Selections from One Thousand and One Nights (c.800-1??? CE)

The first in our Journey to the East reading series exploring texts from the Middle East, India, China and Japan.
Join the Really Old Books Whatsapp to see the full schedule - the Meetup site only allows me to advertise one event at a time: https://chat.whatsapp.com/IzXLwdM1Fa33dNe4suamLV
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Have you seen that Christopher Nolan film, Inception? The one with the dreams and the dreams inside the dreams? Pretty confusing, eh? Well, to the audience of the Islamic Golden Age, a narrative device like that would've been perfectly normal, as we can see here with the stories within stories of the Thousand and One Nights.

Our heroine Scheherazade is relying on her storytelling skill to stay alive, entertaining her husband King Shahryar and relying on a knack for narrative suspense to keep him from indulging in his awkward habit of beheading women. One story leads to another, one night into the next, and so, through the dense web of interconnected tales, she postpones her violent end.

I promise I will not kill you if you do not read all of the stories here. We'll only be reading about six. I'm reading the abridged translation by Richard Burton, which is available in full on Project Gutenberg here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51252/51252-h/51252-h.htm

We are reading the first 5 tales, including the frame narrative - from 'STORY OF KING SHAHRYAR AND HIS BROTHER' to '4. TALE OF NUR AL-DIN ALI AND HIS SON BADR AL-DIN HASAN', along with 'ALAEDDIN; OR, THE WONDERFUL LAMP' thrown in for good measure. This is about 300 pages in my edition - you can skip Alaeddin if you don't have time and aren't interested in the version of the story without Robin Williams / Will Smith.

All of these can be found in the Modern Library edition 'The Arabian Nights' - as there are numerous other editions I don't know for sure where else you'll find these texts, but I know for certain they are on Project Gutenberg and in the Modern Library edition.

Please contact me if you have any enquiries! Looking forward to a fun chat about a book that's been on my shelf, unread, for 5 years now.