Buy from Amazon
|
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer has plenty of rivalry between the storytellers - the Miller tells a tale of how a carpenter is tricked by his young wife and her lover, and so the Reeve (who was previously a carpenter) responds with a tale of how a thieving miller gets fooled. One thing I've noticed about these stories is that they're not particularly memorable on one reading - they seem to 'go with the flow' as it were. Whether this means that they should be read several times in order to get the full benefit or that they should be treated as a bit of light reading to while away the odd hour -that's up to you.
The Canterbury Tales can be read at http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/c#a144, either in the original Middle English, or in a 19th century translation. However, I thought that Nevill Coghill's translation seemed to flow more freely.