In 2021, I read fifty books. But the first and best book of the year for me is the book I have not yet finished. It's a book I first read in 2015 and went back to last year: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Also known as The Human Comedy in contrast to Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy, The Decameron inspired Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales among hundreds of other writers and their works over the past eight hundred yers.
For me and many others, these tales written and published during the worst years of the Black Death in Florence have been a source of fun and inspiration during the current pandemic.
I have loved the Divine Comedy for decades, but had not read Boccaccio nor Francesco Petrarch. The lives of these three Florentines overlapped in the early thirteen hundreds. Dante died in 1321 when Petrarch was 17 years old and Boccaccio was eight. The two younger poets became friends after Boccaccio published The Decameron in 1352. Together the three poets are known as The Three Crowns of Florence.
After reading and re-reading Dante for 35 years, I read Boccaccio and Petrarch in 2015 in class on Medieval Italian Literature taught by Chelsea Pomponio at Franklin and Marshall College. I was delighted by Boccaccio, less so by Petrarch. In 2020 as the pandemic sent the world into crisis, I went back to Boccaccio and to the sonnets of Petrarch. Now I read both regularly, thinking about how they survived the terrible plague of their time and created stories and poems that inspired and delighted people ever since.
My favorite book of 2021 is the book I have not yet finished: The Decameron.
In 2013, Joan Acocella reviewed the translation of The Decameron by Wayne A. Rebhorn in a long review in the New Yorker. It's a good review and gives a lot of background on the book. Here is the link.
