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[Photo by Jeremy Mura on Unsplash]

We know you’re feeling it too. How is it already the end of February? Well we’re not ready to say goodbye to it just yet. To close out the shortest month of the year, we’ve created 28-word summaries for some of our favorite books.

[Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash]

Today is No Brainer Day, and while it may be a day which celebrates the simple and obvious, sometimes these things are not the same for everyone.

This year’s Oscar nominations included films containing incredibly diverse and fascinating cinematic experiences: an international adoption from Calcutta to Tasmania, a heightened musical representation of artistic LA and working class African-American 1950s Pittsburgh.

The Oscars are intended to recognise extraordinary accomplishments and storytelling, dream worlds and universal truths within movies. We have some of our own suggestions for Oscars (or would they be called the Quirkeys?). We’re providing nominations and winners in our own play on words production. Could we have the envelopes, please?

And the winner is…

Since the first Academy Awards in 1928, thirty-three Best Picture winners were based on novels.

All told, that accounts for almost half of all Academy Award winning films! That’s quite a track record attesting to the critical success of “book to screen.” But do literary characters fare equally well?

We’ll admit it, February can be a bit of a gloomy month. Spring is tantalizingly close… and yet it feels so far away when the snow is still falling. The holidays are long gone and those wonderful New Year/New You intentions are fading away in the rearview mirror. But though it may be a bit ‘blah’, February also marks the birthday of one of France’s best-known novelists: Victor Hugo. Born on the 26^th in 1876, Hugo’s writing certainly suits his birth month – his most famous works (Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame) are deeply melancholy, with death and despair at every turn.

There are countless fairy tales and legends we hold dear, but not all of them have had the staying power of Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, and Cinderella. Some stories just don’t have what it takes to remain in public consciousness and be made into Disney films. Here’s a collection of fairy tales that have fallen, deservedly, into obscurity.*