the ocean

As a middle class adult male with no children, I tend to have more free time than a lot of people. As regular reader(s?) of this blog will know, a lot of that time I waste on stupid shit like performing deep dives on Top Model cycles or writing and performing cabaret shows that will be seen once by roughly twelve people. But I also occasionally get on reading jags, where I will take down classics that I feel weird about not having read in high school or college. (In some cases, despite those classics being explicitly assigned to me for reading.) 

A few years ago, it was Ulysses. I can't remember if I wrote about that here at the time and I'm too lazy to check, but suffice it to say that I had attempted that particular classic several times in the past but never got farther than the first twenty pages or so, in large part because it was just too damn heavy to carry with me on a train or airplane. But I decided to buck up and thin out my carry-on to make room, and I finished the damn thing. And it was okay. The last chapter in particular I thought was quite lovely. Other parts I found a bit dense. But I think I understood what all of the fuss was about, at least sort of.

This fall I read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It was a bit tainted for me because I started it during the period where we were stuck on a train in Canada for an entire day, but eventually I got over that particular trauma (without even the aid of a trigger warning) and made it through. It was interesting. It was episodic in a way I'm not used to in novels, with tone and subject matter varying widely from chapter to chapter. Kind of like a picaresque but without actually going anywhere. And lots of philosophical content, which fortunately I can kind of skim right through.

Then, just yesterday, I finished The Divine Comedy. I mean, of course I had read excerpts before, but no one assigned the entire thing, and now I kind of know why. Of course the Inferno slaps, and the Purgatorio was way weirder and more torture-y than anyone had a right to expect, but lord is the Paradisio boring. So many discourses on some many different precepts of faith! If I wanted that, I wouldn't have located the only mass in the city of Chicago that only lasts half an hour. (St. Michael's 5 PM Saturdays; it's worth a look.) But the language is beautiful, even in translation, and the sheer scope of what Dante has constructed is kind of insane. So ultimately a thumbs up. But next I'm thinking maybe that Jessica Simpson autobiography...