Inferno: Canto I-XV, XXI-XXVI, XXXII-XXXIV
Purgatory: Canto I-III, IX-XVIII, XXV-XXXIII
Paradise: Canto I-V, XVIII-XXIII, XXVIII-XXXIII

Full review at Booklikes

Dante’s Divine Comedy is perhaps best known for the Inferno which is about Hell. It is, perhaps, a self full-filling view of the human race that it is the Inferno that everyone talks about and not the other sections that deal with Purgatory and Heaven. The human race wants Hell. Perhaps this is due to fear; perhaps it is due to a sense of superiority – he might have been famous, but at least he’s there and I’ll go here.



Today, perhaps Dante’s hell would be a store or mall in the US on Black Friday when all the insane people decide to do their shopping for themselves. I don’t get it. You can sleep in. I hope Dante would feel the same. I can just see Virgil lifting a skeptical eyebrow.

Hell's the only good bit :p

Definitely one of my favorite books that I've had to read for school - there was no shortage of deep yet comedic topics to discuss, and Dante is a pretty entertaining man, both as a Poet and as the Pilgrim

The Divine Comedy is one of the seminal works of Western literature, debated and parsed by readers and scholars almost as much as the Bible. Though The Inferno is the more famous of the trilogy, all of them work together in a beautiful whole. And though this book does just that, and even include's Dante's earlier work, La Vita Nuova, the translator's choice of a more literal translation, makes the language of this biting and, sometimes, comical work rather stale.

To his credit, the editor & translator, Mark Musa, does give a good explanation for why he translated Dante they way he did and his introduction to this book is very good. Also, the translation of the sonnets in La Vita Nuova caught they young, love-stricken Dante's mood very well. However, the literal translation of The Divine Comedy felt rather flavorless. Perhaps, I would enjoy it more with a better, less literal translation.

a book has never impacted me the way this book just did. Read it, beginning to end, don't you dare just read a Canto here and there, it's worth the time.