Books I read in 2024

I read 30 books or 8365 pages in 2024, a solid improvement over last year’s, and many of those books were excellent. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov was outstanding, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations was incredible, and then there’s Family Lexicon and The garden of Finzi-Contini, and many others were close to that league. Yeah, color me satisfied.

The usual scoring system applies:

• One star means a book is meh.
• Two stars mean a book is perfectly fine.
• Three stars mean a book is good—consider it recommended.
• Four stars mean a book is exceptional.
• Five stars is pretty much unheard of.

The question of Palestine, by E.W. Said

(La Questione Palestinese, il Saggiatore)

★★★☆☆

I was interested in learning about Israeli-Palestinian history from the beginning, and I wanted it told from the perspective of an Arab-Palestinian scholar and critic. In the West, we grow with Western and pro-Israeli narratives, and it is super-hard to get access to the Palestinian narration. The Palestinian Question turned out to be the ideal text. “The tragedy of being a victim of victims.”

The garden of the Finzi-Contini, by Giorgio Bassani

(Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, audiolibro)

★★★★☆

The Garden of the Finzi-Contini is probably the most understated and effective novel about the Holocaust. It is also a bittersweet and nostalgic tale of youth. The reconstruction of provincial life in the years immediately preceding World War II is touching, especially if one is fortunate enough to know Ferrara and its historic town center. The prose is rich, the characters are all indispensable and well-chiseled, each peculiar in his way, but some stand out, like Micol. The dialogues, never trite, often hint at unspoken yet implied meanings. Near the novel’s end, the late-night conversation between the protagonist (whose name we never know) and his old father touched me deeply. This slow burner picks up pace as it approaches its inevitable, bitter end.

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius

(Pensieri, Oscar Mondadori)

★★★★☆

Marcus Aurelius, one of the Five Good Emperors of Rome, kept a journal to collect his thoughts about how to live well. It was not meant for the public, and in fact, it did not go public until centuries after the emperor’s death, when it surfaced in its original Greek form, probably with missing and corrupted parts. Meditations is that journal, a work of motivational advice that inspires us in stoicism and a manual for being a complete, mature adult living a dignified, thoughtful life. Some concepts repeatedly resurface throughout the twelve books that make the text:

• inevitability of death
• irrelevance of the individual no matter their importance in life
• how to be a good man
• forgive the defects of others
• accept and embrace what comes at us, be it good or bad
• live in accordance wit nature

These and others were reflections and aims meant for the author, not lectures for an audience. That these thoughts came from the most powerful man in the world makes it all the more impressive. Two thousand years have passed, and humanity still struggles with the same essential topics and unanswered questions.

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

(Lolita, audiolibro)

★★★★★

I read many of Nabokov’s works but avoided reading Lolita for a long time despite its universal acclaim as his masterpiece. I was not ready to confront its obscenity. In hindsight, I cowardly feared that my admiration for the writer would be affected. However, now that I have read the book, I know it is both shocking and disturbing, yet sublime. While reading, I couldn’t help but appreciate the author’s audacity in publishing a text like this in 1955. It was then pointed out to me that it was easier to publish works on the topic of pedophilia during that time as compared to today¹.

Quoting Nabokov in his afterword to the Italian edition (Adelphi):

Lolita does not carry any morals with it. For me, a work of fiction exists only if it provides me with what I will frankly call aesthetic voluptuousness, that is, the sense of being in touch, somehow, somewhere, with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, goodness, ecstasy) is the norm. The others are topical garbage or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often consists of circumstantial shenanigans that are lovingly passed on from era to era in large chalk blocks until someone gives Balzac, Gorky, Mann a good hammering.

I am glad to report that my admiration for the author is intact. Shoutout to Ennio Fantastichini for his exceptional audiobook reading (Ad Alta Voce, Radio Tre.)

Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg

(Lessico Famigliare, Einaudi)

★★★★☆

The key to this novel is outlined already in its title. It is familiar because it tells the story of a Jewish and antifascist family, the Levi family, in Turin between the 1930s and 1950s. And Lexicon because the paths of memory pass through the recollection of phrases, idioms, and slang expressions that only existed within the family. The Levi’s were not just an ordinary family. During those years, characters who were already or would become influential for the time passed by their house: politicians, industrialists, and intellectuals are all told from the point of view of a kid (later a girl, then a woman) who observes them from an unusual and unprejudiced angle. The years of Jewish persecution, confinement, and the postwar period are recounted without drama; the Great Story is lived daily and flows around them; they’re impacted in significant ways, yet the focus stays on the family, its members and the many characters that revolve around it. The outstanding characters are the mother and the father; Natalia, the author, stays on the fringe, rarely seen or mentioned, if not by the last part of the book.

Under the Volcano, by Malcom Lowry

(Sotto il Vulcano, Einaudi)

★★☆☆☆

I gave up on this one. I wanted to like this one. I attempted it a couple of times last year, and then I tried with an audiobook, which was more engaging. However, in the end, I abandoned it again. Again, I’m sorry because the writing is good, and the author is remarkable in their art. Nothing happens throughout the 400+ pages of this book. The plot could be summarized as primarily drunk people wandering around a small Mexican town at the foot of two volcanoes, spending much of their time brooding over an old love triangle that was never entirely forgotten.

Women’s Resistance, by Benedetta Tobagi

(La Resistenza delle Donne, Einaudi)

★★★☆☆

This book is exciting and well-written. It tells the story of the Italian Resistance from the point of view of women who participated actively in it and with an often decisive role but never really saw their merits appreciated, much less their participation recognized. The Italian Resistance was a pivotal and dramatic period of World War II, and women who chose to participate had to show even more courage and attitude than their male comrades, as in those times, women were expected to serve as mothers, wives, and housekeepers at home. War was a male affair; women leaving for the mountains to join packs of male rebels tended to be ill-reputed, and when captured, they risked far more than their male counterparts. At times, it tends a bit toward rhetoric, which is entirely excusable in this case, but even when it happens, the author quickly picks up the thread.

The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, by Marie Favereau

(L’Orda. Come i mongoli cambiarono il mondo, Einaudi)

★★★★☆

This book interested me because it offered a historically researched and accurate narrative of a historical period and geographical area I know little about: the Euro-Asiatic region between the 8th and 16th centuries, during the Mongol rule. It is a remarkable work that substantially revises and corrects the canonical image of the Mongols as ruthless and almost uncivilized rulers and conquerors. On the contrary, historical sources prove that the Mongol empire was based on flexibility, tolerance for customs, traditions and religions, integration and not assimilation, often allowing the dominant structures of the conquered territories to remain intact. The Empire offered ample and rich trade opportunities, both to the dominated and outsiders (the European, Muslim, and nonassimilated Asian powers), and thrived on the tribute it reaped from the thriving economy that resulted. The other key point of this book is the intrinsic and never-lost pure nomadic nature of the Empire, perhaps its distinguishing characteristic: Mongol leaders always remained nomadic, even as they conquered and assimilated settled civilizations, such as Russia, China, and Islamic regions of southern Asia. And yet the Empire shattered when, over time, it slowly moved away from ancestral, communal nomadic traditions in favor of an authoritarianism that, paradoxically, made the Empire less authoritative and, as such, weaker. I also learned about the origins of Russian society, the relevance of Kyiv and other principalities before the slow rise of Moscow, and the influence the Mongol Empire had in the formation of modern Russia.

Replay, by Jordan Mechner

★★★★☆

First Second Books/Macmillan, signed copy

A graphic memoir by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, recounting his own family story of war, exile and new beginnings.

It’s the first comic book I’ve read in a long while, and I’m glad I did. I pre-ordered a signed first edition from the USA that I received by post. The book is a work of craftsmanship. The story was a challenge for the author, I’m sure. Many characters from three (if not four) generations are juxtaposed and interwoven continuously; the risk of getting lost is real, but Mechner manages to keep control, also thanks to the comic form that he masters and lends itself to the purpose, for example, through the use of different color palettes depending on the era being narrated. Remarkably, this narrative would not have been possible without the diaristic fever that gripped at least three generations of this Jewish family that was uprooted and then dispersed across two continents by the dramatic events that followed the advent of Nazism in Europe.

Sixty Degrees North, by Malachy Tallack

★★★☆☆

Iperborea, I Corvi

Sixty Degrees North is a travel book written in the 2000s based on the author’s visits to each of the eight nations along this northern parallel. I didn’t expect that so much of it would be about the impact on the author of his father’s death when he was a teenager, his search to resolve his feelings about this, and his search to find somewhere to live that felt like home. These unexpected parts gravitate the book more toward the memoir genre, but the travel parts are still prevalent, well-researched, and recounted, some more interesting than others. This book touches on many things, often only superficially, which is a pity.

Kind of Blue, the making of the Miles Davis masterpiece, Ashley Kahn

★★★☆☆

Il Saggiatore

I saw the light the first time I listened to Kind of Blue, and I did a lot of research to find a text that would go into detail and explain how this legendary album came about and why it influenced jazz so much that it became the benchmark. Kind of Blue by Ashley Kahn fully met my expectations. Well-researched and written, full of first-hand accounts and quotes from the sextet members. I appreciated the introductory part that clearly illustrates where the jazz scene was at when the six came together to record this masterpiece, as well as the final part in which we understand the influence that Kind of Blue had, and is still having, in the decades that followed, not only in jazz but in all genres of music.

My Ingeborg, by Tore Renberg

★★★★☆

(La mia Ingeborg, Fazi)

Awarded best book of the year by Norwegian booksellers, this one is a literary bestseller dragged along by lashing writing, as taut as a thriller and as moving as a love story, My Ingeborg is an intense tale of a family that, headed by a destructive man, falls apart. A great book.

I love Russia, by Elena Kostyuchenko

★★★☆☆

(La mia Russia, Einaudi)

This book is written by an independent Russian journalist who worked at Novaja Gazeta for many years until it was banned. Mostly, these are reportages from the great rural Russia, far from the big cities (the story from small villages on the high-speed train line between Moscow and St. Petersburg is one of the best). I Love Russia helps us understand today’s deep Russia and the consequences of the fall of the USSR and the advent of Putin. It is also a love letter to the homeland, hence the title, but it does not bend to the official narrative; quite the opposite.

Blame! Vol. 1, by Tsutomu Nihei

★★★★☆

I came to this manga after watching the action movie on Netflix. The movie intrigued me, and I wanted to trace the source. It was well worth the effort. Cyberpunk is at its best here.

Taccuino 1870-1884, by Giuseppe De Nittis

★★★☆☆

We happened upon the De Nittis exhibition at the Royal Palace in Milan. It was a revelation, the best exhibition since the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood one in Forlì a few months ago. Giuseppe De Nittis’s notebook, an inconspicuous booklet displayed in a few copies in the bookshop at the end of the exhibition, caught my eye. I bought it because I wanted to learn more about this artist from southern Italy who emigrated to Paris to become one of the most famous painters of his era. It turned out to be a good purchase. De Nittis recounts salient episodes of his life in the French period and in London (where “I made my fortune”), with several enjoyable episodes occurring during his travels in Italy, especially in Naples and his hometown Barletta in Apulia. We learn a lot about the artist’s life, peculiar personality, and the upper-class lifestyle of the time. In contrast, Italian episodes often depict scenes of popular life that would come across as stereotypical today but are undoubtedly genuine.

Trappole alimentari, by Stefano Vendrame

★★★☆☆

There are four things that never cease to amaze me: first, how disastrous people’s diets are; second, how little they realize; third, how even small changes in eating habits can make huge differences in health status; and fourth, how little people are willing to make such changes.

Vendrami is a nutritional biologist with great expertise and undoubted popularization skills (he’s also active on YouTube). In this book, he does not propose diets but highlights the “food traps” into which all of us in the West have fallen, induced mainly by the food industry. At the end of each chapter, Vendrami suggests behaviours and tricks that promise to get us back on track. Anchored in sound science, Food Traps is a valuable book worth keeping on hand, applying its suggestions a little at a time, without haste, with the long-term goal improving our nutrition strategy and, with it, achieve better health.

Slow Horses, by Mick Herron

★★★☆☆

The first book in CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning British espionage series starring a team of MI5 agents united by one common bond: They’ve screwed up royally and will do anything to redeem themselves.

This was a fun read. I should read more fiction in the future, especially light-hearted fiction like this; it entertains and engages.

Pao Pao, by Pier Vittorio Tondelli

★★★☆☆

This book is a collection of autobiographical accounts from the author’s military service in 1980. In Italy, military service was mandatory—a rite of passage for generations of young adults. I went through that ten years later (1990), but the experiences were very similar. His conscript life was much more transgressive and unruly than mine, and the book perhaps indulges too much in those excesses, but PVT was like that. Pao Pao is a worthwhile read, especially for remembering a long-gone, intensely lived era that will never return. Also, PVT was a great writer.

Storia di mia vita, Janek Gorczyca

★★☆☆☆☆

This book tells the the story of Janek, a Pole who has lived in Rome for over 30 years without a home, documents or a steady job. It is a work written in an overwhelming, cruel, and unique Italian language, as spoken by the protagonist. It is a short, rough and not wholly satisfying book.

The bastard brigade, Sam Kean

★★★★☆

(La brigata dei bastardi, Adelphi)

The Bastard Brigate tells the gripping, untold story of a renegade group of scientists and spies determined to keep Adolf Hitler from obtaining the ultimate prize: a nuclear bomb. In the middle of building an atomic bomb, the leaders of the Manhattan Project were alarmed to learn that Nazi Germany was far outpacing the Allies in nuclear weapons research. Hitler, with just a few pounds of uranium, would have the capability to reverse the entire D-Day operation and conquer Europe. So they assembled a rough and motley crew of geniuses - dubbed the Alsos Mission - and sent them reeling into Axis territory to spy on, sabotage, and even assassinate members of Nazi Germany’s feared Uranium Club. This book is well conceived and executed, and I liked that there’s humour in it on almost every page, despite the dramatic events it narrates. I want to read more by Sam Kean.

Lacci, Domenico Starnone

★★★★☆

What are we willing to sacrifice so as not to feel trapped? And what do we lose when we choose to retrace our steps? Nothing is more radical than abandonment, but nothing is more tenacious than those invisible ties that bind people to one another. And sometimes, all it takes is the slightest gesture to resurface what we have tried to put aside. Domenico Starnone gives us a moving story, a masterful account of an escape, of a return, of all the failures that seem impossible to us and those that keep us company for a lifetime.

Walking, Erling Kagge

(Camminare, Einaudi)

★★★☆☆

Walking, by Erling Kagge, is a book on walking. The author is an explorer who has walked to both poles and the summit of Everest; his performances are certainly out of the ordinary, yet in this book, he is more about the everyday act of walking: the walks he still takes every day, both in his neck of the woods (Norway) and around the many places in the world he has visited. The text contains thematic quotations from writers, philosophers, and other famous people, and it explores the meaning and utility, both physiological and psychological, of the act of walking. As a walker and hiker, I found myself in many of the arguments in the text, but Kagge explains and argues them better.

Blame! Vol. 2, by Tsutomu Nihei

★★★★☆

The second instalment of Blame didn’t delude me. I’m not very deep into mangas, so sometimes I’m in trouble parsing what I’m seeing and making sense of a story often told via drawings rather than words, but I welcome the challenge.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Damien Lewis ★★★☆☆

(Il ministero della guerra sporca)

Damien Lewis became an author largely by accident, when a British publisher asked him if he’d be willing to turn a TV documentary he was working on into a book (source).

Reading the book, one notices that the author must not have a literary background, as the language seems more appropriate for an action movie. It is not great literature, but it does tell a story worth knowing, that of the early clandestine actions that saw the baptism of the British SOE and Anders Lassen (SOE, SAS, SBS), a role model for all brave and swaggering agents operating behind the lines. In celebrating the daring actions of these outlawed warriors, this book does not hide their flaws, such as the abundant use of drugs to sustain themselves in action. I was surprised to learn that at the end of WWII, SOE operated in my area, and Lassen ultimately found his death in Comacchio (FE). His body is buried at the Argenta Gap War Cemetery, not too far from where I live.

The three-body problem, Cixin Liu ★★★★☆

(Il problema dei tre corpi, Mondadori)

It took me oh-so-long to get to this book. I was scared it would be a delusion, and I’m glad to say I was wrong. Excellent writing, an enthralling story, and lots of science intermixed with intriguing philosophical concepts and wild ideas—Sci-fi at his best.

White noise, Don DeLillo ★★★★☆

(Rumore Bianco, Einaudi)

I missed DeLillo, as it had been some years since I read him. White Noise is from 1985 but is still fresh and relevant today, maybe especially today. It’s the book that brought him to prominence and with merit. A couple random quotes:

Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

DeLillo is The american postmodern writer. Well, along with Paul Auster, of course.

Class trip, Emmanuel Carrère ★★★☆☆

(La settimana bianca, Einaudi)

I thought this would be a chilly psychological murder mystery with a classic French Existentialism gloss. Instead, I read a haunting character study of a child filled with angst and dread, trying and failing to make sense of the disorienting world around him, never understanding the true nature of his existence in this meaningless, absurd, and often deadly world, which is French Existentialism in a nutshell. Class Trip is the only Carrere book I read that is pure fiction. He soon moved on to the fictionalised biography genre and became more effective there. Mine was a reread, as I found out today when I went to add the book to my library page and discovered I read it in 2016. It should tell either about the book’s impact on me, my ageing and sadly vanishing memory, or both. And yes, I own two copies of this book now; they’re different editions, at least.

The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster ★★★★☆

(Trilogia di New York, Einaudi)

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy is a postmodern masterpiece. It is a collection of three short detective and mystery fiction novels initially published between 1985 and 1986: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Although seemingly independent stories, they share themes, atmospheres, and narrative structures that deeply connect them. All three novels explore the identity crisis of the protagonists, who are often driven to confuse themselves with other characters. The protagonists are isolated figures engulfed by an urban landscape (New York City) that becomes a veritable labyrinth. The city is more than a backdrop; it is a unifying and symbolic element. With its immensity and endless possibilities, New York represents a place of loss and finding but also an enigma. It functions as a reflection of the protagonists’ obsessions and quests. Auster plays with the boundaries between reality and fiction, questioning the meaning of writing and storytelling. In some cases, the narrator almost emerges as a character (so much so that one character is named “Paul Auster”.) The author litters the three novels with recurring elements that create a sense of continuity and mysterious interconnectedness. The objects, character names, and details that reappear suggest that the stories are not independent but parts of a single narrative universe. Again, a masterpiece. Also, the book that gave Auster fame.

Altri libertini, by Pier Vittorio Tondelli ★★★★☆

After Pao Pao, I wanted to go back to Pier Vittorio Tondelli, to his early work, to understand better what it was all about. I wanted to know more about the author, but also about what he was telling about, about that Italian generation of the late 70s and early 80s orphaned of the great ideals of the 60s, much more ramshackle, desperate and at the same time full of will to live. Great.

All your children, scattered, by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse ★★★★☆

(I tuoi figli ovunque dispersi, e/o)

I read this book almost by accident. It was a home reading assignment for my daughter Anna, who liked it and recommended it to me. It is a novel but also an autobiography, given the many commonalities between the author’s story and the Rwandan family featured in this novel. Everyone remembers the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, if only from following the news on TV. This book tells us about those dramatic events and the trauma that followed, along with the life-long attempt to reconcile, from the point of view of those who experienced them firsthand. It isn’t easy to hold together the stories of four generations of protagonists and do so engagingly—good, solid book. I am grateful to Anna’s literature teacher; she always gives me stimulating and enriching readings.