Wen-chin Ouyang

I'll admit right from the start that I read this purely as its in the '1001 books' list. I wasn't sure about what edition to go for as there are many different translations and collections. From what I understand, most of the editions you can read will have selected stories and not the entire works as its so large. The Everyman's Library edition I chose contains 23 main stories but many of these are broken up into 4 or 5 related tales. For example, the tales of The Fisherman and the Jinni contains one main story and four sub stories. What tends to happen is a story is being told which contains a character, and then we are told the story of that character before coming back to the main tale. This is repeated several times before the main overarching story is completed. We start with Sheherazade who convinces king Shahryar to let her tell him a story before he kills her. To preserve her life for as long as possible these stories seemingly never end and go on night after night. I found it hard to rate this as its so historic it feels wrong for a mere mortal like me to pass judgement on it. Some of the writing is a bit difficult to get on with as tends to happen with 'old' language but the stories are engaging and you soon realise where a lot of the story archetypes we know today originate from. My favourite stories were those of Sinbad the Sailor as they encompass many different settings over many years. Overall I enjoyed my time with this book.… (altro)