The Language of Birds

For the #RamadanReadathon at Twitter, I want to highlight some story collections, like the Nasruddin books I wrote about last time, that people might enjoy reading, featuring free full-text books online. I'll also choose out one story to tell as a 100-word story too.

So, today's book is Told in the Coffee House: Turkish Tales by Cyrus Adler and Allan Ramsay, which is also available as an audiobook. See details below, and here is a story from that collection:

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The Language of Birds

A young man begged a wise man to teach him the language of birds.
Thus he learned his horse would die, so he sold the horse.
Then he learned his house would catch fire, so he sold the house.
Then he learned that he was going to die.
The young man ran to the wise man for help. "What shall I do?" he begged.
"You shouldn't have listened to the birds," the wise man replied. "If you endured the loss of your horse, your house wouldn't have burned, and you wouldn't be about to die. It's better not to know."

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You can find a longer version of that story, and many other stories besides, in the online book, which is available at Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, and Google Books. You can get a free Kindle ebook from Amazon, and there's a free audiobook from LibriVox.