When I was a kid in about... Grade 8, I want to say, we had the Decameron in history of literature class. (For those who don't know, it's a book of short stories framed as "told by people trying to quarantine from the plague". It's mostly horror, humor and sex. Think COVID entertainment, but maybe more terrifying). We had a few stories from it selected in our reader, and the assignment was "pick a Decameron story and do an oral retelling."
At the time, me and another girl had just ceased routinely beating the shit out of each other with chairs, and instead had become friends in one of those delinquent-nerd duos. She taught me street smarts, I taught her weird intellectual shit. It was a beautiful friendship.
So of course when I saw the Decameron on the curriculum, I told her "you realize a lot of stories in that book are basically porn, right? Let me get you the unabridged version from my house."
My friend's eyes lit up. She read the whole thing in a few days.
Class time comes, and for the first and only time in our class one of the class delinquents shoots her hand up. The teacher goes, "oh wow, what just happened? All right, go ahead."
And of course my friend picked one of the pornier tales. If I recall, it was about a monk seducing a nun by telling her that men had devils, and women had hells, and occasionally one must contain a devil by sticking him into hell. The teacher has no choice but to listen because the assignment doesn't specify "pick a pre-selected story from the reader". It just says "pick a Decameron story."
The retelling was fantastic, as hilariously funny as the story itself, (she did voices and gestures!) and my friend got the class listening on the edge of their seats. My friend got her well-deserved A, the teacher got a pedagogical challenge, and it was a win-win all around. :P
Tl;dr: go read the classics, they're a lot of fun.
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