My literary tastes, I have come to recognize, take a highway, sometimes literally, through Hell. There, along the Highway of Indecisiveness and Moral Scrutiny, lie works like Dante's Inferno, (I probably really should read the Divine Comedy,) Homer's Odyssey, which admittedly takes a shorter trip through hell, but goes, just the same, and Bugatti Queen by Miranda Seymour. Bugatti Queen doesn't literally venture anywhere near Hell, but concentrates on a French woman who raced cars for automotive impresario Ettore Bugatti in the 1930s. Her name was Helle Nice, a former dancer and model, who, for all the greatness she ever knew in her life, still managed to go through her own personal hell. At a race in 1936, Nice crashed and was ejected from her Bugatti; her trajectory was buffered, and her life saved, as it turned out, because of a fan who was basically standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nice survived the blunted impact; the fan died. In the days following World War II, a fellow driver accused her of being a spy for the German Gestapo, and basically ruined her reputation, and her life, as if it wasn't already. Some of the stories in the Tolstoi book I'm wading through currently have a decidedly moral intonation, and I just got wind of a graphic novel that looks absolutely fascinating, called Me and the Devil Blues by Akira Hiramoto. The review of this one tells of it being about blues musician Robert Johnson's long-fabled deal with Satan that supposedly made him such a great musician. Reportedly, Hiramoto's interpretation takes a substantial amount of literary license with the legend, but manages to turn out a good work just the same. I'll definitely have to see for myself. And yeah, okay, perhaps it is a strange path my literary tastes take; or maybe it just gives another dimension to the word "vicarious."