The Divine Comedy by Dante
Good Reads meta-data is a listening time of 17h and 3m, rated 4.4 out of 5 by 18 audiblistas.
I read the Inferno, Part I of the Commedia, as an undergraduate and it made an impression on me. One for Dr Sarah Gardner. But I aways wondered about the remaining two parts. I finally scratched that itch by listening to an Audible version of the whole over the last few weeks on daily patrols of Newtown.
Hmmm…. I found Purgatory boring, all too much like listening to conference presentations: one after another, each successive one less interesting than the one before.
However, it proved more bearable than Paradise which was so saccharine that I gave up on it with more than two hours of empty rhetorical calories to follow.
Conclusion? Machiavelli was right, the people in Hell are more interesting than those in Heaven. He wrote something like this: In hell I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, while in heaven are only beggars, monks and apostles. Certainly Dante’s Hell is far more entertaining than his Purgatory or Paradise.
Further reading: Maurice Joly, The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864) adds to the fun. See also Sebastien de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (1989), sanctimonious though it is. But first try Machiavelli’s own short story, Belfagor.