What are you reading?

[jekylljuice]

Originally Posted by Diamond Duchess

Now I am forced to dig into Geoffery Chauser's The Canterbury Tales, courtesy of my English class.

The structure of the work is quite different from the other works of literature I have been reading and studying in class. It's a bit easier to read, and allows for many differing styles of prose to be presented in one collected work.

A quick question: Who here has read The Canterbury Tales as part of required reading for their English classes? I would like to know, just out of curiosity, if anyone here has.

That would include me. I covered them a couple of years ago as part of a module I was doing on High Medieval Literature (which is far from my favourite literary period). Out of interest, Diamond Duchess, are you actually reading them in their original Middle English form or just in their Modern English translations? I had to read them in the former, which isn't quite as bad as it sounds. The thing about Middle English is that it looks rather terrifying on the page, but if you read it out loud you'll find that phonetically it's very similar.

Sadly, I don't actually remember that much about the texts themselves, other than that the Wife of Bath was quite the character. Most of what I'd stored had to go to make way for deliberations upon William Langland's Piers Plowman, which I had to write a 3,000 word essay upon at the end of the module. Just be thankful you're not studying that happy little epic - infuriatingly mind-bending or mind-bendingly infuriating? My cerebral jury's still out on that one.