An ancient book from over 600 years in the past still famous, and relevant which is the reasons it's a classic undoubtedly. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote these bawdy tales with confidence working for the royal family sure helps. If you think fart jokes are a modern invention you're wrong and this proves this fact . The British have a quirky sense of humor and Nevill Goghill new translation captures the essence without losing the flavor intended by the author. Readers now may enjoy the amusing stories, ...

The Canterbury Tales can be an incredible experience or an incredibly boring experience depending upon your translation.The Canterbury Tales is often defined as the beginning of poetry in the English language. This is quite a lark as Chaucer didn’t even come up with original material. The stories originate from Boccaccio’s Decameron (F. Scott Fitzgerald owned this book!), John Gower’s Confessio amantis, the Roman de la Rose, the Bible, and unknown sources (or at least according to this 1961 Imag...

welcome to...THE JANTERUARY TALES.get it? like the canterbury tales? only january?anyway.this is an installment of PROJECT LONG CLASSICS, by which i make intimidating books less scary by reading them over the course of a month and bothering all of you.it's been a while since i read an old-timey-language one. let's give it a shot.DAY 1: PROLOGUEyou can tell i'm being really smart and brave because i'm actually reading a prologue.this is basically an introduction to a cast of what seems likes 92 c...

Well, that came out of the blue!I perused it, expecting some blend of quaint bits of Merry England, cloaked under some veil of Medieval lore, yet I had been confronted with something quite different!This comes out as an array of odd tales, dealing with peoples' shortcomings, cuckholding, cheating, ripping off and the likes! As a whole it stands out unprecedented, a fearsome match for almost any collection of modern or contemporary shorts stories I have read.For starters, each character has its s...

My biggest fear about this book was that it would be like The Pilgrim's Progress. Although they followed a similar format, they couldn't have been more different for me. The Pilgrim's Progress was boring and preachy, whereas this was delightfully bawdy. There are many translations, from Middle English, to Victorian verse, to modern day prose. So sample a few and read what you're comfortable with. Then dive in and enjoy the stories. They can be read independently of one another, but often play of...

Another - 'I am so glad to get this off my book bucket list' - book that was very hard for me to understand. The stories were often grounded in concepts that I think modern readers may have problems understanding, but I still recognize that this book is one of the great literary works of all time. I mark it a 'favorite' due to the fact that it is a 'key' to understanding other works of literature. I am sure this narrative form of story telling has influenced untold works of art.

Book Review It was 1996 and my freshmen year at college. I had already declared English as my major and needed to choose between Chaucer and Shakespeare as the primary "classic" author to take a course on. I chose Shakespeare. My advisor told me that's the usual pick and most missed out. I laughed at her. She was 40 years older than me and told me all the dirty stuff was in Chaucer... "Are you sure?" she asked. At that point, I realized life was just beginning. I was so naive back the...

When confronted with the painful choice of whether or not to read Chaucer in the original Middle English, I agonised for precisely four seconds and decided to read Nevill Coghill’s modern translation in lovely Penguin paperback. In the same way I wouldn’t learn German to read Goethe, or unlearn English to read Dan Brown, I refuse to learn archaic forms of English for pointless swotty scholar-points, and grope instead for selfish readerly pleasure, two-fingering the purists and bunking down with ...

A classic that has worn well... the psychology, in particular with regard to women, seems remarkably modern! It's funny, and not just in one style either. Sometimes he's subverting the popular cliches of the day, sometimes he's slyly campaigning for women's rights, and sometimes he's just having fun telling dirty jokes. I'm having trouble deciding which style I like most - they're all good, and often mixed up together too.I once spent a pleasant bus trip sitting next to a grad student who was do...

I'm gonna start texting in Chaucer's English.

*declares war on abbreviation*