Pleasures of Reading

Born six hundred years ago, Geoffrey Chaucer, the son of a London brewer and vintner, eschewed his ancestral vats and tuns to find continual excitement in his own life, and bring a native exuberance to his own work. Chaucer's animated spirit, his lusty appreciation, his keen observations of life, and his Falstaffian gusto set him apart in the most glittering of centuries. He expressed his time --yet escaped it, for he is as vibrantly alive today as he was in the fourteenth century.