The Dante Club: A Novel
This Book is Currently in the Wild!
1 journaler for this copy...
I enjoyed this book when I read it a while ago. I picked up another copy at a thrift store purely to use in the Mystery VBB.
My previous review:
A very intense mystery with some rather gruesome crimes and a surprising turn or two along the way. I read Dante's Inferno immediately after taking the Bar Exam (which many people said was insane) but only after reading this did I realize how little of it I had absorbed (hey, my brain was pretty fried!). The debate as to the exact meaning of specific passages was quite illuminating for me. I came to love very much the main characters of this book -- Lowell, Holmes, Fields, Greene, Longfellow, and especially the fictional Nicholas Rey. I will have more appreciation for them and their work in the future, I think. Mr. Rey's character especially appeals because you can feel his isolation and loneliness and determination to do his duty in a way that I still cannot feel Dante's, despite the great literary minds in this book that tried to convince me otherwise. And I found the character of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., later Justice Holmes, somewhat redeemed by this glimpse into his early life, though not enough to forgive him his bigotry in Buck v. Bell.
One of the questions for discussion at the end of the book is "did you figure out whodunit?" followed by another question, "really?" I think this is justified. Once it begins to be explained, it all makes sense, but until then the reader, like the great literary minds, is deceived. Any other comments would spoil the revelation, so I must leave it at that.
My previous review:
A very intense mystery with some rather gruesome crimes and a surprising turn or two along the way. I read Dante's Inferno immediately after taking the Bar Exam (which many people said was insane) but only after reading this did I realize how little of it I had absorbed (hey, my brain was pretty fried!). The debate as to the exact meaning of specific passages was quite illuminating for me. I came to love very much the main characters of this book -- Lowell, Holmes, Fields, Greene, Longfellow, and especially the fictional Nicholas Rey. I will have more appreciation for them and their work in the future, I think. Mr. Rey's character especially appeals because you can feel his isolation and loneliness and determination to do his duty in a way that I still cannot feel Dante's, despite the great literary minds in this book that tried to convince me otherwise. And I found the character of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., later Justice Holmes, somewhat redeemed by this glimpse into his early life, though not enough to forgive him his bigotry in Buck v. Bell.
One of the questions for discussion at the end of the book is "did you figure out whodunit?" followed by another question, "really?" I think this is justified. Once it begins to be explained, it all makes sense, but until then the reader, like the great literary minds, is deceived. Any other comments would spoil the revelation, so I must leave it at that.
Adding to the Mystery VBB.
This book was not selected from the Mystery VBB after two rounds, so I will withdraw it from the list and find another way to share it with future readers.
Released 7 yrs ago (8/7/2016 UTC) at Along the Rail Walk in Roanoke, Virginia USA
WILD RELEASE NOTES:
Left at one of the stops along the Rail Walk near the Transportation Museum (which was very cool).
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Any future reader or recipient of this book is encouraged to leave a journal entry here on the BookCrossing site to let prior readers know the fate of the book. You can make an anonymous entry without joining the BookCrossing movement, but if you are interested in joining, it is a free and spam-free community where your contact information is not shared with others. Best of all, members receive private messages via e-mail from books like this one when those books are journaled, allowing for long-term relationships between books and readers.
