Week 4 Reading Diary: Arabian Nights

Persian miniature: a polo match

I really liked reading all of these framework/nested stories in the Arabian Nights unit from The Arabian Nights' Entertainments by Andrew Lang and illustrated by H. J. Ford (1898). My favorites were towards the end. I liked the story of the king being cured of leprosy and the jealous vizir, and the following story was with the parrot was very entertaining as well!

I liked the magic in the story with the king being cured because it made me wonder how it was done. Sometimes I think stories give a little too much detail, and I know that I don't like to leave anything up to the imagination by the end of the story if I can help it. But by nesting several short stories together, these Arabian Night stories left a lot up to the imagination! Also, almost all of these stories seemed to involve someone feeling jealous or wronged, which I thought was really funny as well.

In the story with the parrot, the wife felt wronged that the parrot had told her husband what she was doing, so she tricked the parrot. I don't really understand why the husband was so mad that he killed the parrot, however. But I guess if you trust something, lying is a pretty big deal, even if it is only a bird. I feel like it could be fun to tell this story because the story of the parrot is very short. So even in one of my weekly storytelling posts I could use the framework story technique as long as I keep the nested story short, like this parrot one!