The Decameron

excellent stories, lackluster performance

(0 stars)

sweeterswish2

I realize that this is a labor of love, but many of these short stories are unlistenable due to the reader's inability to perform the material. Day 1 the 7th story is read by some fellow who inflects at least 3 or for question marks into each sentence that reads. There is no way for me to follow the story, because of stilted and unnatural delivery. Again, I commend him for taking the time, but the editors of this archive should exert some level of quality control. It is as though someone were in the process of xeroxing a page from this book haphazardly, allowing the book to scoot across the photoglass while being copied; smearing all the words of the story on the copied page to illegibility. What good is that?

Wonderful

(3 stars)

Brigit

Great tales. Ruth Golding and Andy Minter especially did a wonderful job reading and bringing Boccaccio's stories to life. As always, I'm not a fan of readers who have a thick non-native accent (sorry) as I find it hard to get used to their particular inflections and thus hard to focus.

Great BUT

(2 stars)

moi

This is a marvellous collection, but a number of the ‘readings’ in English here are very poor, in fact, barely understandable. It is a great tragedy. This well-wrought translation would be greatly improved if narrated by those whose native tongue was English.

Wonderful, funny, amazing stories

(5 stars)

Kevint60

Have not listened yet (dling now), but read this delightful book some years ago. The stories are amazingly contemporary, or love, lust, greed and intrigue have not changed at all in hundreds of years. Great book.

Better in smaller sections than listening as a single work, I feel.

(0 stars)

Timothy Ferguson

Without commenting on the readers as other reviewers have done, I'd like to suggest that I may have spoiled the book for myself by listening to The Decameron as a single run through, rather than accepting it is a great monolithic doorstopper and say, listened to something else after every day or second day.

(4.5 stars)

A LibriVox Listener

Very well done. Length though is close to 32 hours.