I gave up on Dante Alighieri and The Inferno last night. I made it through two cantos. I enjoy good poetry, and if I could read Italian, I may have enjoyed this in its original.
I should have been skepical from the beginning. In the Introduction to the version I picked up, Peter Bondanella wrote:
An encounter with the Inferno (not to mention the rest of the epic) requires serious thought and work. This is a classic for which footnotes are essential, and the bibliography provides a number of works that will assist the reader in understanding this incomparable work.
What!? You mean I can’t just lie back and read this? I have to work at it?!
Sorry. When I want to read fiction or poetry, I’m not interested in having to do a lot of cross-reference work. That’s like someone having to explain their joke to you–the point has already been lost.
I also gave up on The Da Vinci Code. I made it halfway. It was going nowhere, slowly.