All done! An excellent end too.
Maybe the book is supposed to be read over 1000 nights and not in a few sittings.At roughly the half-point, but it is getting difficult to keep reading 1001 nights. The format is very forced - essentially all of the stories are alluding, supposedly covertly, to the king's decision to kill his wife and her lover and then marry each day and kill his new bride by night - and various other elements are repetitive, such as evil spirits and transformation of humans to animals.
The tale of the evil ziin is nice, but I already knew that since elementary school*. Most of the other tales are not very interesting.
*In fact reading the whole book took away my original impression of the stand-alone nature of the evil ziin story, cause later on the ziin is freed again and is reconciled with the fisherman - which makes it more of a melodrama instead of a tragedy.
He also has a weird fixation with men becoming feminized over time, and then going back to 'proper men' even further in time. He doesn't really portray the femininity as a bad thing, more that it is just an inevitable product of the times that people live in. In times of comfort, men get soft, basically. He presents that idea in this book a few times and it is my least favorite of his social observations/critiques.
Reading just the second book would really miss the whole story. As Hobbs said, you need to read them all in order.I have the 2nd of these books lying around at home, might pick it up soon.
I feel this 100%. For a while I was hesitant to even use my library because I felt like I wouldn't finish books before they were due back. I got the book solely on @Birdjaguar's recommendation and wasn't super sure about it. Then I lucked out and had a 7 hour train ride and once I started it, I couldn't put it down. I nearly finished the first book in a single sitting. I ran through the entire series like that but I was busy with life and it's taken about a month.it's difficult to start reading a series of fat sci fi novels when I'm expected to read hundreds of pages weekly for uni, and quite a lot for personal growth/interest. I