The Arabian Nights

Everyone has heard of Aladdin and Scheherazade -- read the original tales! My edition (inherited from my grandfather) published in 1916 is free of today's concerns about political correctness or prejudice about Arabs, and the color illustrations are amazing! ( )

This is the story about Scheherazade who marries the sultan in order to stop him from killing his wives. He was married previously, and found out that his wife was cheating on him, so in order to get revenge, he would marry a new wife every day and have her killed the next morning. Scheherazade would tell the sultan a story each morning and end with a cliff hanger so that the sultan would want to hear the ending the next day. It reminded me of how television shows end the season with a cliff hanger in order to lure you back into watching it the next season. Who can forget the summer when we couldn't wait to find out who shot J.R. on Dallas? After telling story after story for 1001 nights, the sultan decides to keep Scheherazade around.

This was a very old edition of this book, and one thing I liked about it was the fact that it had a lot of footnotes explaining the terminology or the history of specific parts of the story. Something that disappointed me in the stories was the fact that in so many of the stories there is a beautiful, rich girl who is the most beautiful girl in the world, or the most beautiful girl ever seen. How realistic is that? Also, there seemed to be wealthy sultans or merchants in every story with rooms full of gold and jewels. It even mentioned one girl who wore so many jewels that she could hardly walk. Again, this was very unrealistic. But if you view these as fairy tales, then I guess you can have all the gold, jewels, and beautiful girls you want in them. ( )