Lizzie the Librarian Reads Literature

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...