I was enchanted from the moment I began to read, the story of Scheherazade, who will be killed by the king unless she can keep him occupied with her stories.
I was certainly occupied. The stories have that certain quality that only seems to come to tales that have passed through many hands. Of terseness. No unnecessary adjectives, no flowery or long-winded descriptions. Only the best and brightest words have made the cut and survived down the generations. The rest is left up to the imagination. This means that even though it is written on a level which children can comprehend, it is often slow going because of the necessity of summoning up one's own mental images.
This is rather a joy than a toil, however. I enjoyed the unconventional way in which the stories are connected, one inside the other like nesting eggs. Scheherazade might begin a story, and then one of the characters begins to tell another story, and then one in that story begins another, and so forth. It could be five or six stories before we finally wind our way back to Scheherazade.
Because the stories are short and efficient, it is easy to pick up the book and read one in a spare moment. If I were you I would avoid the newest translations and pick up an older version. The language is at times archaic, but it retains that feeling of reading the result of generations of retellings better than the newer versions.
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