I find ‘meta’ books fascinating: books about narrative, meaning, reading, storytelling, and writing. Which is one of the reasons I’m a big fan of Jorge Louis Borges. I love The Book of Sand, the Library of Babel, and many other works by him. For the same reason, I also love Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino. But I’ll write about these writers and the works that most appealed to me another day.

Where did my love for this type of fiction and writing in general come from? I think it comes from an amazing insight my father shared when I was young, where he drew a parallel between the narrative structures of The Baital Pachisi and the Arabian Nights.

Both are very well-known, popular works, but depending on where you are located you are probably more familiar with one or the other. Just to be safe, let me therefore introduce each of these works briefly.