makes a great reading list for fantasy lovers. I look forward to reading them all, and pleased that he allowed me to re-post them (from here).
The Fayborn Reading List (to date)
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 Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien
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? =)
Wow, what a list! I do a lot of referencing and homages in my novel, The Red String, as well. I never thought to make a list of influences in the appendix. (though I do blog about them- http://daysoftheguardian.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/sincerest-flattery/)
Great idea. I really want to check out HUI now. Thanks!
Thanks for the link. We all seek to honour in following the bread crumbs others have left behind.
Pingback: Digital Dust? Thoughts on my 300th Post | A Pilgrim in Narnia
Pingback: 2014: A Year of Reading | A Pilgrim in Narnia
Pingback: The Real Order to Read Narnia: A Third Way | A Pilgrim in Narnia
Pingback: Elves and Fairies and Yokai, Oh My! | A Pilgrim in Narnia
Pingback: 2015: A Year in Books | A Pilgrim in Narnia
Pingback: Faërie Stories in The Labyrinth: A David Bowie Tribute Post | A Pilgrim in Narnia
Pingback: The Fayborn Series by J. Aleksandr Wootton | A Pilgrim in Narnia