In this talk, novelist and professor Randy Boyagoda (University of Toronto) will make a case for why, who, and what we read can be life or death decisions. He will do so by exploring signal moments in Dante’s Divine Comedy with life and death stakes based on the decisions individuals make about who and what they read, how, and why. In turn, having read a canto a day of the Divine Comedy for the past five years while writing a Dante-inspired novel, he will read from Dante’s Indiana (Biblioasis), about ordinary people whose lives have been radically changed by the books they took up at high and low points in their lives.