My Discovery

I pride myself on having a numerous amount of books that I can barely fit on three large seven foot bookcases; in fact I show people and it frightens them. (That perhaps I have no life, which may be true.) In any case, I was cataloging them on this new piece of software I bought called Delicious Library 2. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s not like Yahoo’s Delicious, which bookmarks pages for later use. It’s a cataloging system for all of your possessions, so I figured why not my books, my prized possessions. 

So I was doing that and I came across a book that I didn’t remember buying or getting. It was called Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier. The cover was a little scary. As you can see, it looks a little freakish, with its goat looking face and in it were stories, what I assume are bedtime stories, but they don’t sound like children’s stories. 

The first story is about a man who has a love of tiger skins and beautiful women, and he could do without the first by choice and the second he did without by fault. So he seeks to pick up a hobby, because he is miserable and he needs something to do, he stumbles upon a glass bottle shop. One of those hobby shops that has those ships in a bottle; he looks around for a minute and a little man comes out of the back. He tells the man that he has all sorts of things inside the bottles in particular, a man who can grant any wish and the most beautiful woman in the world, which of course piques the man’s interest. So he asks for the bottle which contains the man who can grant any wish. Needless to say, the man goes a bit crazy with wishing for everything he could ever want, including, you guessed it, tiger skins and beautiful women. However, he soon grew bored of it all, and ask the genie to take away everything out of his palace and bring him the bottle containing the most beautiful woman in the world. 

I will leave you to guess what happens next, but seriously check it out. It gets twisted very quickly, and I think the stories are great and I’m glad to have found something so interesting in my collection of books.