Reading Post A: Arabian Nights

Reading Post A

Arabian Nights

My story choice this week was to read Arabian Nights. Something that my friends and I love to do is play board games and one of the board games we play very often is "Tales of Arabian Nights" which has a playable character named Scheherazade, which is the main storyteller in this story of the week. I was definitely drawn to this story right off the bat just from how it was going to be told. I love the idea of having an inception of stories within stories within stories. That approach at first glance can seem to be like the story is trying to be dragged out, which might annoy a reader who just wants to get to the end. Something I appreciate about this style of writing is that not only are you wanting and hoping for a pleasant fate for the main character but as more stories are told with other characters you start to be drawn in and hopeful for them too. It's also a great way to expand on a story since most of the time this new story will have something to do the storyteller's situation. My favorite method this story took was when it went into talking about a fisherman who was troubled by a genius (a sort of mystic presence who was wanting to harm the fisherman) and he told a story to save his life just as Scheherazade was telling a story to save his life. That section of this reading had a lot of inception like stories and I was here for every second of it. I will say that I wished there was more done between the actual storyteller and the main reasons as to why the stories were being told throughout the tales given. Did they allude back to her when she felt like she needed to pause her tales? Yes. Did they ever further develop her situation or if she ever was free to stop telling stories and still live on? Not in the scripts I read but, there may be more information elsewhere.

Bibliography: The Arabian Nights' Entertainments by Andrew Lang and illustrated by H.J. Ford (Un-Textbook)
Image: Arabian Nights Illustration (Wikimedia Commons)