This is going to be a fairly long post, as there are several stories to talk about, so bear with me.
It took me a lot longer than I had planned to read this book. My settings in my app have me reading 3 books a month, and instead it took me three weeks to read this one book. To be fair, I do have a lot of other reading to do for school, but I have to admit I'd still expected to use a lot less time on this one.
First, a little bit about the book. I had the choice between a six volume version, and a 300-page version. Needless to say, I chose the shorter one. The version used in the app is 450 pages, so I also went with what was closest to that. As it turns out, this is also just one volume in a several-volume version of the book, so that was a bit of a fail, but that's what they had in the library, so that's what I went with.
I had a bit of trouble getting used to this book. I think it's because it's very shortened, so the stories don't flow as well as I imagine they do in the full-length book. The stories in my version are as follows*:
- The Tale of King Omar bin al-Nu'uman and His Sons Sharrkan and Zau al-Makan
- Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat
- Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Landsman
- The Mock Caliph
- Aladdin; or, The Wonderful Lamp
The first one, The Tale of King Omar, had a lot of stories inside the story (storyception!), which I think is part of why it took me so long to get through it. The stories seemed to only have very brief strokes, and this paired with how the main story was constantly broken up by other stories, made it difficult to get into. I do think it was an interesting read though, and I would love to go back and read the full version some time, so that I can really enjoy it properly.
The second story, Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat, confused me. At this time I didn't know there was a second Aladdin story in the book, so I was confused as to how different it was from the Disney movie, as there were obviously parts of this story that had influenced the movie, such as the name of one of Ala Al-Din's wives and the flying carpet (a flying sofa bed in this story, which seems infinitely less practical). I liked it, but with this one I was definitely distracted by similarities and differences with the story I already know.
The Sindbad story mostly frustrated me. It's a very interesting and entertaining story, but I kept thinking how Sindbad needs to learn from his past experiences. He goes on 7 journeys, and each journey ends in somewhat of a disaster where he barely escapes with his life, and still he doesn't learn, but keeps going on new journeys! I think maybe this story would also have benefitted from being read in the full versions, as I suppose it wouldn't feel so much like he was suffering from short-term memory loss. This story also features my hands-down favorite sentence in the entire book, which is the following**:
In this area there are also unicorns, or rhinoceroses, which graze just like our oxen and buffaloes (...)I mean!!! That is fantastic! I don't know about you, but where I'm from, rhinos and unicorns are two very different animals. I loved this part so much I just had to write it down so that I'd remember to put it in the blog post, because it is just golden. Sindbad goes on to explain how the rhino is so strong that it sometimes catches an elephant on its horn, and doesn't notice until the elephant dies and its fat starts melting and runs down into the rhino's eyes. At this point the rhino lies down to die, and the giant bird Roc feeds them both to its offspring. Like I said, this is hands down my favorite part of the book, for obvious reasons.
Out of all the stories, I think The Mock Caliph is probably the one I liked best. I think it probably isn't much longer in its original form, because it flowed well and didn't feel chopped up like the others. It's a clever story with unexpected twists, and I liked the morale, and how it shows us that even the wisest among grown-ups can learn things from young children.
The final story is the second Aladdin story. This is obviously the one that influenced the Disney movie the most, and it did help to clear up some of the confusion I had about the first Aladdin story. Out of all the stories this is the one I was the most familiar with from before, and I thought it was perfectly okay. Again it's probably a lot more interesting in the full versions, as things happened really quickly and it felt like some of the excitement was missing.
Looking at the book as a whole, I think the impression I'm left with is that I definitely need to read the full versions of these stories to really enjoy them properly. It's very interesting as a Christian to read stories written from a muslim viewpoint. It makes me understand even better than before that a story will always be influenced by the author's history, both religious and cultural. The first story features a war between Christians and Muslims, and in these cases I'm used to always having the Christians be "the good guys", and so I actually found it refreshing to read something that's different, and I think it's also important and healthy to not always read stories where the people you identify with are the heroes.
All in all I liked this book, but I do think there are other books on the List that I will enjoy more.
* I read the book in Norwegian, so I had to look up the English titles online. Naturally they're a bit different, so you'll have to forgive me if this isn't what these stories are actually called.
** Again, as I read this in Norwegian, I've had to improvise the English. This is my own translation, and the wording probably isn't anything like in the book, but I think you get my point.
