The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Anderson. The book can be found on the Norwegian Book List.
This book took me a long time to read. I started reading it with my daughter about 5 years ago during our bedtime reading. However, she did not like it at all, despite being a huge The Little Mermaid fan, and we eventually stopped reading it together. I then started to read it on my own, however I couldn't continue reading the stories for a long time, so I would put the book down for months at a time. This style of reading works for a short story compilation because there are no threads tying the stories together, but there is also nothing drawing me back into the book. Anderson wrote stories for over 40 years and in that time his writing style didn't change much at all. He would often start and finish stories in the same manner, with his story wrap up much like Forest Gump's "and that's all I have to say about that", which leaves a sour taste in my mouth. There really was no need to add the last sentence just saying the story was completed. Many of his earlier stories were basically just Christian folktales, with that theme cropping up throughout his writing career. He was also horribly misogynistic and anti-Semitic. There is an entire story about a Jewish girl who basically hates herself because she is Jewish and eventually dies happy finding out that she had finally been converted to being a Christian. He is also big on anthropomorphism, where many, if not most, of his stories revolve around viewing life around an inanimate object as if that object had thoughts and feelings. I think these were the most painful to read. His better stories focused on humans, and there are some rather enjoyable stories in the mix. I liked "The Thorny Road of Honor" and "Lucky Peer", as well as reading up on the original stories for all of the Disney Movies and other stories that had gotten passed down through time such as "The Little Mermaid", "The Ugly Duckling", and "The Little Match Girl". These were overall the high points of his writings and really would be the only ones I recommend people search out to read.
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