27. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio I've wanted to read this for years, ever since I read about it in a Jane Austen book. It actually fit in very well with the Backgrounds course I took this past semester. Boccaccio was a contemporary of Dante's, and like him, a 13th century Florentine. The language seems rather modern, but I'm sure that's a result of the translation from the Italian. This book is an 80/20 mix of the Canterbury Tales and the Inferno respectively. Six young Florentine noblewomen choose three young Florentine noblemen to accompany them in their flight to the countryside to avoid the raging Plague. Each day, a different member of the company is the "queen" or "king," whose chief duty is to set a story topic for the day, and at the appointed time, everybody relates an appropriate tale. The book is almost entirely composed of these stories, all folk tales that would echo something in the minds of readers even today. Most of the storie...
Life, Books, and SFF