Lizzie the Librarian Reads Literature

Even if you aren't a fan of musicals, you'd probably recognize at least one of the songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein's first production Oklahoma! . Opening on Broadway in 1943, it went on to change the face of American theater and became one of the most celebrated and performed musicals in history. It tells the tempestuous love story of Curly McLain and Laurey Williams at the turn of the century when the Oklahoma territory was on the cusp of becoming a state. Curly is a young, hot cowboy who wants to take farm girl Laurey on a date to the nearby dance. Laurey decides instead to go with farm hand Jud Fry (we'll talk about him in a moment). Chaos, dancing, and accidental murder ensue.  Less well-known is the play that Rodgers and Hammerstein based their musical on, Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs. Essentially, it tells the exact same story but with less plot points and dancing. Surprisingly there's almost the same amount of singing. Even though I am very familiar...

Fairytales have been in my life since before I can remember. My Dad and my brothers would read them to me out loud and I loved Disney princess movies. When I was little I loved them because of the romance, the pretty ladies, and the magic. Today, I can appreciated how important they are as a literary genre. Fairytales, like myths, are the basis of the literature and stories we have today; they reflect human nature and explain deep truths about our world.  And so, I'll be doing some posts about my favorite fairytales. I'll be taking a deep dive into the history of these tales and various versions, as well as some amazing retellings that are worth the read/watch. Starting with probably the most famous fairytale of all time: Cinderella . The History The oldest known version of Cinderella is thought to be from Ancient Greece. It is contributed to the Greek historian Strabo and is about Rhodopis, an Egyptian courtesan, whose sandal is stolen by an eagle while she is bathing. The eag...

One of my reading goals this year is to re-read some old favorites and see if they still hit the way they once did. I'm looking at the last twelve years and selecting my top book of the year for each, which means that I'll be re-reading one per month for all of 2025.  Starting with January, I got to revisit what used to be my favorite romance novel of all time and my top book of 2013. It still stands up, though maybe not to the extent that some of my new favorites do. I read Blackmoore by Julianne Donaldson for the first time when I was seventeen and at the time it changed me. I have written in a previous post about how I grew up incredibly conservative and I wasn't allowed to read romance novels that weren't Christian for my entire adolescence; trust me when I say, Christian romance is a genre to stay far away from. Now, that isn't to say that I never read books with romance in them, just never the classic romance novels you think of when it comes to the genre. Tha...

The dreaded question for a reader is this: what's your favorite book? It's almost impossible to answer, I have a list of over 200. And yet, for the past couple years I've known my answer: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Now I realize this is a really pretentious answer, and I have had people roll their eyes when I say it, but it did something to my brain when I first read it in 2019 and I've been obsessed with it ever since.  Recently, I've been worried that maybe it isn't actually my favorite book and I've just been saying so for the shock and awe, because I was having trouble pinpointing just why I love it so much. And so, I committed to doing a re-read. Which is no small feet by the way, because it's 1,200 pages long and the print is very small and the cast of characters is huge. But I'm happy to say that I have accomplished my goal and my second reading cemented it as my favorite book. And I'll tell you why. When I first read War and Peace a lo...

I grew up in Fundamentalist, Evangelical Christianity. I was homeschooled by my parents, I went to church every Sunday, youth group two times a week, and attended Christian college. I didn't have any friends who weren't the same religion as me and I lived my life in constant fear that I wasn't living up to the expectations my parents, the church, and even God had for me. When I questioned things I'd been taught or failed to read my Bible regularly, the guilt ate at me and I was convinced I was going to hell and had never truly been a Christian. I used to pray every night on a loop for God to save me from hell and keep my family safe.  When I went to college, even though it was a Christian one, it was the first time I lived away from my parents. Even though I was still being taught the same damaging things I always had been, it was coming from different sources and I was able to parse through everything myself without the influence of parents, older siblings, and youth p...

 It's no secret to anyone who knows me that my favorite genre is romance. It's something I talk about constantly, something I read constantly, and something I always come back to if I'm having a bad day. Last year alone I read 38 romance novels, but even more which had a romantic subplot in it somewhere. It's rare for me to read or enjoy a book that has absolutely no romance in it, and this has been true since a very young age. But before we get into that, lets look at the romance genre and how it's become what it is today.  If you look back in history, the term romance novel was very different to what we think of today. You have your Greek romances, Arthurian romances, and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Romance could mean a tale of adventure with a brave hero on a quest; there might not necessarily be any love story involved. Think of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the stories of Sir Lancelot. Sir Walter Scott was writing historical novels that were inspired b...