I am a glutton for punishment.
I had originally set out to read Dante’s Inferno as it’s on my list of books I
never read in high school. Since I was able to pick up a free copy of the entire
Divine Comedy on Amazon, I figured may as well read the whole damned thing.
Regardless of how the world has interpreted this work, or how important my
English teacher thought it was, I thought it was a completely mind-numbing.
Funny thing is, I used to refer to Dante’s Inferno as one of my favorite
books. Even though I had never even finished reading it. Because I thought it
was deep or some shit like that. Silly, silly teen.
The only redeeming quality of the whole ordeal is that I thought the layout of
the triptych’s chapters, err, cantos. They were very consistent in length and
that did make things a bit more enjoyable. I absolutely hate reading things that
have chapters lengths that are all over the map.
Maybe it would have been a better read for me if I were reading it in Italian.
That said, I have to imagine that the line “and he had made a trumpet of his
rump” is pretty much perfect in any language.
