Book Value

Leaders from the worlds of business, academia, entertainment and politics share what’s on their bedside table.

Nobel Laureate ROBERT SHILLER

Sterling Professor of Economics, Yale University

SHAHRAZAD’S SAGA

I’ve been reading The

Arabian Nights (Norton, 2010), edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen from Princeton’s comparative literature department, translated by Husain Haddawy, based on a text edited by Muhsin Mahdi. It comes from the

oldest near-complete manuscript that survives from the 14th century. It has a scholarly introduction and a “Contexts” section, which includes fragments from a 9th-century manuscript (as well as works by Poe and Proust). Another name for it is The Thousand and One Nights. It was apparently a bestseller around 900 A.D.

I wanted an authentic translation, not a cleanedup version. You’d think that something written in Arabic 1,000 years ago would be hard to relate to, but I am enjoying it perfectly well. This says something about the constancy of human

experience.