Canterbury Tales, if you're reading it in Middle English, will be the most difficult of the three to read. Worth the effort, but could well take you longer to read than you think if you're not used to reading Middle English poetry. Gets easier as you go along, tho'.Revelator wrote:Thanks to Mr. Sausage and to Zaki for the extremely helpful information. I've finished the first volume of the Lyon translation of Arabian Nights and am a quarter through the second. After finishing all the volumes, Canterbury and the Decameron should be a doddle. However, I am slightly worried, since legend says that whoever reads all one thousand and one Nights will die shortly afterward...
But should I survive, I will have read three of the greatest classics of world literature and watched three classic films. I figure that's worth risking death for!
If you end up liking The Decameron (or the other two) you really, really should read Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, a sixteenth century French spin on Boccaccio's conceit of a group of people holed up telling stories to each other. It's just as fun and lively as Boccaccio's work, although it's unfinished (only about 70 of the projected 100 stories were completed). Lot of war between the sexes stuff, with the men and women telling stories that challenge the gender depictions of the previous stories.