Aesops fables are classics that have endured. In the 17th Century La Fontaine turned them into French verse, and these have been further translated by James Michie into English. They are collected here with some 19th century French illustrations.

I know many of these fables from the very many places they appear, even today. You read them in childrens books, or watch sketches of them on The Muppet Show, or even play computer games featuring them. Almost always, an animal like a hare, or a frog, or a lion, exhibits some aspect of human nature that isn't desirable, and gets their come uppance.

I've enjoyed these in the past, and in this book you get nearly 100 cleverly written versions, but there are two things about these retellings that somehow manage remove a lot of the subtlety and playfulness I remember.

The first is that I just couldn't seem to get the poems to scan properly, or the rhymes to match up. I tried first to read one out loud to my daughter, but this proved impossibly tortuous. It almost works sometimes, then the timing disappears and you get tongue tied. I had a look a the French versions, and they appear to flow much more pleasantly. The language used is also much too serious for children.

The playfulness is also lost by how serious everything seems to be. I may then have made another mistake in reading the rest of the book in one sitting. I ended up just reading them one after the other simply as stories, and getting quite depressed at what a load of selfish, greedy, vain animals were being paraded in front of me. In many cases also, the fairly obvious moral of the story is hammered home a bit too firmly at the end.

Perhaps a bit less haste, and more effort at finding the correct meter for reading is what's needed to get the full enjoyment from these fables. Even more so, I think that like Shakespeare, they can only really be enjoyed properly by being listened to, read out loud by a skilled actor.

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