uh... Storybook Favorites

Of the storybooks I looked at, my three favorite storybooks were  Stories of the Elephant Headed God, Tragic Stories featuring Yakshas, and Musical Demon Slayers

In Stories of the Elephant Headed God, the author tells many of the most popular stories of the god Ganesha. Ganesha is known as being very wise, and has 4 arms which each hold an item of significance. The author tells the stories of his noose, his love of mangos, his mouse, and his conch shell. However, the best feature of this storybook is that each tail is told in a rhyming poem, following the style of Shel Silverstein. The author also adds his or her own twist on the stories, often for the sake of rhyming the next line, and explains the changes and the original stories afterwards. 

Tragic Stories Featuring Yakshas is pretty self explanatory: it follows a few stories of Yakshas that have tragic endings (or the author takes unembellished stories and embellished them with tragedies.) I enjoyed this following reading the Stories of the Elephant Headed God: knowing very little about Indian stories and epics, I am enjoying piecing together the gods, goddesses, and everything else, and these stories helped with that. It was also nice to see the story of Kubera told again, with a somewhat different spin. 

Finally, the Musical Demon Slayers was a very creative and modern take on a few older stories. The author takes stories with violence and replaces the fighting with music, often in the form of a musical battle. Additionally, the author found actual videos of bands playing the music that the author was imagining, and included them in the storybook. It was an incredibly creative and interesting way to retell these stories that could only be done in the twenty first century. Additionally, the author tailored many aspects of the stories to fit modern culture. Thankfully, he or she also included descriptions of the original stories and what was changed, which allowed me to bridge the gap between the modern occurrences (such as the fedora wearing demon) and the original story. 

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(Ganesha - the source given by the author may no longer be available, but links to a Spanish blog)