One Aladdin Two Lamps

She’s a sorcerer , expressing with precision the mysteries that often escape us in our everyday existence.

Excellent

In this book Winterson uses the One Thousand and One Nights to talk about the importance of fiction and of stories in our lives as humans. One of my favorite things she did was talk about how literature changes us. By spending time with language and words and the thought that goes into story telling we become better people. We are creating internal resources and personal libraries that we can reference and use to create patterns and new ideas and creativity. It reminds me of this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”Now I am a huuuge advocate of reading fiction but I’m also a very literal person and I’m always searching for more concrete, thoughtful reasoning on why fiction is so valuable, why we, as humans, from the very beginning of our lives, are drawn to stories. Babies will watch you talk, toddlers beg for stories, kids with the shortest attention spans will sit down and read a book about other people going on adventures. The psychology of it is fascinating so any book like this one is like catnip to me.Threaded throughout this whole book, however, is a case for AI, which was, for lack of a better word, weird. I have a hard time understanding how an author, of all professions, can be in favor of expanding the presence of AI in our society. It’s possible she just thinks it’s inevitable and because of that we should make the best of it. I’m not entirely sure but even with all that I’d still recommend this one.Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press for this advanced copy!

Leave it to Jeanette Winters on to bring worlds together and make us think about where we go from here. This book took me away from the unspooling current world to places and ideas that can help us move forward by creating new stories for ourselves and our future. I highly recommend this book.

Read ONE ALADDIN TWO LAMPS by Jeanette Winterson if you love creative nonfiction, stories about storytelling, going on a guided journey, the history of oppression & narratives, changing the story, creating new worlds, the power of literature, thoughts about AI & asking "What if?"