Reading maketh a full man

I have just completed a selection of tales from the One Thousand and One Nights collection, in the Penguin Classic, Arabian Nights.

I think you can tell a lot about a people by their folklore and the messages they carry and lessons they teach. As a man thinketh, so is he. Suffice it to say that there seems to be an obsession with the latent infidelity of women and jinnees.

I do feel some loose link with Jamaican/West Indian folklore with the stories of Anancy, who is the character to whom cunning has become a second nature and who skillfully applies it to get ahead... but all folklore exist to pass on the wisdom of the forebears to the newer generations.

While reading Arabian Nights, I was more than slightly shocked at the sexual references-especially since the culture has become so conservative. Believe you me, one of the more frequent verbs is "to Mount" and all the conjugations thereof.

I am reading the classics because they are a lot cheaper than the newer hyped up books, the last of which my book mark is still stuck on page 40. It seems many of these newer books are better seen as loose movie treatments than becoming classics in their own right. I can buy four classics for the price of one new book so if you are going to be all hyped up, you better be good because the classics are worth every penny!

The Next Book: Mansfield Park by Jane Austin. I think it relevant especially in the light of my post about my own experience of poverty and class.