The Dante Club

How I came upon this book was under awful circumstances a few years ago, which might add to my complete and utter disdain for the book. Wait, maybe it was the plotting, characters and premise that caused that, I'm not sure. I was stuck in Chicago O'Hare a few years ago in a layover gone awry situation, forced on standby the next morning.

For some reason I decided that spending money on a hotel was completely out of the question, so I chose to spend the night in the terminal with nothing but my backpack as comfort. I had run out of reading material and this was well before the advent of smart phones, so my conundrum was to go into the airport bookstore and pick just about anything to keep me from going stir crazy or spend the entire night roaming the halls of the terminal and fighting off exhaustion.

Maybe it was the idea that it was “based upon” the Divine Comedy that made me think that somehow this could be interesting, but the reality was downright depressing. What it did accomplish is that it kept me warding off temporary insanity while the overnight staff vacuumed around me before I landed at home and left it for safe keeping in the nearest garbage can.