Modern Tales for our Life and Times

Recently when I had voluntarily taken a break from reading (the break was about a month long, and it was only partly voluntary, but that’s not the point), I ended up reading a book anyway.

It was a short book full of short stories, which is why it was easy to read in spite of aforementioned break.
I read it in just a couple of hours, in fact.

It had some very interesting quotes and witty dialogue, so I’m going to post some here for your reading pleasure.

If they convince even a couple of you to go read the book, that’ll be cool because it is truly hilarious.

The book is called Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by James Finn Garner.

It is a collection of the fairy tales (such as Cinderella and The Frog Prince and Snow White) we all were told as kids, but stripped of all racism, stereotypes, sexism, misogyny (no but seriously, how sexist and misogynist were all the stories I loved as a kid anyway?), lookism, ageism etc.

It was refreshing to read these stories where the “bad” guys were not simply bad by virtue of belonging to a particular class of people living in society and they could also maybe do good things sometimes, and to see how the “good” characters maybe weren’t exactly as good as we grew up making them out to be.

The title was enough to convince me to go read the book, and the book did not disappoint.

Here’s a quote (one of my personal favourites) :

From The Little Red Riding Hood

Here are some more:

The Emperor's New Clothes

The Emperor's New Clothes, again.

Rapunzel of course

This was the disclaimer paragraph by the way:

I especially loved how Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White ended.

Here’s the ending to Rumpelstiltskin (as for Snow White- it makes more sense within the context) :

Speaking of Snow White, here’s a comic I found around the web which matches the tone of the book:

Nice, huh?

Reading this book, and finding similar posts to the one above, made me wonder, would children grow up any differently if the stories we told them were more politically correct and helped them become more socially aware?

And yes, we need stories with beautiful ball gowns and glass slippers, but maybe not all of them need the Prince and the Princess to get married for them to be happily-ever-afters.