Kristina Olson

Distracted by Very Breathy Narration
Review of the Audible Original audiobook edition (April 20, 2021)

Books That Matter: The Decameron is part of Audible's The Great Courses occasional series Books That Matter*. I'm glad to see this new series as it is somewhat of a continuation of the limited series Books That Changed the World from 2006-2007, of which I read several in my pre-Goodreads days. They are somewhat confusingly listed on a Goodreads Listopedia as Books That Shook the World although they were never marketed under that alternative title to my knowledge.

In any case, this present lecture introduces Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)'s The Decameron (1351). The framing story is that 10 members of the nobility have quarantined themselves for a period of 10 days in order to avoid the bubonic plague aka black death that was spreading through Florence, Italy at the time. To pass the time, each member is appointed king or queen for a day and selects a theme from which then everyone has to tell a story. So it is a collection of 10 x 10 = 100 stories with the occasional interjection of the overall storyteller Boccaccio.

I have to confess that I found the narrator's breathy voice and inhalations to be very distracting and it effected my being able to concentrate on the summaries provided, which often provided the plots of the major stories of each day. Many of these felt rather dated now as they were often along cynical and/or misogynistic themes even when the storytellers are the women. Most of them also didn't stick in my mind as they tended to blur together. The ones that stood out were the Nightingale, the Falcon and the Griselda stories most of all. There is a brief element in the lecture introduction and conclusion to tie it into the present COVID pandemic.

Books That Matter: The Decameron was available free to Audible subscribers through the Audible Plus program. It is available to everyone for a standard price.

Trivia and Links
* I don't think there is a separate Audible or Goodreads Listopedia for these, but some that I have spotted are Books That Matter: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (2017), Books that Matter: The Analects of Confucius (2016), Books that Matter: The City of God (2016), Books that Matter: The Prince (2016) and Books That Matter: The Federalist Papers (2020).… (mere)