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- Hey, do you like The Arabian nights?
- Sure! Loved this book as a kid. My favourite story is Aladdin!
- Um, it’s not in the original text and was written by a Frenchman Antoine Galland and then it was translated into Arabic and attempted to pass as an original text.
- Hmm. Well, then Ali Baba and the forty thieves. Love it!
- Um, same thing as with Aladdin�
- Damn! Ok, I love Sinbad’s adventures! Ha!
- You see, it was a cycle of independent stories from 17-18th centuries. They are not in the original oldest Syrian manuscript we have now in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
- The hell?? What are these stories then??
- Glad you asked!
This is the world of jealous murderous husbands, horny duplicitous wives, demons and sex. the surprising amount of sex... The colorful world of magic. The world of uncountable kings. You thought romance genre’s England has too many Dukes? Ha!
I really loved the first half of the book but by the end stories became too samey. Still it’s a recommend and this book makes a very fun reading experience.

This version is by Muhsin Mahdi based on the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Syrian manuscript that is currently in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Mahdi argued that this version is the earliest extant one (a view that is largely accepted today) and that it reflects most closely a "definitive" coherent text ancestral to all others that he believed to have existed during the Mamluk period (a view that remains contentious).

A few months later...
This book is quite extraordinary. While reading it, I am enjoying it, but I can never remember any further than the last two stories. And the spell is broken every time I close the book. They just refuse to stay in my head. I vaguely remember that there must be a prince, a sea voyage, betrayal/misfortune, some island in the middle of the sea with strange things happening on it, sometimes there's castle with virgins, and then return to Baghdad and becoming wealthy. And that's almost every story.