100 Days of Dante

I saw a message on a Catholic Facebook group the other day about a thing called “100 Days of Dante”. The idea is to read a little bit of Dante’s Divine Comedy each day for 100 days. This is one thing that I have always wanted to read the entire poem, but have never gotten around to it.

A few years ago when Father Mike Schmitz was doing the Bible in a Year podcast for the first time, I heard about it on X (Twitter at that time.) All the Catholic people on there seemed to say he was solid, and at that point I was unfamiliar with Father Mike. I started listening to it on day 6 and was immediately hooked. I ended up making it the whole way through reading along most of the time while I listened to the podcast. That approach worked so well I went on to do the Catechism in a year when he did that as well and made it through the entire catechism of the Catholic Church for the first time in my life.

Along those lines I think this will be a great way to keep me on track with the book and there are nice videos about each Canto that have been done as your read your way through the book. The schedule they have is that you read a canto every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It started on August 25th, so I have read the first 2 cantos and am really enjoying it already. It will wrap up around Easter, so it seems like a fun project for the next several months. The version of the book I am reading is Anthony Esolen’s translation.

I loved his translation of Confessions of St. Augustine and I can say for the first 2 cantos of Inferno the translation seems great as well. My only complaint is I could only find his version in a mass market paperback and not a nice hardcover edition like they did with Confessions. When I get to Purgatorio and Paradiso I do not yet know which translation I will use as I still need to do some research to see which are considered the best versions.