Week 11: Bidpai Reading Unit (Essay)

For this week, I read the Tales of Bidpai unit from the Un-textbook. I really enjoyed this unit and thought all of the stories were fun to read. The stories were all diverse and all of them were interesting. I personally like when the un-textbook stories are only a page or two long, so I thought this one was great since none of the stories went over a page.

This was the first unit I had read in this class or the Mythology Folklore class that had some pages with multiple, extremely short stories  one one page. I thought this was great because i was such a different set up from many of the long stories we read, especially with the epics in this class. I also thought they were grouped very well, for example, having multiple stories on a page that all focus on apes. 

I also don't think I'd read a unit for either class that had an introduction quite like this one, but I really liked it. I liked how it set up the original scribe of the book of stories, almost as a myth himself. I thought that this was a great way to begin a storybook like this. The talking about the libraries of the king and the amount of knowledge there, was amazing. When reading it it made me think of the Library of Alexandria. 

There were many stories I liked, including the Two Travelers, however I talked a lot about that one in my first reading diary and my storytelling assignment, so I won't talk much about that one here. I also liked the King, Hermit, and Two Princes story. I thought this was a great story to show the moral of no living above your means, saving your money, and not relying on other people to bail you out of debt or bad situations in general that you get yourself into. The story was very similar to modern day versions that are in movies and TV shows where the trust fund kids are cut off and party away all of their money before they realize it. 

I liked this reading unit a lot and would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for something a little different. I have loved reading the epics this semester but it is nice to read stories that are a little simpler sometimes and this unit was great to do that.

(Bidpai and the king, from the
Arabic Kalila-wa-Dimna)

Story source: The Tortoise and the Geese and Other Fables of Bidpai by Maude Barrows Dutton, with illustrations by E. Boyd Smith, 1908.