What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Dante

I am starting this blog so I have somewhere to put my writing where everyone can enjoy it.  Of course, I cannot hope to produce good fiction as quickly as the Internet can send it out.  What may take me weeks to write may only take you a half hour to read.  I won't complain about how unfair this is, but I will say that it is why I will not be posting my fiction every time I write a post.  To get me going, then, I'm going to start a little game called "What's Elizabeth Reading?"  Every time I start -- or finish -- reading a book, I will post about it on here, kind of like a book review.  Of course, it might not end up being a book review.  It might just be what the book made me start thinking about!  After all, books are made to make people think.

I haven't decided yet whether I will only post about books I am reading for fun or if I will include the ones I read for school.  I am working toward a bachelor's degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing.  This semester, I'm going to be reading a lot of Young Adult literature and American literature between the Civil War period and World War II.

Over the Winter Break, I borrowed my older brother's copy of Dante's Inferno.  I keep hearing about it all over the place and I decided it was about time I pick it up.  I am almost finished with it, and to be honest it is fast reading.  I would have finished it much sooner, but alas, Christmastime is family time and I had social engagements.  I have two canto's left.  I've never heard of a "canto" until picking this book up, so I looked up the definition: a "canto" is kind of like a chapter for an epic poem.  Simple enough.

Of course, when the break ended I had to give my brother the book back, so I had to look it up online.  Luckily, Dante is old enough that his work is free to the public, no pirating involved.  I also had to look up a map of Hell as Dante describes it, because I got kind of lost.  Here is a link to a map. To be honest, I can get lost pretty much anywhere, even in a store at the mall.  For Christmas, I got a GPS.  I have no car, but I have a GPS; I guess this means I'll just walk around with it.  What I really wish they would make is a GPS for the grocery store to tell me where to find the ingredients I need.  Now that would be a useful invention for us pedestrians.

But I digress, as my friend Tim would say.  Dante's Inferno is really only a portion of his Divine Comedy, which isn't actually a comedy in the colloquial sense.  In the ancient sense, a "comedy" is simply a story with a happy ending.  If he meant it as a humorous tale, Dante has one twisted sense of humor.  Travelling through Hell and looking at people undergoing various types of torment is not my idea of a funny story.  It has given me a cool idea for a story, though.  The idea came right on time for my Advanced Fiction Writing class, in which I will be writing two short stories.

More on Dante later.  In the meantime, I should grab some ice cream and go to bed.  I'm a morning person and it is getting late.