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All or nothing?

rachelr's picture

 I read the Thousand and One Nights tales from the ELF site, and the tales that I chose were The Story of the Merchant and the Genius, The Story of the Greek King and the Physician Douban, and The Enchanted Horse. I decided to skip around because I wanted to get a sense of some of the early, middle, and later stories, but when I have time I would like to read all of them, and in order. Some stories lead into other stories, and these stories are part of the secondary story which is a part of the Thousand and One Nights main story. So I feel like, to get the full effect and being able to understand the main underlying story, you need to read all of the stories in order. However if you are not a concerned with the main story, then many of he tales can also be read and appreciated individually. 

I enjoyed these readings- when I began reading I started with the Harvard Classics site, but I did not really like the translation so that is when I switched over to ELF, which I found much easier to follow. I think it would be interesting to look at more editions and translations to see how much of a variation there is between tales...

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