What a rivetting subject! But anyway I said I would tell you what I read, and it was The Dante Club. Have already forgotten who wrote it, but it's a fantastically good thriller, probably the best I've ever read. It's based on genuine events, such as the creation, in Boston, of the first American translation of Dante's Inferno, in the 1860's. The main characters are real-life ones, Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes, the translators. Frighteningly, as they are meeting to discuss the translation, a series of horrifying murders takes place, mimicking Dante's blood-curdling punishments of wrongdoers in Hell. With immense ingenuity and imagination, Matthew Pearls --ah, I remember his name!-- makes the 'coincidence' plausible. It's a far better book than most literary novels.
Reading that, smoking on our balcony, and drinking wine, was about all I did.
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