I've missed having some properly dull bedtime reading, ever since I finished Moby-Dick. I keep trying, but I'm 99.9% pure curiosity by weight, so I keep finding stuff interesting. Non-fiction doesn't work so well, although A Natural History of the Piano delivered a decent dose of turgidity with a subject I am at best indifferent about. No, I needed to look elsewhere.
I eventually get around to reading Dan Brown's novels (he of The Da Vinci Code), which are unchallenging as literature, but interesting as art history. The latter book takes much of its plot from the pseudo-nonfiction book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, material much better explored by the graphic novel Preacher (now a decent TV adaptation!). Angels & Demons was the Illuminati book, and The Lost Symbol was Masons. Secret societies make for fine paperback fodder, and you can save some time by reading The Illuminatus Trilogy, which literally has all of them, or save even more time by reading Everything Is Under Control by the same author, essentially a catalog of conspiracy theories and secret societies (real or imagined).
Ever get the sense that a ton of people did drugs in the 60s and in the end it did not do some of those people any favors?
Dan Brown also wrote Inferno, another escapade with his usual protagonist (a "symbologist," which is not a real thing but does provide endless excuses to be chased after by secret societies using secret symbols), but Inferno lacks any conspiracy theories. Instead, it's about...Dante Alighieri. And Florence. And Dante in Florence. It has no pretense to being anything more or less than the novelization of an art history course about Florence in the 1200-1700 C.E. period. At the end of the book, the heroes have not 100% saved the day, which is an unexpected dose of ambiguity from one of English's greatest hack authors.
I read the book a while ago, and was reminded of it because I watched the movie, which was terrible, in ways that were only surprising because usually a Dan Brown novel is not something you could make an enjoyable, let alone intelligent, movie out of, but no. They took a Dan Brown book and dumbed it down. Out of habit, maybe.
Well, hell. I've never read Dante. I don't like poetry. What translation should I use? Already more work than I want to put in. I'm near the end of the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean podcast, and the last section is about the origins and development of Satan. Our conception of Hell is Dante's, but our conception of Satan is Milton's (brought to modernity by Neil Gaiman's graphic novel Sandman, and Mike Carey's brilliant spinoff Lucifer). I've never read Paradise Lost, but it bypasses the translation problem, and it's pretty dull to read! (At least as of line 450 or so, the language is somewhat unaccountably easier to read than the roughly-contemporary Shakespeare. Maybe I'll learn why, some afternoon when I should be working.)
I leave you with what is surely the most famous English-language description of Milton's work:
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