The Welsh Fairy book by W. Jenkyn Thomas

Exhibit A: My love of all things Welsh.

Exhibit B: My obsession with faeries, fairy tales, and folklore in general.

Exhibit C: The title of this book.

The defense rests.

More seriously, this is a fantastic collection. There's a wide variety of fairy tales in it--mostly featuring actual faeries--and I felt that it gave me a really good feeling for Welsh folklore in 1907 (when the book was first compiled). One can't really judge on the literary merit of folktales, but they're well-told, and most are entertaining and intriguing. A few had unexpected similarities to folktales of other cultures that I've encountered, and I would be interested to find out where these tropes originated (if it can be pinned down) and how they passed from one to the other.

Primitive Mythology by Joseph Campbell

This was quite a long read and I'm not sure I quite got all the information in my brain, but it was pretty interesting. I was, however, expecting far more actual myths and less blather about them. It seemed that the stories were thrown in randomly--sometimes to illustrate a point, sometimes not--and there was much more summary and generalization than otherwise. I had a hard time following some of that. The part about shamans and their role in ancient society was, I think, my favorite part--there were illustrations in that section, which made it more vivid to me.