Helpful Score: 6
I really wanted to like this book, but in the end I couldn't. The book alternates between two stories; that of Dante struggling to write his Divine Comedy, and that of Nick Tosches (yes, the author) gaining possession of Dante's original, working copy of the Divine Comedy. The portions detailing Dante's struggle are terribly wordy (in one chapter, a single paragraph spanned three pages) and often times I wasn't in the mood to read through them. Once the plot became apparent (half way through the book) it then seemed to proceed too quickly, and the ending was disappointingly "non-shocking". All in all, it was an interesting story, but it ended up being tedius and unsatisfying.
