Monday morning....

....and 12 hours of my workweek already put to bed (though not I with it -- yet). Managed to finish up one last thing before the weekend was out. I just finished reading The Dante Club....

I don't read enough fiction. This is mostly because I have two small children and enough innate guilt to poison Lake Ontario. I'm not from a Catholic family or a Jewish family, so I'm at a loss as to how to explain it. Oh, never mind. New England Puritan roots -- no prying them out of the granite bedrock. Idle hands and all that. I was talking with a friend of mine about this fiction drought last night at work. We both mentioned the same thing. You sit to read, and suddenly there are small hands tugging at your sleeve needing things. You resent them ever so slightly because you don't want to put the book down. Whole hours are lost to this pastime that serves no other household member. We quite honestly cannot bear the guilt.

So anyway, great book, The Dante Club, can't believe I hadn't picked it up before now. It's a murder mystery based in late 19th century Boston, with Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes among the main characters. They and a small group of colleagues are working on an English translation of The Divine Comedy, and find themselves trying to catch a murderer that works according to Dante's sense of justice.

Back in a previous life, when I majored in history at Cornell, I studied a fair bit of Italian and took a course on Dante's Divina Commedia. We read, discussed, and wrote class papers in Italian. The class consisted of about 7 students, and we met in the professor's office, so there was no hiding in a corner and not contributing (did I just give it away? that's what I did in a lot of my classes). That experience just added a nice additional layer to my enjoyment of the book. Plus I worked for three years on Beacon Hill in Boston, so I recognized quite a few of the places mentioned in the book. Since I don't read a lot of fiction, I definitely don't read many mysteries -- it was really fun!. When was the last time Longfellow was fun? Read it, read it -- you won't regret it. I don't despite my nagging guilty feelings