Favorite Storybooks

I'm so looking forward to creating a storybook. I wasn't quite sure what that might entail, but looking at the examples from past years has me so excited.

The first one that caught my eye was Gossip Girl Ayodhya. It was a throwback, though maybe not as far back as it would be for some people, since I bingewatched it for the first time on Netflix during my sophomore year of college. I don't have any experience with Indian Epics, so none of the references make sense, but I figure once we start reading, things will start to click into place. The posts, even though the characters were new to me, were so classically Gossip Girl, that it felt very familiar, and the site was very easy to navigate, so I liked that. There were also photos for each story, which enriched the experience.

Barney's Epic India Playbook was very amusing. It once again took something that I was unfamiliar with and put it within parameters that I knew. It was quirky, and even had title pages in the style of the real "playbook" from How I Met Your Mother with plays that reference what I assume are events from some of the Indian epics, which was a nice stylistic touch. There was even a sitemap, though the navigation of the site was simple and straightforward.

The third storybook that I want to mention seems a bit more mysterious to me. I'm not sure if it is fact or fiction. It sounds like fact, and it's very different from the other blogs I mentioned. The introduction is a touching story about a father and his research. The storybook is titled simply Ramayana Poetry, and the introduction talks about a boy being told stories about Rama before bed by his archeologist father, who believed Rama was real. It goes on to say that after his father's death, he translated poetry to prove that Rama was real, much in the way that letters from others about Jesus are what convince people that he is real, rather than bones or other artifacts. The emotion encapsulated is so raw and genuine that to me, that is what shines, rather than the poetry itself. It riveted me. I read it twice.

The storybooks I like perhaps don't have a lot in common, but I feel that they show the wonderful creative license that has been ingrained into this project, something which excites me immensely.

photo: Father and son