Storybook Favorites

As this course gets rolling, one of the first steps is to look at the work of our predecessors. This means reading stories, so it's not as boring as it may seem at first.

Looking through the story collection three in particular grabbed my eye. These each piqued my interest with their titles for entirely different reasons. 

The first of the stories worked its way in because of my love for turtles. The story, Kurma and Karma: A Tale of Two Turtles, seems to be an interesting explanation of how karma works. The introduction does a great job of showing how complicated karma can be. It does not go into great detail on how the rest of the story will go, or really what will be covered.  This particular story is written with the tone of voice you imagine coming from Crush, the sea turtle from Finding Nemo. This gives it a sort of playful and easy-going undertone. In the same way, the story brings you along with it in a go with the flow sort of attitude, and refrains from getting too bogged down with little details. Glancing ahead in the pages, the tone gets to be more informative but generally stays with the original theme.
This story is definitely going to be worth further reading, even if it's just to see more turtles.

My second find of the day, picked due to familiarity, is 1000 Ways to Die: Demon Edition. As indicated by the title, this story follows the theme of the popular TV series by the same name. However, the style doesn't extend too far past the introduction. The introduction itself is written like the introduction from one of the episodes of the show, which is a nice touch to really show what is going to be discussed. The story appears to focus on how certain demons in Indian culture were defeated by Rama and Bhima in particular. I like how the theme goes from  a solid TV theme to a more informative documentary style, still with creative undertones. This theme transition starts with some good attention grabbing elements, but then holds that attention with focused details.

Last, but not least, I picked a story at random, and came up with Bedtime Dharma Tales. The theme for this particular story set is a bedtime story perspective for some of the more classic tales. These tales are used to explain the concept of Dharma. This is an abstract word that can't be translated directly to English, so I very much appreciate the author's choice to elaborate with examples. The only problem I can see with this particular story set is the actual formatting. It isn't exactly coherent, as there is seemingly random bolding going on and the images and captions don't line up in a logical manner. On the subject of images though, I do like the use of depictions from the actual stories being retold, such as the one of Rama fighting Ravana seen below. I also like the use of links to the next page being located at the bottom of each page, so you don't have to scroll back to the top.

Rama and Ravana

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