Arabian Nights Kindle Edition

One's imagination can run wild with reading the tales of Arabian Nights

The Arabian Nights needs no review, as a classic. It is the delight of all story lovers, young and old. I read it first as a teenager, and now at age 80! The stories are as delightful as when I read them first. Translated beautifully into The type of prose fit for the best of stories in the world!

It was a great book but it has to much witchcraftI chose it because my parents told me to read it and I found it was great

In these difficult times the efforts of Muhsin Mahdi, professor of Arabic at Harvard, have presented us with a new text, and Husain Haddawy, professor of English at the University of Nevada at Reno, has translated it into modern English bringing us back to the true heart of a proud and humble culture all should remember.

While reading “The Uses of Enchantment the meaning and importance of fairy tales”, I felt I needed to review some of the stories referred to in that book to re-experience such stories without the deep breakdown shown in “The Uses of Enchantment”. The Arabian Nights tales were wise in their understanding of human nature and illuminating in ways that still provide value in our current time.

This is basically the Grimm Fairy Tales equivalent for East Asia, India, and the Middle East. You can imagine these tales told orally by skillful speakers.There are stories within stories within stories, an interesting device. (It's like "Inception," where you go down the dream layers and then have to return upwards, and then you have to try and remember the upper layers after time away from them.)There are lots of kings and rulers and beautiful princesses and handsome princes. Very few good-looking people turn out to be jerks. There is magic and magical creatures, but not in every story. It's a great look at human imagination over the generations.These are the main lessons from these tales: Traits such as industry, wisdom, graciousness, and generosity are admired. Greed, dishonesty, and laziness are scorned. Wealth is admired so long as you are generous with it. A good story may save your life. A good sob story will make people feel sorry for you and give you money. Everyone eventually gets what they deserve. Punishments are harsh, so beware!

Kids used to be introduced to these tales as a part of growing up, even though they might not have known the familiar stories were from this book. As children we thought the culture behind this collection was so exotic, but yet the concept was so understandable -- here are people from a different era and a different part of the world, yet we understand them and are interested in their experiences as if they were anything like our own. There's something endearing about the timelessness of this collection, though the stories are so many and are repetitive. I think that's why we were exposed to the individual tales in bits and pieces; the book cannot hold a child's attention when delivered as a whole. An adult will find things in it that nostalgically remind him of something from his childhood -- too bad developments in the modern world have spoiled the comfortable concept of Arabian Nights for us.

Excitement, intrigue, suspense.... really, just great story telling! As a child, you read of Sinband the Sailor and rubbing a magic lamp to find a genie with three wishes. As an adult, you can bring this all back by reading this well wrtten/translated labyrinth of stories. Each storyteller has a story and one leads to another, all interwoven. It is hard to put down.Before you think this is just an old fashioned, studious piece of literature, believe me, it is so imaginative and rich. Each story is relatively short, so you can read at your own pace; either one story a night, or several stories at a time.This is a great read for those who love to be swept away to a different time and place. I could see readers of Harry Potter, adventure readers and even those with a short attention span who prefer to read short stories enjoying these Arabian tales!I can't wait to recommend this old school book to my friends. They'll be so surprised!

Suspend your disbelief and enjoy these ancient Middle Eastern tales for what they are. Well worth it at the price.

Great reading , not taxing and free

Thanks

The stories in this book brought back my childhood memories. All the children used to gather at the Granda Pa's home in the evening where he read stories from the Arabian Nights.

This book brings back childhood memories :)