It's contest time again! But first let me give credit where it is due: The first post I opened today to enjoy with my morning coffee was this one by 
Collections of International Fairy Tales
While I grew up with all kinds of fairy tales, from Hungarian folk tales to the most famous German tales collected by the Grimm brothers, my all-time favorites came from two massive tomes that used to belong to my dad when he was little. Their titles in English are The Palace of the Dragon King and The Flying Ship. Both contain folk tales from a number of ethnicities living in two regions. The former book focused on tales from East Asia, the latter on folk tales of cultures living in the Soviet Union.
The Palace of the Dragon King
As a kid you're still putting the world together, and while I had no idea about geography (let alone culture and ethnicities), I was well aware of how different the "Far East" had to be from my Hungarian / German home. Reading those stories (or rather having them read to me at bedtime) showed me that not only were they different from the European tales I was more familiar with, but from each other as well. Thus I learned that not everything that is Asian is automatically Chinese. The tales in this book were from a number of peoples, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Uyghur, and Tibetan cultures. (Sorry BDCommunity, no Bangladeshi tales in this book.)
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The Flying Ship
For me this book turned out to be even more exotic! It was a huge collection of folk tales from all over the former (though at the time of publication, and even when I was enjoying the books it was still well and alive) Soviet Union. I never knew how many cultures lived in that immense country, and how diverse they were. In fact, looking at the names, even today I don't recognize about half of them. Though their stories bring to mind settings of an immense diversity. Some were very European-like, others reminded me of the world of 1001 Nights, still others brought to mind the endless steps and forest of Hungarian tales, while still others put me right into the remoteness of snow and ice where the protagonist interacted with animals.
This book included tales from Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Moldovan, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Georgian, Armenian, Azeri, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tadjik, and Kyrgyz peoles, but also those who did not have their own republic within the USSR: the Tatar, Bashkir, Koryak, Chukchi, Buryat, Karelian, Samoyed, Udege, Evenki, Dagestani, Nanai, Ossetian, Kabard, Dolgan, Yakut, Chuvash, Mordvin, Avar, Udmurt, Mansi, and a culture referred to as Eskimo.
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Available Online in Hungarian
I know both books are still on the shelf in my parents' house in New Zealand, but prompted by this contest I tried to see if I could find at least their covers online. As you can see, I did, but not only that. My second search result for The Flying Ship offered me a .pdf file of the whole book in its entirety! The Place of the Dragon King was just as easy to get. However, both are in Hungarian only (sorry for getting your hopes up). So now I can truly immerse myself in my childhood memories, reading these wonderful fairy tales, while looking up the history, geography, and culture of those folk groups who created them. Thank you BDCommunity for this great contest, and thank you
Invitation to Participate
I know, we're getting close to the end of this contest, so there isn't a lot of time to participate. Still, I would like to challenge two of my favorite Hiveans to share their favorite books: 