Merry Tales

Skinner, Eleanor L. (Eleanor Louise), 1872-Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

2.4

Word count: 176K words
Chapters: 18

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Merry Tales by Ada M. Skinner and Eleanor L. SkinnerAuthor: Skinner, Eleanor L. (Eleanor Louise), 1872-,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Dec 18, 2016

Editor's review

Edited by Ada M. Skinner and Eleanor L. Skinner, Merry Tales is a juvenile literature title presented as a collection of short stories in English. Its value lies not in complex narrative technique but in offering English learners and child readers a body of short, briskly paced stories written in relatively simple language. As a free Project Gutenberg e-book, it is extremely accessible and well suited as introductory English reading material or for family read-aloud sessions. Readers need not seek depth of plot; instead they can focus on sentence structure, common vocabulary, and the storytelling voice. For researchers, it also serves as a small sample of early twentieth-century American children's book compilation. Overall, this is a lightweight, practical public-domain text suited to fragmented reading; its strengths are that it is freely available and the stories are short, while its limitation is the lack of notes or introduction, requiring readers to build their own reading framework.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Student readers new to original English stories who need short pieces for practice
Parents and teachers looking for English bedtime story material for children
Enthusiasts of literary or publishing history studying early English children's读物 compilation
Readers who enjoy short stories in spare moments and do not require long, continuous plots

Not a good fit for

Beginning readers who want a Chinese translation or bilingual annotated edition
Readers who prefer long novels with complex structure and profound themes
Readers who find public-domain e-book formatting and the absence of an introduction difficult to adapt to

Reading tips

Read one or two pieces a day without looking up words first; review new words afterward to preserve the sense of the whole story.
For parent-child reading, have an adult read aloud once, then let the child retell the gist to train listening and summarizing skills.
Reread the same story after a week, focusing the second time on sentence patterns and common expressions, and take brief notes.
For teaching, select several pieces of similar length for comparison and discuss how the stories open and close.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book suitable for readers with zero English foundation?

Not very suitable for complete beginners. The book is in original English with no notes, and beginners may struggle with unfamiliar words and sentence patterns. It is better to have basic vocabulary and simple-sentence reading ability first, or to try it with an adult's explanation.

What age of children are the stories suitable for?

The material indicates it is a juvenile literature story collection with light language and short length, better suited to upper-primary children with some English foundation, or as parent-child reading material. The specific fit still depends on the child's English level.

The e-book has no introduction or notes; how can I read it more effectively?

You can build your own reading framework: first read a story through to grasp the plot, then review new words and sentence patterns, and finally write the gist in one or two sentences. After several stories, compare how they open and close, and your reading gains will be more systematic.

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About the author

Skinner, Eleanor L. (Eleanor Louise), 1872- Author · 1872

Eleanor L. Skinner (1872– ), whose full name was Eleanor Louise Skinner, was an English-language author about whose life very little is known. Only her birth in 1872 can be confirmed; her nationality, education and career remain obscure, and publicly available information is very limited. One work by her is held in the collection, Merry Tales. Judging from its title and its circulation, the book appears to be a collection of light, humorous stories, possibly intended for general readers or young people, told in a brisk and cheerful style. Because records are scattered, she has attracted little attention from scholars or general readers, and her writing style and influence cannot be fully assessed. On the available evidence, she is best understood as a writer remembered for a small body of work, whose significance lies chiefly in the popular storytelling appeal represented by Merry Tales.