• Characters: Scheherazade (narrator), Shahryār (The King), Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor
• Genre: Fantasy
• Setting: Middle East, Baghdad
• Reading time: 37 days (up to 65%) (19/12 to 25/01/2013)
• Rating: Not Bad
One Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights, is an ancient collection of stories from the middle east.
It is not the wisest of the choices if you want to be delighted by a marvelous or witty use of English. It is actually a translation from Arabic, a language which I guess doesn't share many things in common with English, therefore the language used here is rather simplistic.
From my perspective, one of the most appealing things of this book is the fact that it is a very old piece of Arabic culture, which is the reason why I got to read it in the first place. It represents indeed a very fulfilling experience if you wish to take a dive into any theme related with the (ancient) Arabian culture, as it was my case.
However, speaking strictly of the tales in terms of the story lines I must say it didn't live up to my expectations. Many of the stories would take weird twists getting nowhere close to where I'd have liked them to end.
Having said all this and even though I didn't get up to its end ,I consider myself done with One Thousand and One Nights. This collection of stories failed at getting me engaged enough, so I didn't keep up the energy to read it on a daily basis. Then again, I think that having read about 65% of it leaves me with more that enough to know what is this classic all about.
It is not the wisest of the choices if you want to be delighted by a marvelous or witty use of English. It is actually a translation from Arabic, a language which I guess doesn't share many things in common with English, therefore the language used here is rather simplistic.
From my perspective, one of the most appealing things of this book is the fact that it is a very old piece of Arabic culture, which is the reason why I got to read it in the first place. It represents indeed a very fulfilling experience if you wish to take a dive into any theme related with the (ancient) Arabian culture, as it was my case.
However, speaking strictly of the tales in terms of the story lines I must say it didn't live up to my expectations. Many of the stories would take weird twists getting nowhere close to where I'd have liked them to end.
Having said all this and even though I didn't get up to its end ,I consider myself done with One Thousand and One Nights. This collection of stories failed at getting me engaged enough, so I didn't keep up the energy to read it on a daily basis. Then again, I think that having read about 65% of it leaves me with more that enough to know what is this classic all about.
