Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Reading Diary A: The Praying Baker

The Praying Baker in the Unit Persian Tales would be my favorite for this week.  This story was one of the few stories that had a happy ending.  Most of the stories in this unit had horrible endings with people getting eaten, killed or hurt in some way.  This story was about a baker who was asked by a King to find his ring or he would have to give his life if he didn't find the ring.  The King gave him 10 days to find it.  Upon the tenth day, the baker's wife found the ring in the belly of a fish while she was preparing it for dinner.  The baker presented the ring to the King and the Kind ended up making the baker his favorite person and gave him a huge reward.  There was quite a bit of trickery in this story as well on the part of the King.  This story had several plot twists which I thought made it more interesting.  The picture that went with the story was of a fish and I thought it was quite appropriate for the story.

I guess you could say that I wasn't really a fan of this unit overall because most of them ended up with people getting hurt in the most horrible of ways.  This main character in this story threatened the baker with death if he didn't find his ring, but he lived at the end because he had found it.   The story leads you to believe that it was because of his faith in God that the ring was found by his wife and his life was spared because of that.  I also like the fact that in this story that the man's wife is the one who found the ring.  In general, all the stories in this unit make the females out to be stupid or unworthy.  In this story, the baker's wife is the actual hero because she was the one to find the ring and told her husband to present it to the King.  The only thing that has me puzzled about the stories in this unit is that they always end with "and the sparrow never got home".  I'm not exactly sure what to make of that last comment.  It almost seems like it doesn't belong in the story, unless there is some meaning to it that I'm not comprehending.

The fish & the ring

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2 comments:

  1. Laura GibbsFebruary 4, 2015 at 12:24 PM

    Krista, I sent you an email about this. You can use this for Week 5, so relabel it and do the Declaration for the Week 5 Reading Diary. Details in the email.

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  2. UnknownFebruary 15, 2015 at 7:48 PM

    I don't believe I read any part of this unit over the last two weeks. It was very interesting to get exposure to a new story/unit. It was kind of shocking that this was the only story with a happy ending in this unit. I'm glad you found a nice story among all the terrible ones. A happy ending is always good.

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