The Trend of Audio Books

Having failed several times to make it through any significant portion of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I decided to try the audio book route. I wanted to read it because I had gotten a lot out of the parts that I had read: the story seems to consist mostly of fart jokes, jokes about sleeping with the farmer's daughter, and people slandering each other's intelligence and/or professions. Not that I feel any dearth of such standards in our modern entertainment, but it's comforting and somewhat reassuring to hear them coming from a bygone era. I purchased a recording of some selections, hoping that a skillful reading would help me get Chaucer's narrative voice into my head as I had already done with Shakespeare. I know that the whole book -- actually a poem -- is a series of nested stories, with person A telling a story where-in person B tells a story which is itself about person C waking up, cheating on his wife, and then telling person D a story...

So I was surprised to be following the narrative as well as I was. I listened to the audio book on my CD player while making dinner. I followed along with persons A through F, listened to a friar introducing a story about a coxswain (or some other archaic profession), listened to his story, then followed along as the seamstress (or was she a handmaiden?) interrupted with her own story -- but was she interrupting person D, the chandler, or person B, the deacon? And why are half of all the professions members of a religious order? Who attended church services back then if everyone was qualified to stand in the pulpit? I didn't have too long to worry about the hand seamstress, because right about then, person K finished his story to the approval of his audience.

Person K? What happened to storytellers A through J? Did I miss a layer of narrative, or was K the storyteller who had concocted them all? I had only gotten about twenty minutes into this rat's nest, and I was already hopelessly lost. I had no better chance of following Chaucer's tortuous path than I did gleaning anything from a T.S. Eliot poem without the benefit of an encyclopedia, a French-to-English dictionary, a copy of Bulfinch's Mythology, and a fifth of vodka. I was ready to give up and listen to Maroon Five when I happened to glance at the mode indicator on the CD player.

I had accidently set the player to "shuffle."