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Vote for the Next Book Club Series: Italian Grudge Match Edition
🕑 Added 2024-02-08 21:34:41 +0000 UTCPatrons, as we're getting close to finishing up our series on Star Wars: Andor, the time has come for us to pick the book we will use for our next book club series. However, we simply can't do it alone, so we're asking you to vote on which book we will cover next: Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron or Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. That's right, it's Italian (Florentine) on Italian (Modern) violence. Voting will stay open for three weeks to give everyone a chance. Feel free to reply with your reasoning for choosing one or the other to try and influence other voters, we're perfectly fine with that sort of thing. Brief descriptions of each book follow.
-The Decameron is Giovanni Boccaccio's Medieval magnum opus, written during the height of the Black Death and first published in about 1355. It is a collection of short stories written as a frame story wherein the narrators tell one-hundred bawdy, lusty, anti-clerical tales to one another to pass the time as they wait on the Black Death in seclusion. Written in the local Florentine dialect, the novel is considered one of the great written works of the Medieval era, is a direct homage to Dante's Inferno, and inspired Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The Decameron was also quite literally on the Catholic Church's banned books list for hundreds of years.
-The Name of the Rose is Umberto Eco's obsessively Medievalist magnum opus and also his debut novel, first published in 1980. It's a work of ironic postmodernism dressed up as a historical murder-mystery that occurs at an Italian monastery in 1327 amongst rising tensions within the Catholic Church over the subject of apostolic poverty. Considered a literary masterwork and one of the one-hundred best novels of the 20th century, it is one of the greatest medievalist works ever being meticulously researched and very accurate in its portrayal. It has been adapted numerous times including the 1986 movie The Name of the Rose, starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater and the 2022 video game Pentiment, directed by former guest of the show Josh Sawyer.
Voting begins now!
Comments
Jennifer
Both? Both are great. I voted for Decameron because I've never read it before, but I'm hopeful that both get covered eventually.
Do Golems Dream of Ceramic Sheep
All I really have to say is that the copy of the Decameron that I picked up at a book fair had a (19..20s? 30s?) era ad for a book on how to learn to ballroom dance at home without music or a partner. You can feel the alienation coming off of that one.
