A review by shadybanana
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

4.0

I was challenged to read the thickest book in the library and someone took out the Canterbury Tales. It was very long and I must confess that I was worried if I would be even able to finish it or not. As it turns out the book was so good that it nearly forced me to read the other book with prose style in my tbr: Beowulf. Anyway, in the edition I read there was Old English manuscript and a translated to Modern English version as well. I tried to read the Old English manuscript along with the Modern manuscript but at nearly 40% of book, I abandoned this quest and switched completely to Modern English manuscript. The best thing about the book was definitely the prose and how it was fluently carried out till the end without losing touch for a single moment. The stories and fables were so marvelously crafted within the rhymes that I was left in awe. There was a certain specialty in every tale and this made the book more interesting. Perhaps a chief contributor to the book being so good was the whole idea of a bunch of diverse people with varying nature and different occupations travelling together to the same purpose and killing boredom by telling stories. The stories were so natural that they were blissful. There were certainly deep philosophies concealed in the tales as well which I were able to thankfully extract now and then. There is, however, one objection that I have and that is that the tales all had certain obscene crude-ness. I shall not typically name those paragraphs but there was a certain roughness in that nudity which should have been better coveted. I do understand that such events can be recalled without hesitation in a company of grown up men and women but there should have been some censorship or alternatively some metaphoric description. Hence it was a 4-star book for me. Nothing more, nothing less.