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I enjoyed the three stories that I read in A Thousand and One Nights-- I read the Electronic Literature Foundation's online selection of the stories, which were translated by Andrew Lang and Sir Richard Burton.  I love how the stories flow into each other, making a seemingly endless storyscape.  I first read 'The story of the merchant and the genius,' in reading which I wondered what definition of genius the writers meant.  I understand the word to mean really intelligent, but as I consulted Merriam-Webster I was confronted by a definition I was not familiar with: 1 a plural genii : an attendant spirit of a person or place b plural usually genii : a person who influences another for good or bad.  this story then morphed into a new story, the story of the first old man and of the hine, which then became the story of the second old man and of the two black dogs.  In this story, I caught the typo “I began to lover her more and more,” which made me giggle at the thought of lover as a verb. throughout these stories ran a theme of sparing life, which I liked.