I bought a first-edition Kindle back in the day, but never got around to using it much. After a few attempts to like it, it ended up in a drawer. Fast forward to 2025, I gave myself a second chance and got a Kobo Clara BW, a device I’m digging a lot. Yes, every time I finish an ebook I liked, I’m sad I cannot shelf it, but the advantages are many that I don’t think I’m going back to paper books anytime soon. There will be exceptions, I’m sure, but the norm will be ebook first.

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.

Il mangiatore di pietre, Davide Longo

★★★☆☆

A good, short noir set in the harsh, rugged, and in some ways repellent mountains of Piedmont, on the border with France. The characters are equally tough, children of their land. The writing adapts; less is more.

Across arctic America, Knud Rasmussen

(Il grande viaggio in slitta, Quodlibet)

★★★☆☆

The exceptional account of the sled journey from Greenland to Alaska and on to Siberia. During the sixth Thule expedition, Knud Rasmussen encountered all the Eskimo tribes, documenting them one by one and collecting a huge number of artifacts. This book is a popularized, highly condensed version of Rasmussen’s most ambitious expedition, which was a great success.

Orbit Orbit, Caparezza

★★★★☆

Orbit Orbit marks Caparezza’s debut in comics. He claims that only later did he feel inspired to add a soundtrack that blossomed to become a new album of the same name. While the two works can be enjoyed independently, they form a unique, multi-dimensional work.

Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe

★★★★☆

Heartbreaking. I have always wanted to learn more about what happened in Ireland during the Troubles. Not being Irish, I often found the subject daunting. The prose here is perfectly charged with meaning, and the reader is sucked into the narrative vortex from the very first page, with the insane scene of Jean McConville being torn from the arms of her large and loving family—never to return—by masked thugs. What is shocking here is that this is not a novel, but a journalistic investigation. A rich apparatus of notes accompanies every event narrated or quoted.

A Nord di Thule, Knud Rasmussen

★★★★☆

It is 1912, Greenland is still largely unexplored by Europeans, and the Thule trading station has just been inaugurated. It is from there that Knud Rasmussen sets off in April, accompanied by a Danish cartographer and two Inuit hunters, aboard dog sleds, to map Peary’s Channel. This volume is the expedition’s travel diary, and it is as fascinating, harsh, and adventurous as you can imagine. It is excellent, not for its literary value, but for its testimony to a heroic era that has now disappeared. I am, however, biased, as I have been collecting all of Knud Rasmussen’s writings for some time.

Pornorama, Claudia Grande

★★★☆☆

with pornorama, claudia grande has written an ambitious novel that combines the atmospheres of thomas pynchon and chuck palahniuk with true crime, the most unsuspected innocence and the most heinous brutality, private neuroses and great repressions, a red-light photograph of our contemporary world, so obsessed with death that it disguises it with sex and so deformed by money that it no longer recognizes its violence.

ambitious and courageous. it took too long for the story to start ticking.

The Day of Judgment, Salvatore Satta

(Il giorno del giudizio, Adelphi)

★★★★★

Salvatore Satta tells the story of a city (Nuoro) and a rural Sardinian society that is slowly transforming into something new and profoundly different. The protagonists, with their rituals and customs, belong to the past without knowing it. There is sadness and disillusionment in these pages. No matter their social class, a ray of light never touches the protagonists’ lives. Their lives inevitably all end in the cemetery, the only proof of their passage through this world. Compelling and convincing despite the nihilism that permeates this novel, Satta delivers a masterpiece.

Stasiland, Anna Funder

(C’era una volta la Ddr, Feltrinelli)

★★★★★

The East German Stasi was the world’s best and most efficient secret police, the textbook definition of the omnipresent Big Brother. The Stasi guarded and secured the rule of East Germany’s Communist Party for four decades, during which it seeped into every tiny crevice of East German society. East Germans could not escape the Stasi - in every six people, one was an informer for it; all spaces where life took place were infiltrated and monitored by the Stasi, which kept meticulous records on its subjects. Anna Funder does an extraordinary job in interviewing and telling the personal stories of people on both sides of the table: those persecuted by the service, and officials at various levels in the organization and around it, who took an active part in the action. Reading this work right after The Communist Manifesto was enlightening.

The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

(Manifesto del partito comunista, Feltrinelli)

★★★★☆

One hundred and seventy years later, the truths contained in the Manifesto remain as relevant as ever. Capital’s ability to control our lives through its untouchable ownership of the means of production remains intact. It is difficult to deny that the struggle for emancipation from precariousness, structural exploitation, and alienation should be led not by those who control work in their own interests, but by those who spend their lives working or trying to do so. I am glad I finally read this document. Each of us should go to back the sources first, then proceed from there.

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

(Il senso di una fine, Einaudi)

★★★★☆

Memory can deceive us, and our actions have consequences that we often cannot predict or fully understand. Barnes brilliantly shows how the protagonist selectively remembers events, usually distorting them in his favor. Self-justification and self-deception characterize Tony’s narrative, as he always tends to present himself in a favorable light, minimizing his flaws and responsibilities. Guilt and responsibility emerge towards the end, when Tony discovers the role he played in his friend’s fate.

History is that version of the past we have chosen to believe.

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

★★★★☆

It’s hard to put this book down. It’s full of stereotypes about the epic history of the West, but then again, it’s not. It would be more accurate to say that it contributes to shaping them, and it does so in a peculiar way, enriching and retouching them in a captivating manner.

Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir

★★★☆☆

Science fiction that is both incredible and plausible thanks to the extensive research work done by the author of The Martian. Sometimes perhaps it goes overboard with the details and brilliant hacks of the genius scientist and his pal the engineer, but the story remains gripping until the end. The message is clear: it will be cooperation between peoples and between worlds that saves us, not conflict.

Assalto alle Alpi, Marco A. Ferrari

★★★★☆

To give the Alps a future, a new perspective is necessary—one that is aware and respectful. A threat hangs over the Alps in our near future if we continue to draw upon old idealizing stereotypes that reduce the mountains to a salvific place of pure “beauty,” or to an amusement park for tourists fleeing the cities. How can we imagine their near future? In this small but important book, M.A. Ferrari traces a brief history of the “assault on the Alps”: tourist speculation, the “valorization” of the territory, and everything that has led to the current situation. He then attempts to propose new paths, which are actually already being experimented with in various places.

Lost in Translation, Ottavio Fatica

★★☆☆☆

Started well, got bored relatively soon. The insights are sometimes brilliant.

The Mental Load, A Feminist Comic, by Emma

★★★★☆

A graphic novel that captures the condition of women in Western Europe today in 10 episodes; a read for everyone, a starting point for exploring topics such as women’s mental load and emotional labor. I suspect most readers are women; should be men.

Ragazzo, Zuzu

★★★☆☆

Zuzu recounts youthful angst, the collapse of a family unit, and disorientation through a combination of scenes from everyday life and improbable situations, indulging in explicit yet childlike sexuality, without forgetting to reveal the truth through dreamlike scenes that devour reality to lead to other moments. These are certainly the most powerful moments in the entire work, in terms of intensity and visual anarchy.

History (La Storia), Elsa Morante

★★★★☆

The story of a small, humble, and desperate Roman family forced to face the great historical events of the advent of totalitarianism in Italy and Europe, World War II, and its consequences. One of the best-selling books of all time in Italy, it still sells very well today, and for good reason. It sparked great controversy and envy when it was released, but time has proven it right.

Voices in the Evening (Le voci della sera), Natalia Ginzburg

★★★☆☆

Audiobook. The story of the seemingly dull and claustrophobic life in a small town in the Piedmont province during and after World War II. Charming short work, with some rich and interesting characters.

S., Gipi

★★★☆☆

S. is short for Sergio, the name of the author’s father, who recently passed away. The book is a collection of autobiographical memories and stories set in Tuscany between 1943 and roughly the end of the century. It’s beautiful, but it didn’t engage me as much as I thought it would. I appreciated the fact that it didn’t hide some of the weaknesses of the parental figure.

Le valli della memoria, Pietro Scarnera

★★☆☆☆

A small comic book on the “History of the Liberation of Ravenna,” partly subsidized by the Municipality of Ravenna and published by Coconino (a prominent Italian comic book publisher). The idea of involving the young grandchildren of the protagonists of that era in a dreamlike way is interesting because, in the end, the message is always the same: don’t forget and treasure the lessons of history so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes.

La mia vita disegnata male, Gipi

★★★★☆

It is a journey back in time to rediscover the author’s own life, but also an evolution in comic book representation, moving towards a more simplified style. The essential, shaky, almost childish lines correspond, from a psychological point of view to the loss of references, the display of the author’s problems and his vision of the world. Gipi has a taste for jokes; he plays down and demystifies humbly and entertainingly. It’s just a life lived (very) badly, like so many others. But the “poorly drawn” cartoons are interspersed with “well-drawn” ones, almost as if the author wanted to show us that, if he wanted to, he is an artist with excellent technical skill. All in all, between dreams, nightmares, irony, melancholy, and reality, the book stimulates reflection on what life is, how to face it, and how to deal with one’s feelings of guilt.

La grande rimozione, Roberto Grossi

★★★★☆

It is an essential comic book that effectively presents the situation of climate change, its urgency, and how to become aware of it and act collectively and individually before it is too late. Some of the panels, often compositions that compare two similar yet opposite situations, are brilliant and very effective. I hope it will be translated and receive the broadest possible distribution. I learned about this book thanks to the Coconino Festival held in my hometown this weekend. A small but well-executed exhibition was dedicated to this work.

A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, David Foster Wallace

★★★☆☆

(Tennis, tv, trigonometria, tornado e altre cose divertenti che non farò mai più, Minimum fax)

Three stories stand out: DFW’s youth tennis, his visit to the Illinois State Fair, and his account of his experience following David Lynch as a director. The one about American TV started well but quickly became too US-centric to follow. DFW, however, is always a joy to read.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales, Oliver Sacks

★★★☆☆

(L’uomo che scambio sua moglie per un cappello, Adelphi)

Quoting a comment on Goodreads, to which I have nothing to add: “This book has many fascinating studies of neurological disorders, and the stories behind the patients are easily understood and, in many cases, enthralling. However, Dr. Sacks seems to give his readers too much credit when he throws off “hyperagnosia”, “Korsokovian”, and “meningioma” like he assumes we had read an entire neurology textbook before picking this one up.”

Source code, by Bill Gates

★★★★☆

Autobiography of Bill Gates from early childhood to the early steps of Microsoft. An interesting work for many reasons, not the least of which is that I find myself in many of the traits and passions of young Gates, on an almost disturbing level. One of the main characters recounts a key moment: the advent of micro and personal computers, and how they changed everything.

Papyrus, by Irene Vallejo

★★★★☆

Papyrus by Irene Vallejo (originally titled “El infinito en un junco” in Spanish) is a fascinating work about the history of books in antiquity. I think Vallejo did an excellent job telling the history of writing and books in an accessible yet scholarly way. Her ability to weave historical facts with interesting anecdotes makes the text engaging. As I understand, the autobiographical digressions that sometimes can annoy the reader are characteristic of her style - she uses her personal experience as a bridge to connect modern readers with the ancient world. The book is particularly strong when describing how texts survived through centuries thanks to dedicated copyists, libraries like Alexandria, and the transition from papyrus scrolls to codices (the ancestors of modern books).

Libera Università, by Tomaso Montanari

★★★★☆

Tomaso Montanari is a lucid and sharp thinker; this text proves it. By the author’s admission, this is a militant, non-technical work. No solutions are offered to the many problems of Italian universities; that is not the goal (albeit one of his own texts on the subject would be interesting). The importance of a clear separation between the tertiary education system and executive power is emphasized more than ever in a season such as the current one, dominated by parties that hark back to totalitarian ideologies. I found the chapter about Italian telematic universities and how they’re encouraged and leveraged by at least parts of the executive power fascinating.

Cambiare la storia, by Adriano Prosperi

★★★★☆

Is human history editable? One way people have tried to change the historical course of humanity is by fabricating fakes. There is no shortage of examples; in this book, Adriano Prosperi focuses on a few in particular—the Donation of Constantine, perhaps the most famous among historical fakes. The second case concerns the historical inventions of the visionary Annio da Viterbo, who rewrote world history, starting with the Flood and prophesying the place and date of the apocalypse. One finds its model in the false chronicles and fake archaeological finds of seventeenth-century Granada, where moriscos threatened with expulsion from Spain invented the existence of a very ancient presence of Christian Arabs who came to Spain before St. James. But the most disturbing of the examples is the fourth, that of the “Protocols of the Elder Saviors of Zion,” notoriously false yet still widespread and operating. Changing or negating history does not pertain to the modern day; it has always been part of the process.

Grandma Gatewood’s Walk, by Ben Montgomery

★★★☆☆

(La signora degli Appalachi, Terre di mezzo)

“Grandma Gatewood’s Walk” by Ben Montgomery tells the remarkable true story of Emma Gatewood, who, at age 67, became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail solo in 1955. After enduring decades of domestic abuse and raising 11 children, Emma left home with minimal supplies—wearing Keds sneakers and carrying only a tiny denim bag with necessities. She told her family she was “going for a walk” without revealing her ambitious 2,050-mile journey from Georgia to Maine. The book weaves Emma’s extraordinary hike together with her complicated personal history, highlighting her physical resilience and mental determination. Montgomery reveals how her journey captured America’s imagination, bringing significant publicity to the then-obscure Appalachian Trail. Emma’s accomplishments established her as a pioneering figure in hiking and inspired generations of hikers, particularly women. The book portrays her as a hiking legend and a symbol of perseverance who found freedom and purpose in nature after a life of hardship.

Emma Gatewood was genuinely revolutionary in what we now recognize as ultralight hiking philosophy decades before it became a formal movement. While experienced hikers of her era typically carried 30+ pounds of gear, Emma completed the entire Appalachian Trail with a homemade denim bag containing minimal essentials—a change of clothes, a shower curtain for shelter, some food, and little else. Her choice to wear simple Keds sneakers instead of heavy hiking boots was remarkably ahead of her time. What makes her achievement even more extraordinary is the context—she had no GPS, no specialized lightweight equipment, no online trail forums, and minimal trail markings compared to today. The Appalachian Trail was rougher and less developed in 1955, with fewer shelters and support infrastructure. Her approach embodied the core ultralight philosophy: bring only what you need, rely on your knowledge and adaptability rather than gear, and understand that mental fortitude often matters more than equipment. Emma proved that age, gender, and expensive gear were not prerequisites for tackling ambitious wilderness challenges.

The death of Ivan Ilyc, by Lev Tolstoy

★★★★☆

(La morte di Ivan Ilyc, Feltrinelli)

This work is a potent warning against the superficiality of life and a call to seek a more authentic and conscious existence. The main themes (and there are many for a booklet of a few pages, but that is what can be achieved by a giant of literature) are the inevitability of death, the hypocrisy of “civilized” society, alienation and loneliness, the meaning of life, and redemption through suffering. It is one of Tolstoy’s minor works, the philosophical-religious period from his second and last periods. Admirable.

La scomparsa di Majorana, by Leonardo Sascia

★★★☆☆

Since March 26, 1938, traces have been lost, between his departure and arrival on a sea voyage from Palermo to Naples, of the 31-year-old Sicilian physicist Ettore Majorana, whom Fermi would not hesitate to call a genius of the stature of Galileo and Newton. Suicide, as the investigators of the time want to believe and let belief, or voluntary escape from the world and the terrible fates that such a mind may have read into the future and the near future of science? In this admittedly speculative work, Sascia favours the latter. Sciascia’s arguments are intriguing but not entirely convincing to me. The value of this work lies in Majorana’s biography, which is well-documented and told. One is left wondering what Majorana could have achieved in his career if he hadn’t fled from it.

The Moon and the Bonfires, by Cesare Pavese

★★★★☆

(La Luna e i Falò, Edimedia)

The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese is a novel published in 1950 and is considered his masterpiece. The book explores several key themes, including:

• Return and Memory: The protagonist, Anguilla, returns to his hometown in the Langhe after years of absence. The contrast between past and present becomes a central element of the narrative.
• Identity and Sense of Belonging: As an orphan who sought fortune in America, Anguilla questions his roots and whether he truly belongs anywhere.
• War and Its Consequences: In the aftermath of World War II, the novel highlights the scars left by the conflict, mainly focusing on the Italian Resistance and its impact on people and the land.
• Myth and Disillusionment: The moon and the bonfires symbolically represent the contrast between dreams and reality, between the desire for something more significant and the harsh truth of rural life.
• The Human Condition and the Inescapability of Fate – Pavese explores themes of solitude and the search for meaning, often portraying life with a melancholic and fatalistic outlook.

The novel is intensely autobiographical and reflects Pavese’s existential concerns, offering a universal meditation on memory, identity, and the pain of existence.

This village where I was born, I believed for a long time to be the whole world. Now that I have indeed seen the world and know that it is made up of many small villages, I’m not sure if, as a boy, I was really that wrong.

Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa

★★★☆☆

(Ogni mattina a Jenin, Feltrinelli)

I received this novel as a Christmas present from my kids, and I’m grateful to them for this powerful, passionate, eye-opening novel. Set against one of the twentieth century’s most intractable political conflicts, Mornings in Jenin is a deeply human novel of history, identity, friendship, love, terrorism, surrender, courage, and hope. Its power forces us to take a fresh look at one of the defining conflicts of our lifetimes.

For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.

The heartbeat of the wild, by David Quammen

★★★☆☆

(Il cuore selvaggio della natura, Adelphi)

An annotated collection of memorable field reports written for National Geographic over nearly three decades by David Quemmen.

Human beings are the problem on this planet, but they are also the solution.

Anyone who has read Tolkien’s letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien’s fury—specifically, ire over mankind’s obsession with motor vehicles. Tolkien’s anger is expressed through a playful satire told from the perspective of a group of future archaeologists who are studying the titular fragments, which tell of a civilization that asphyxiated itself on its own exhaust fumes. Tolkien’s fictional fragments use the language of ancient myth, reframing modern issues like traffic congestion and parking with a grandeur that highlights their total absurdity. It is Tolkien at his angriest and funniest, making The Bovadium Fragments a minor treasure in his ever-growing catalog.

Tolkien’s repulsion toward machines is well documented, with Isengard serving as the in-story metaphor for technology used wrongly. The canonical reference has always been the war machines used in World Wars I and II, which he witnessed with terror on the battlefield. I never imagined that he also glimpsed Isengard in his everyday life, and much closer to home: in the polluted streets of Oxford.

The lies we tell others are for survival.
But the lies we tell ourselves…
those can kill us!

A quote from Ragazzo by Zuzu, which I read recently.

Neuromancer has become more than just an influential novel; it’s now the blueprint for the entire Cyberpunk genre. Even if you’ve never read it, you’ve felt its impact in nearly every major sci-fi film, TV show, anime, and video game of the past 40 years. Gibson didn’t invent cyberpunk, but he defined it. He created the lexicon—cyberspace, matrix, sprawl—that shaped how we imagine our digital future.

Reading Neuromancer for the very first time in 2025

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.

I’ve been using LLMs (ChatGPT and Claude) more and more lately, especially for work. The more I use them, the more I understand how to leverage their capabilities. I would have never thought about sharing my reading experiences with ChatGPT before. Ethan Mollick has it right; we should all put at least 10 hours into LLMs before judging them.

Your goal is simple: spend 10 hours using AI on tasks that actually matter to you. After that, you’ll have a natural sense of how AI fits into your work and life. You’ll develop an intuition for effective prompting, and you’ll better understand AI’s potential. Don’t aim for perfection - just start somewhere and learn as you go.

Today, few people are aware that Bradbury, renowned science fiction writer, beloved fantasist, and mainstay on banned-book lists, wrote the screenplay for the 1956 John Huston adaptation of the Melville classic, which starred Gregory Peck as the iconic and obsessive Captain Ahab. Writing the screenplay was a dream come true for Bradbury, until it morphed into a waking nightmare. As the old adage goes: Never meet your heroes.

Fascinating stuff. Well written, too. Read the full story here.

Books are strange objects. Chapters and chapters of coherent research and lived experiences assembled by people who wanted to put it all down in one place. Edited by actual editors who like editing. Designed— down to the weight of the paper, the typography, and the illustration on the cover— to make the experience of reading it enjoyable. Books are uncanny and impractical objects. A terribly inefficient way to encode information from one brain to another, but an excellent way to tell a story.

Full post here.

I’ve always loved libraries. They are a glimpse of the kind of ‘better world’ we all want to live in. That’s because by their very nature they are inclusive and welcoming. Anyone who walks through the doors of a library is reminded, just by inhaling the air of the library, just by being embraced by its atmosphere, to be a kinder and more caring person, and to forget, for a moment, the usual rules of our capitalistic society.

A library is a good place.

– Rebecca Toh

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (debated, see here)

Tor, one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, is best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. But the real “dark web,” when it comes to Tor, is the hidden history brought to light in this book: where this complex and contested infrastructure came from, why it exists, and how it connects with global power in intricate and intimate ways. In Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy,Ben Collier has written, in essence, a biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, politics, and empire in the deepest reaches of the internet.

I’ve always been cautiously curious about the Tor project. I remember listening to a Tor talk at a PyCon Italy (or EuroPython?) conference, where the speaker insisted that Tor wasn’t meant for dark usages but as a means of liberation. Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy might help frame the project from that perspective.

It’s packaged as a free PDF. It’s too bad it’s watermarked, so converting it to EPUB results in a mess.

For those who have found their meaning, their place in the world, and what they feel they want to live for, death is just one part - inevitable, but not frightening - of a good life—a death all woven with life, which has the smile and soft touch of a newfound embrace. I wish myself, anyone, such a death.

– Benedetta Tobagi, La Resistenza delle donne

John van Wyhe, the academic who has led the “overwhelming” endeavour, said it showed the extraordinary extent of Darwin’s research into the work of others.

“It also shows how insanely eclectic Darwin was,” Van Wyhe said. “There is this vast sea of things which might be an American or German news clipping about a duck or invasive grasshoppers. That’s been the fun part, not the formal books but the other things … all of which pool together to make the theories and publications we all know.”

The Guardian article is here. I had to dig a little to surface the actual catalog on the Darwin Online website. Many titles even have links to their text contents and images.

Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. From the leasing business model of mega a publishers to physical device evolution to format obsolescence, digital books are fragile and threatened. […] Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.

Full article here.

Inspired by Adactio, I am considering a different, less demanding approach. Instead of one review for every book, I may post one general review at the end of the year. I plan to start the article with the first book of the year, keep it as a draft, update it with every new book I read, and publish it by the end of the year. Individual notes should be short, one or two paragraphs at most, maybe with a rating. This solution would reduce the number of book-related posts, also benefitting, I suspect, most of my readers. Also, this allows me to leverage a couple of new features on my website: the table of contents and active title links (which I can then use in my library page).

I might as well adopt Adactio’s scoring system:

• 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.

Most ratings would fall in the two- to three-star range.

I’m starting this year. When a previously posted, more detailed review is available, I’ll link it, and only repost the first paragrafe in this page.

The sorrows of young Werther, by J.W. von Goethe

(I dolori del giovane Werther, Einaudi, traduzione di E. Ganni)

★★★☆☆

“The first Dandy in European literature, Werther ignited the sensibilities of an entire generation, that of the Sturm und Drang, which made him a timeless hero of the rebellious culture that prefers the intensity of feeling to the aridity of reason”. To modern eyes, the reading is sometimes disturbing, preconfiguring Werther as the prototype of today’s stalker (he goes so far as to consider the suppression of the now unattainable love). Still, one has to refrain from judging a text out of the context and period in which it was written. The writing is superb, fluent, and accessible for a text published in 1774—Enrico Ganni’s Italian translation is excellent.

Happiness, as such by Natalia Ginzburg

(Caro Michele, Einaudi)

★★★☆☆

A mother already advanced in years but still young, and a son physically distant and even more distant in ideas, needs, affections, and sorrows. A son for whom the mother resents but from whom she cannot detach herself, and the last, unbreakable umbilical cord is made of letters alone. It is a novel of many scattered characters, divided by incommunicability and destined for loneliness. I was struck by the precise description of society and culture in the early 1970s (the novel was published in 1973) and the non-trivial (for the time) theme of homosexuality, treated effectively.

The ancient hours, by Michael Bible

(L’ultima cosa bella sulla faccia delle terra, Adelphi)

★★★★☆

A few troubled characters move through the area south of the Appalachians, one of America’s poorest and most religious (evangelical) areas. Though tormented, the characters refuse to admit their defeats. They seek redemption in love in memory and drugs, trying to bridge frailties and family conflicts, coming to terms with God’s cumbersome presence, and accompanied by the feeling that they are moving forward but can only look backward. There is much poetry and poignancy in this beautiful and passionate tale. Micheal Bible is a talented writer who knows the places, culture and society he narrates, and it shows.

Milano calibro 9, by Giorgio Scerbanenco

(La nave di Teseo)

★★☆☆☆

A collection of twenty-two noir tales about the ruthless Milan of the 1960s: the sacred triad of crime, sex, money, and power is present on every page. The characters in these tales are driven by aching and losing loves, vices and addictions, or fatal sexual attractions. The stories were originally published in weekly magazines that were then in vogue, first and foremost Novella 2000, of which Scerbanenco was a longtime editor. At the time, Novella 2000 was not the tabloid magazine we know today but a popular literature magazine (hence the name). Only some of the stories are captivating; some are not well written, and noir is not a genre that interests me, but I got this book to understand the literary Milan of those times better, and I got what I wanted.

Ferrovie del messico, by Gian Marco Griffi

(Laurana)

★★★★☆

If you are looking for adventure, you will find plenty and taste great literature with this novel. There are so many characters to follow between Asti, Italian Social Republic, February 1944 and then up and down the railroads of Mexico between the 1920s and 1930s, all rich and exciting, never flat or predictable, masterfully orchestrated by an author who manages to keep the events narrated in perfect balance between comedy and tragedy, never dull despite the length (824 pages). Gian Marco Griffi is the best modern Italian author I discovered this year.

ADHD workbook for adults, by Tara Wilson

(ADHD negli adulti, independently published)

★★☆☆☆

A relative of mine was recently diagnosed with ADHD and this short introductory book allowed me to learn more about it. I didn’t find it particularly enlightening (much of what it contains can be found online), nor is the author particularly titled to talk about it (she is a professional coach), but perhaps because of this the content remains simple, and serve its purpose.

High, by Erica Fatland

(La vita in alto. Una stagione sull’Himalaya, Marisilio)

★★★☆☆

Himalayan fiction has accustomed us to stories of climbers tackling Everest and travelers seeking spiritual experiences in Buddhist monasteries. But what do we know about the people living in that region? Erica Flatland tells of the peoples, cultures, and societies that have inhabited the high areas in the Himalayas since time immemorial, and to do so, she takes a long, slow journey through these remote areas, encountering characters and places full of stories to discover. High is an excellent reportage that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Codice Jury, by Jury Chechi

(Longanesi)

★★☆☆☆

Jury Chechi won the Olympic title in the rings at Atlanta in 1996 and was third at Athens in 2004. Chechi’s bronze resulted from his attempted comeback into the sport at 35, well above the average age of a male gymnast. Even at 54 (his current age), he’s astoundingly in shape. He’s one of my idols. The news that he authored a book on calisthenics primarily dedicated to older adults couldn’t be ignored by me. I recommend this work if you’re starting and looking for guidance, motivation, and solid routines, not so much for the expert.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy

(Einaudi)

★★★★☆

In the middle of a cold night in 1980, Bobby Western dons his wetsuit and dives into the black depths of Mississippi Bay. There, he catches sight of the outline of a plane with nine bodies in the cabin, their eyes empty and their arms outstretched in an icy embrace. What happened to the phantom’s tenth passenger? It sounds like a thriller and is also that, but also much, much more. The author’s classic themes are all present, only disguised in a story that is only seemingly and partially different. The Passenger requires commitment and concentration: there are many closed discussions, varied and more or less recurring characters, numerous flashbacks and juxtapositions, but it is amply worth it.

McCarthy’s final diarchy consists of this work and its natural continuation, Stella Maris, centered on Bobby’s schizophrenic sister, Alice. Together, the two volumes make a modern masterpiece.

Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy

(Einaudi)

★★★★☆

In The Passenger, we hear the story of Bobby Western, salvage diver, physics expert, former race car driver, and grieving brother who is still in love with his beautiful sister who killed herself. This very sister is the protagonist of Stella Maris, the book’s title being the name of the psychiatric facility she admitted herself to. The text is set in 1972, and here (spoiler alert), we discover that ten years before The Passenger events, Bobby was in a coma after a car accident and brain dead. The doctors wanted Alice to agree to stop life-support. Mind-blowing. The whole text comprises seven sessions with her therapist, Dr. Cohen, rendered in pure dialogue and, therefore, more linear than The Passenger. Stella Maris can be read without its companion, but I would not advice doing that.

Born to run 2, by Chris McDougall and Eric Orton

★★☆☆☆

I’ve been back to running after a long hiatus, and this book helped me get back on track with the right, lightly-hearted approach. The fundamentals are solid (the barefoot-like technique is the way), the 90-day training plan is a good platform, the nutrition hints are remarkable, and I appreciated the injury-treatment segments. There’s too much chitchat for my liking, though, with many stories, anecdotes, and non-technical, gospel-like content. Some chapters are unattractive to the experienced runner (running with dogs, the music while running debate, and training with scooters?). This book targets the newcomer and the veteran runner switching to the barefoot technique. The first book in the series, Born to Run, was the commercial hit introducing barefoot running to the masses. This one is trying to be both a sequel and something different that can live independently. Meeting all these goals was a complicated bet.

Blind’s man bluff, by Susan Sontag

(Immersione rapida, Net)

★★★☆☆

This book made a lot of noise when it came out in 1998. Back then, most of the events narrated were unknown to the general public. The cold-war stories contained within are as enthralling as spy, maritime and Cold War stories can get. This book is still relevant today, as it does an excellent job of recounting the Cold War craziness and revealing how close humanity got to shooting his own feet, and we never knew.

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

(Cime Tempestose, BUR)

★★★★☆

What a weird work of fiction. I was expecting the usual romantic story between noble landowners in late 19th-century England, full of heartbreak and probably opposed by their respective families, the difficulties of rural life, or both. I found myself immersed in a much darker, twisted and sick version of the story, in which every single character is flawed, and there is not a single light of hope. A few weeks passed since I read it, and I’m still trying to come to terms with it. This book was well ahead of its time (1847) and still challenges the readers today. As I read, I could not help but think, “What kind of sick author would write a thing like this?” Emily Brontë’s life was not easy, and many experiences of her and her family percolated in the novel in one way or another. I found an [excellent review][1] on Goodreads, and I’m using it as a guideline for pondering this novel. For as an oddball as it is, this book is a must-read.

L’umanità è un tirocinio, by Domenico Starnone

(Einaudi)

★★☆☆☆

Getting to know my beloved Starnone better through the literary fascinations that turned him on, the sharp reflections on authors and texts, and his very personal “shattering” of articles representing a lifetime’s thoughts on writing and writing was terrific. “The texts collected here owe what little good they possibly hold to the forty-five years of passionate, enjoyable daily conversation with Anita; time has passed too quickly.” It was not an easy read, mainly because most of the mentioned texts I had never read before, but worth it. My to-read list has surely grown much longer now.

The overstory, by Richard Powers

(Il sussurro del mondo, La nave di Teseo)

★☆☆☆☆

I found it overly dull and did not finish it. Strange, because it sounds like a book I’d love. Maybe I’ll try again in a few years.

La mossa del matto, by Alessandro Barbaglia

(Mondadori)

★★★☆☆

Alessandro Barbaglia’s La mossa del matto (The fool’s move) tries to be three things in one: the life story of chess champion Bobby Fischer, a reconciliation dialogue between author and father, who died too soon, as well the tracing of a daring parallel between Fischer’s relationship with Russian champion Boris Spasskij and that of Achilles and Ulysses of Homeric memory. In our neck of the woods, we say that too much is crippling, and this work runs the risk. More here.

Disasters, by Daniil Charms

(Disastri, UTET)

★★★☆☆

Daniil Charms was considered a children’s author and could not stand children all his life. While his whimsical fairy tales populated illustrated books and magazines, giving him something to live on in the silence of his room, he also feverishly wrote tales for adults, equally imaginative but inhabited by an excruciating melancholy, as in fairy tales went wrong. More here.

Land and sea, by Carl Schmitt

(Terra e mare, Adelphi)

★★☆☆☆

Land and Sea is an essay in short story form written in 1942 by Carl Schmitt. Subtitled “A consideration of world history told to my daughter Anna,” this essay recounts and summarizes the geo-historical-legal evolution of our planet since the discovery of the New World. The originality of the work lies in the author’s identification of the Earth-Sea dichotomy as the driving force of human history. More here.

Medieval callings, by Jacques Le Goff

(L’uomo medievale, Laterza)

★★★☆☆

Medieval Callings comprises eleven essays by internationally renowned medieval historians. Somewhat deceptively, only Jacques Le Goff’s prestigious name appears on the front page, as he authored the introductive essay and handpicked and curated the collection. Each piece presents a nuanced profile of a significant social or professional Middle Ages group. Warrior knights, monks, high churchmen, criminals, lepers, shepherds, artists, and prostitutes, all prominent figures of medieval society, are depicted here with great detail. More here.

Being wolf, by Kerstin Ekman

(Essere lupo, Iperborea)

★★★☆☆

I saw a wolf: that’s the phrase Ulf, a hunter and former forestry inspector now in his seventies, has been brooding, unable to confess to anyone since he spotted a majestic specimen at dawn on the first day of the year. Something clicks inside him, and Ulf, one of the most respected men in the village in deep Sweden where he lives, feels an increasingly solid and intimate connection with the creature. They both are hunters and loners, but why does he feel like an intruder? More here.

No sleep till Shengal, by Zerocalcare

(Bao)

★★☆☆☆

Zerocalcare is an Italian cartoonist whose strips, especially in the form of illustrated books, have surged to an iconic level in the last decade. His drawing is excellent, but it is with his writing that, I think, he conquered fame. His stories are fun to read and yet profound and vibrant, all at the same time. Also, he often touches on themes nobody else covers, at least not in the comics world. It was the case with Kobane Calling: Greetings from Northern Syria, his graphic reportage from Syrian Kurdistan and the Syria-Turkey border. The author visited the area with other volunteers to support the Kurdish resistance. I think Kobane Calling did a lot in raising awareness of the Kurdish situation, at least here in Italy (an English edition was published too.) More here.

Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson

(Il rosso di marte, Fanucci)

★★☆☆☆

Regarding space-related topics and scientific research, Casey Handmer’s blog is one of my references. So when Casey started his Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary and I learned about Kim Stanley Robinson’s masterpiece, I was instantly intrigued. In Casey’s opinion, KSR’s Mars Trilogy is “one of the finest works of literature ever composed.” It took a couple of weeks of futile resistance before I gave in and ordered the first book in the series, Red Mars, a 420 pages tome that attempts to depict a scientifically credible human colonization of Mars. More here.

Sanguina ancora, by Paolo Nori

(Mondadori)

★★★☆☆

Sanguina Ancora (Still Bleeding) is not a biography but a passionate and informative tribute to Dostoevsky. The nonlinear, not literary style works and the continuous back and forth between Dostoevsky’s epic and the author’s own experiences as a scholar and Russian literature enthusiast is probably a good idea as it helps stress the actualness of Dostoevsky’s opus. More here.

Uomini, boschi e api, by Mario Rigoni Stern

(Einaudi)

★★☆☆☆

“I wish everyone could listen to the song of the partridges as the sun rises, see the deer on pastures in spring, the larch trees reddened by autumn on the edges of rocks, the darting of fish among the clear waters of streams, and the bees gathering nectar from the flowering cherry trees. In these stories, I write about village places. These natural environments are still livable, about the beautiful social insects that are bees, but also about ancient jobs that are slowly and inexorably disappearing.” More here.

Born to Run 2

I’ve been back to running after a long hiatus, and this book helped me get back on track with the right, lightly-hearted approach. The fundamentals are solid (the barefoot-like technique is the way), the 90-day training plan is a good platform, the nutrition hints are remarkable, and I appreciated the injury-treatment segments. There’s too much chitchat for my liking, though, with many stories, anecdotes, and non-technical, gospel-like content. Some chapters are unattractive to the experienced runner (running with dogs, the music while running debate, and training with scooters?). This book targets the newcomer and the veteran runner switching to the barefoot technique. The first book in the series, Born to Run, was the commercial hit introducing barefoot running to the masses. This one is trying to be both a sequel and something different that can live independently. Meeting all these goals was a complicated bet. Authors: Chris McDougall, Eric Orton.

Immersione rapida (Blind’s Man Bluff)

For decades, American submarines have roamed the depths in a dangerous battle for information and advantage in missions known only to a select few. Now, after six years of research, those missions are told in Blind Man’s Bluff, a magnificent achievement in investigative reporting.

This book made a lot of noise when it came out in 1998. Back then, most of the events narrated were unknown to the general public. The cold-war stories contained within are as enthralling as spy, maritime and Cold War stories can get. This book is still relevant today, as it does an excellent job of recounting the Cold War craziness and revealing how close humanity got to shooting his own feet, and we never knew. Authors: Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, Annette L. Drew.

Cime tempestose (Wuthering Heights)

What a weird work of fiction. I was expecting the usual romantic story between noble landowners in late 19th-century England, full of heartbreak and probably opposed by their respective families, the difficulties of rural life, or both. I found myself immersed in a much darker, twisted and sick version of the story, in which every single character is flawed, and there is not a single light of hope. A few weeks passed since I read it, and I’m still trying to come to terms with it. This book was well ahead of its time (1847) and still challenges the readers today. As I read, I could not help but think, “What kind of sick author would write a thing like this?” Emily Brontë’s life was not easy, and many experiences of her and her family percolated in the novel in one way or another. I found an excellent review on Goodreads, and I’m using it as a guideline for pondering this novel. For as an oddball as it is, this book is a must-read. Author: Emily Brontë.

L’umanità è un tirocinio (Life is an apprenticeship)

Getting to know my beloved Starnone better through the literary fascinations that turned him on, the sharp reflections on authors and texts, and his very personal “shattering” of articles representing a lifetime’s thoughts on writing and writing was terrific. “The texts collected here owe what little good they possibly hold to the forty-five years of passionate, enjoyable daily conversation with Anita; time has passed too quickly.” It was not an easy read, mainly because most of the mentioned texts I had never read before, but worth it. My to-read list has surely grown much longer now. Author: Domenico Starnone.

Il sussurro del mondo (The Overstory)

The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

I found it overly dull and did not finish it. Strange, because it sounds like a book I’d love. Maybe I’ll try again in a few years. Author: Richard Powers.

I appreciated the accurate and skillfully woven account of Bobby Fischer’s incredibly successful yet troubled life. The intersection between Fischer’s biography and actual episodes of the author’s and his dad’s lives works well, too. The attempt to bind the Fischer/Spasskij relationship to that of Achilles and Ulysses, albeit intriguing and often fitting, seems unnecessary, always risking breaking the fragile balance between the three narratives. Somehow Barbaglia manages to keep it all together.

Before getting into this book, I knew very little about Bobby Fischer. He’s known as the American genius who beat the unbeatable Russians at chess, but there’s much more to him than that, and this book does a great job at telling.

At the dawn of the USSR, this desperate fantasy of his was tolerable only if it was confined where it was least dangerous, in children’s literature. Back then, adults were the children to be motivated and consoled with uplifting novels aimed at glorifying the rise of the proletariat, a literature Charms refused to adhere to.

Thus, while socialist realism raged outside, Daniil Charms uncovered impossible worlds in the folds of reality. Gossipy older women tipping over the window, curious people breaking their watches trying to seize the moment, men buried alive rejoicing at the beautiful funeral, birds equipped with teeth (or maybe not), deadly challenges at cucumber blows, caterpillars with their snouts covered in dust.

This book is an arsenal of incredible stories circling for a long time, only clandestinely in samizdats, illegal books recopied by hand or typed in secret. Credit goes to Paolo Nori, who revealed to the Italian readers the greatness of this pioneer of the literature of the absurd. Nori selects and assembles hundreds of narrative fragments, alternating with excerpts from the diaries, in which Charms lays bare his tragic everyday life. The fresco of tightrope walking characters and unbelievable animals is thus interwoven with the minute account of a sour life lived on the fringes of literary society until the gloomy eye of the Party rests on this wacky dissident.

The Soviet Union tried multiple times to erase Charms by letting him die in an asylum. They finally succeeded on February 2, 1942, when famine killed him in the psychiatric clinic in which he was confined.

Most of these things were written when socialist realism triumphed around, and their author knew very well that he could never publish them in his lifetime. Yet, by reading his diaries, all this “nonsense,” as Charmes defined his crazy writing assembly, clearly emerges as the most crucial thing in his life.

I found the book cover excellent and perfectly fit, with this dandy figure seemingly strolling amongst imposing orthodox buildings. According to Wikipedia, Charms loved to appear dressed like an English dandy and with a calabash pipe.

I went into this book knowing very little about the author, Carl Schmitt, and the contents. From the first pages, I considered it a bizarre work, wondering whether a solid basis existed behind some of the assumptions and events narrated. Quoting the back cover of my Italian edition (Adelphi):

In a dazzling interweaving of historical interpretation and political theory, mythography and theology, philosophy and esotericism, the great jurist thus enters a fascinating territory on the borderline between speculation and imagination, where the search for the “elemental” goes “to the threshold of eschatology.” With a few strokes, Schmitt traces millennia of history, unraveling its invisible plot, until he arrives at the decisive event: that “planetary spatial revolution” from which the nomos of modern Europe was born. To then look beyond - and foreshadow, with prophecy, the scenarios of the future world where we will be able to recognize our present.

Land and Sea is an essay written in 1942 by a then-eminent and internationally acclaimed jurist, who convincingly joined the german nazi party in 1933. Historical events in the text are inevitably narrated from an opinionated (and sometimes distorted) point of view. This bizarre work left me unconvinced. I don’t regret reading it, though.

The style varies according to the piece (and its author); some will inevitably be more fluent than others. Fundamental is the introductory essay by Le Goff himself, which provides a useful general overview of the work and also clarifies its stylistic choices. The Monk essay was crucial to me, as it surfaced abbeys and monasteries’ relevance and incredible influence on medieval society.

Medieval Callings’ innovative approach offers a valuable and intriguing perspective on the complex social dynamics of feudal Europe. The work shows signs of age, having passed more than 30 years since its publication. There are probably newer, modern studies that improve on these texts, but it still serves as a fundamental resource for uneducated readers such as myself.

The tension of the stakeouts, the contemplation of the woods in the long waits, the excitement of a trail to follow, the scents and sounds of a wilderness where everyone is alone in front of himself: Being Wolf tells of a predator in harmony with his world and of the human who, inspired by it, questions and rethinks his place in nature. I found two other themes well addressed: the hate and malice that often lurk beneath the surface of small, seemingly idyllic communities and the comfort and serenity that a relationship of mutual trust, respect and love offers to aged partners who stubbornly insist on loving and respect each other despite adversity, misunderstanding and betrayal.

This novel has yet to see an English edition, so as for the English title, I made it up from Essere Lupo of the Italian edition. These quick notes offer me a chance to express my gratitude to Iperborea for their incredible work in publishing so many exceptionally translated Northen-Europe works over the years.

No Sleep Till Shengal recounts the author’s return to Iraq, this time to visit the Yazidi community of Shengal and document their living conditions and struggle as they are threatened by international tensions and protected by Kurdish militias. No Sleep Till Shengal is a good book. Like his predecessor, it is humorous yet tense and touching. I felt like something was amiss in this work, though, and I am not exactly sure what. There are a couple of repetitive passages, perhaps a sign that the author needed to fill in the blanks, having less fresh content at hand. Maybe there’s a slight Deja Vu sensation induced by the previous work; I don’t know. No Sleep is a solid second work on an already visited theme. My affection for Zerocalcare is intact, but I’d pick Kobane Calling over No Sleep, especially for a first reading of this author.

An incredible amount of research went into this book, and it shows. Still, there’s never an overabundance of scientific or nerdy details; quite the contrary, to be honest, and, at least to me, this is one of the book’s weaknesses. It’s astonishing how pivotal moments in establishing the first human colony on the Red Planet are glossed over. One hundred of Earth’s best scientists travel to Mars to create the first human settlement. During their richly narrated, almost two-year-long voyage, we get to know the main characters and learn the ins and outs of the first colonial spaceship. Yet, when they finally reach the orbit, the reader is left with no clues on the undoubtedly dramatic first landing. The settlement is already established in the next chapter, with a second one already in place on Phobos’ surface.

Omitting details such as the first landing is undoubtedly an editorial choice. Given the time scope of the narrated adventure (by the end of the trilogy, it will span a few centuries), it probably makes sense, but I couldn’t help but feel betrayed in some way. The story is more about how humans could establish a society and cultural identity in a remote colony, how such a community develops over time, and, more importantly, how and why conflicts emerge with the distant home first and within the settlement itself later on. While reading, I often thought, ‘Hey, this all reminds me of the American colonization!’ and then, ‘I wonder how much percolated into S.A. Corey’s The Expanse,’ terraforming and Earth-Mars trouble playing prominent roles in both series. In many ways, and I know I am making enemies now, Red Mars could have served well as a prequel to The Expanse².

One thing I found confusing at first but later came to appreciate is that the story isn’t told from a single person’s perspective. Instead, it sprawls across an extensive cast of characters as it expands over time. Viewpoints shift from one character to another, and people we thought we understood suddenly seem strange and different when seen through someone else’s eyes. The Mars society is messy, very human, and often petty, with few clear answers and no simple solutions. In Red Mars, we don’t get an optimistic portrayal of the future of human society. Here, Star Trek’s pacified civilization and the idealistic United Federation of Planets are far away to come, if ever.

Overall, I liked this book, probably a lot, but I don’t think I will read the next installments in the series, at least not right away. Maybe in a while, when Mars dust has settled.

Sanguina Ancora (Still Bleeding) is not a biography but a passionate and informative tribute to Dostoevsky. The nonlinear, not literary style works and the continuous back and forth between Dostoevsky’s epic and the author’s own experiences as a scholar and Russian literature enthusiast is probably a good idea as it helps stress the actualness of Dostoevsky’s opus.

However, the continuous jumping in and out of the Russian’s life, though sympathetic at first, gets tedious over time. While immersed in Dostoevsky’s events, it is not always pleasant to be torn away only to end up in the Parma lowlands for a few entertaining anecdotes (that these anecdotes tend to gravitate around the author’s other works adds to the discomfort.)

That aside, the book contains precious information on Dostoevsky’s life, opus, Russian literature and society of the nineteenth century. Some random facts from my reading notes:

• Dostoevsky’s incredible tenacity in the face of early setbacks. The first translation he worked on was aborted near the end, having discovered that the novel had already been translated into Russian from French. The second was published in a Russian magazine but heavily cut and, worse, without attribution. Yet during all this time, he continued unceasingly, tirelessly, fervently, day and night work what would become his first novel, Poor Folk (an immediate hit.)
• Writers in late 19th century Russia were astonishingly important. Tolstoy had founded a kind of religious cult. Young people would gather in the evenings to read Gogol. In those times, in Russia, writers were real stars.
• Russian literature began with Pushkin. Before him, in the eighteenth century, Russians who wrote did so by imitating the French and knew French better than Russian, as did all the Russian nobles and educated people of the time.
• Bulgakov, in The Master and the Margarita¹, has one of his characters say that Dostoevsky is immortal.
• As great as the country is, there are no dialects in Russia. Also, Russian is a spoken language first, and only then a written language (the Russian alphabet has existed only since the 9th century, with Cyril and Methodius.)
• Russians elected a monument to Arina, Pushkin’s nanny who told him fairy tales and made him love the language. She was illiterate.
• Dostoevsky is arrested and sentenced to death for reading a letter aloud and in public. With his comrades in his revolutionary circle, he undergoes a false execution, an experience he will later give to the protagonist of The Idiot. The five minutes the protagonist waits for the shooting is a transcendental experience.
• Lieutenant Frank Columbo, the protagonist of the famous TV show from seventies, is inspired by Porfirij Petrovic, the detective from Crime and Punishment.

I’ve got a lot of notes from this book, which is a good sign. Vasily Rizanov’s memorable quote on Dostoesky’s writing, also reported in the book, is worth mentioning:

The miracle of Dostoevsky’s writing lies in eliminating the distance between the subject (the reader) and the object (the author), by virtue of which he turns out to be the most familiar of all contemporary writers and, perhaps, even of future writers, of all possible writers.

Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more impressive, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions. This is James Daunt’s superpower: He loves books.

The whole piece is worth reading. Of all the libraries in my hometown, there’s only one (not a franchise) doing the same, and I genuinely enjoy walking up to their window to spot new titles. I appreciate that the owners take their time to pick worthy books and that I get to contemplate their opinionated selection. They also organize group readings and other activities seldom found in franchise libraries. Their only downside, valid for all small libraries, is that almost every time I need a particular title, it’ll have to be back-ordered, which sadly makes Amazon unbeatable.

I wish everyone could listen to the song of the partridges as the sun rises, see the deer on pastures in spring, the larch trees reddened by autumn on the edges of rocks, the darting of fish among the clear waters of streams, and the bees gathering nectar from the flowering cherry trees. In these stories, I write about village places. These natural environments are still livable, about the beautiful social insects that are bees, but also about ancient jobs that are slowly and inexorably disappearing.

The book¹ delivers on the author’s promise in the introduction. Mario Rigoni Stern is an author I have always admired and loved. His biography is touching, his themes are awe-inspiring, and his writing is simple, clean, and enjoyable.

This work is a collection of short stories he wrote over the years, primarily published in magazines and newspapers. The first part of the book, about one-third, is about Rigoni Stern’s struggles and experiences as a wartime prisoner during WWII. The rest is mostly about his wilderness adventures, either as a hunter or a nature-dweller (he spent most of his life living on the Asiago plateau in the Italian alps.) As is often the case with Rigoni Stern, his hunting adventures are proxies to show his deep connection, respect, and empathy for the creatures he preys on, which is counter-intuitive for the modern, educated reader.

Mario Rigoni Stern was one of the very last of his age when nature still played a primary role in everyday life. Despite his early success as a writer, he was lucky, or smart enough, to keep living in his relatively secluded place in the mountains, from which he could observe the unstoppable transformation of our society from afar.

This year I read more fiction than usual. I wouldn’t say what I read was uninteresting or dull; quite the contrary. Do the stats matter, though? Probably not; I might be a bit obsessed with them. As long I enjoy what I read and the time spent reading, I think I’m fine.

Anyway, here’s a selection of my favorite books for 2022. I picked three, but they could easily be five (Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Nabokov’s Mašen’ka made it to the shortlist.) In no particular order:

• Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar. Terrific work of historical fiction. The memoirs are drafted by an elderly emperor Hadrian for his young friend “Mark,” the future Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian does not flinch. He tells of his many great successes but does not hide his mistakes and weaknesses. He points out the former so that his protégé can steer clear of them; the latter he investigates, not without the indulgence that every elder is entitled to. My review is available here.

• Italica, by Giacomo Papi. Italia is a remarkable collection of short stories from Italy’s twentieth century, all written by prominent Italian writers of the period, including Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Beppe Fenoglio, Natalia Ginzburg, and Giorgio Scerbanenco. Enlightening short essays introduce each tale, helping contextualize the story. Full review.

• Stoner, by John Williams. Quoting the New York Review of Books: John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world. My review is here.

Overall, I read great books in 2022. I’m now glancing at the dozen books waiting for me on the shelf. I hope they’ll provide me with the same level of satisfaction, evasion, and entertainment as their predecessors.

The New York Review of Books has this to say about the novel:

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

I find this description perfectly fit. Like Hopper’s paintings, John William’s prose is indeed sparse, detached and powerful.

The protagonist is a professor of English at the University of Missouri in the first half of the twentieth century. From the outside, his life and attitude appear ordinary and dull, and that’s how most former students and colleagues may remember him. And yet, as his life unfolds in the pages, from boyhood at the dirt-poor family farm to college and then adulthood, the reader soon recognizes the William Stoner as a modern hero, incredibly resilient in the face of continued and unremitting harassment from the people and events around him.

The author John Williams grew up on a small farm in Texas and had a similar escape to the University as Stoner’s. Not coincidentally, I think, the author and protagonist share resembling names. While not an autobiography, the novel is probably imbued with the author’s experiences.

Going back to Zagni’s review, his opinion is the this novel was ahead of its time, which would explain why it wasn’t an immediate hit. Indeed,I was struck by the precise and painful description of some characters’ struggles with mental issues and past abuses and how these can unintentionally affect family dynamics and persist over generations.

Stoner is a deceptively simple novel written in 1965 that tells facts of the early twentieth century, yet it has much to say to the people of the modern age.¹

Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in “the best of all possible worlds.” On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan.

His wondrous adventures around the world teach Candide that, contrary to the teachings of his distinguished tutor Dr. Pangloss, all is not always for the best.

With Candide, Voltaire ridicules religion, theologians, governments, armies, philosophies, and philosophers (Leibniz being his first target). An erratic, fantastical, picaresque novel with a fast-moving plot that enjoyed both great success and scandal at the time of its release.

The lives of brilliant scientists of the 19th century, whose discoveries changed how we understand and perceive the world, are told by drawing on their biographies and filling in, where necessary, with well-told, captivating inventions. Some protagonists are well-known (Heisenberg, Schrödinger), and others, while first-grade stars in their field, are relatively unknown to the layman, or at least, they were to me.

Astronomer and physicist Karl Schwarzschild is one of them. In 1915 he provided the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity. Karl accomplished this tremendous feat while serving on the Russian front during World War I. On December 22, 1915, a letter contaikning the solution to Einstein’s dilemma was sent from the trenches. One month later, Einstein acknowledged it with enthusiasm and then, only five months later, on May 11, 1916, Schwarzschild died from a disease he developed at the Russian front.

Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck is another one I didn’t know about, whose life was fascinating. A stateless mathematician who became the leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry, he received the Fields Medal in 1966. While still producing relevant work, Alexander withdrew from the mathematical community and devoted himself to political and religious pursuits. In 1991, he moved to the French village of Lasserre in the Pyrenees, where he lived in seclusion, still working tirelessly on mathematics and his philosophical and religious thoughts until he died in 2014.

And there’s the extraordinary and controversial figure of Fritz Haber, the german Nobel Prize chemist. His inventions allowed for the industrialization and large-scale production of fertilizers and explosives. He became renowned as the “father of chemical warfare” during World War I. His pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases led to the cruel death of tens of thousands of soldiers in WWI. His work led to the infamous Zyklon B, responsible for killing millions of Jewish people in World War II (Haber was of Jewish origins.)

Again, the problem with ‘faction’ is that you never know whether you’re reading facts, making it hard to distinguish between actual stories and invention. Much of fiction went into the main story, the gripping battle over quantum mechanics between Heisenberg and Schrödinger, and in their biographies especially¹.

A book worth reading.

Several of the themes of this story will be recurrent in his later works: memory, Russian ex-pat, nostalgia and a yearning for the past, which is, in fact, the central theme here. Young Nabokov’s prose is good but not as great as in his later works. Here, we appreciate the beginnings of what will eventually pupate and make Nabokov one of the greatest.

With this work, Nabokov tells us that no matter the pomp and nostalgia, one must leave the past behind and let the present life flow.

I prefer to divide the subject into three parts, to highlight three thematic lines of my work from those years. The first is the ‘Resistance’ story (or at any rate of war or violence), seen as an adventure of suspense or terror, a type of fiction that quite a few of us did at that time. The second line is also common to much fiction of those years and is the postwar picaresque tale, stories coloured by elemental characters and appetites. In the third, the landscape of the Riviera dominates, with boys or teenagers and animals. This last line is a personal development of a ’literature of memory. Needless to say, the three lines often.

Although mainly written in the neorealist style, many scenes are infused with visionary, fable-like elements characteristic of Calvino’s later fantasy period. My favourites are Adam, One Afternoon, Theft in the Cake Shop, The Cat and the Policeman, Fear on the Foothpath, and The Crow Comes Last.

Short story collections are not fancy these days and probably never have been. Yet this is a book I would probably suggest to someone coming to Calvino for the first time, as some of his full-length novels can sometimes feel too “esotheric” to the newcomer.

While Ravenna is relegated to a marginal role in the modern age, it played a very significant one in ancient times. Quoting from the from the backcover of the book:

In 402 AD, after invading tribes broke through the Alpine frontiers of Italy and threatened the imperial government in Milan, the young Emperor Honorius made the momentous decision to move his capital to a small, easy defendable city in the Po estuary - Ravenna. From then until 751 AD, Ravenna was first the capital of the Western Roman Empire, then that of the immense kingdom of Theoderic the Goth and finally the centre of Byzantine power in Italy.

In her tome, Judith Herrin tells Ravenna’s story from its time as the capital of the Western Roman Empire to the late 8th century, when it inspired Charlemagne’s imperial and religious building projects in Aachen. This book’s 576 pages are packed with dense information. Many political, military, and spiritual characters’ in-life achievements and troubles build a complicated narrative spanning four centuries. It helps that small, titled sections within each chapter offer a palatable framework.

Herrin’s monumental work is one to be admired and respected. I was especially delighted when Pippin and his son Charlemagne came into play in the book’s final part. As I’ve read King and Emperor, A New Life of Charlemagne recently, I could merge knowledge from the two works. The flow of events that originated with the demise of the Western Roman Empire and, centuries later, led to the first glimpse of “Europe,” as we intend it today, is much clearer now.

Of Ravenna’s glorious byzantine age, only the beautiful mosaics and the baptisteries and churches containing them have survived for today’s visitors to enjoy.

‘O lone Ravenna! many a tale is told Of thy great glories in the days of old’ –Oscar Wilde

The Tripitaka Koreana - carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century - is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss - an unequalled achievement.

The full story is available here (via).

The Count was initially published in a literary magazine, in eighteen parts, from August 1844 to January 1846. Entirely attributed to Alexandre Dumas, it was also authored by Auguste Maquet; ghostwriters are not just an XX-ish century thing. According to the legend, when the publication started, Dumas didn’t know how the story would end or how it would develop. Nonetheless, it was an immediate hit that quickly became a literary classic with many film and TV adaptions and an infinite number of copycats. The story, partially based on real facts, is well known and as intriguing, captivating and entertaining as it could get for a mid-XIX century adventure novel. It helps that it is rooted in notable historical events like the Bourbon Restoration and Napoleon’s Hundred Days.

The audiobook does an excellent job at skipping the tedious parts while focusing on the main narrative but still includes many characters and events. It is sometimes hard to track them all, especially if your listening, or reading, is discontinuous, like in my case.

Critics didn’t go easy on this novel. Famously, Umberto Eco had this to say: “The Count of Monte Cristo is undoubtedly one of the most exciting novels ever written, and on the other hand, it is one of the most poorly written novels of all time and all literature.” R.L Stevenson concurs: “The first part of Monte Cristo, up to the discovery of the treasure, is a perfect piece of knockout storytelling; there has never been a man who has participated in these moving adventures without a quiver, yet Faria is a papier-mâché character and Dantès little more than a name. The sequel is but the prolongation of a mistake, dark, bloody, unnatural and stupid.”

I think I agree with both: The Count of Montecristo is rich of exciting moments, intriguing events and unexpected plot twists. Yet, the composition is often confusing (mainly in the second part) and, more importantly, too many implausible coincidences occur throughout the story. Yet, it’s a lot of entertainment. What I found more compelling, however, are its social and historical competence. I learned a lot by reading (listening to) this novel.

Being the book junkie I am, I went out and bought the unabridged tome. I can’t help it; I must possess the physical thing. The book is now happily resting in my library, and I can move on.

Few people know bears as intimately as Else Poulsen. She has raised bears, comforted bears, taught bears, learned from bears, had bears communicate their needs to her, and nursed bears back to health. This book offers remarkable insights into the complexity and richness of bears behavior and emotional life. Individual bear stories are often touching, as is the relationship they develop with their care keeper.

Reflecting on the fragmentary history of the Czech nation and on its shaky equilibrium (as it will be evident shortly after that), in 1967, the writer asks, “Is the cultural value of our people such as to justify its [nation] existence?” And to this question, he then adds a second one: “will this value suffice in the future to protect it from losing its sovereignty?” West Europe’s failure to understand the dilemma and its substantial indifference to the fate of the small eastern nations, which Russia’s totalitarian giant will eventually swallow up, are co-responsible for this loss of living identity and culture.

In the second text (1983), Kundera questions the “disappearance” of Europe as an ideal horizon (but also as a concrete force): united in the Middle Ages by the Christian religion, in the 18th century by Enlightenment philosophy, and in the modern age by the culture at large, what shared values constitute its foundation today? Perhaps technology and the entertainment industry?

It is not, therefore, political boundaries (inauthentic, always imposed by invasions, conquests and occupations) that determine the Central European aggregation. It is great common situations that bring peoples together, and group them in ever-changing ways, within imaginary and ever-changing boundaries, where the same memory, the same experience, and the same traditions remain.

If this unifying fabric is not there (and we need to understand by what threads it is held fast), each small nation is bound to see its autonomous and free existence called into question.

Thanks to Kundera’s brilliant reflections, I could look into recent Central Europe history from a different, non-western-centric perspective and get precious insights into current events. Look at what is happening today before our incredulous and appalled eyes.

Unlike The Lottery, where all tales followed a distinct theme, Just an Ordinary Day has little to unite the stories. Several genres are represented: classic family stories, supernatural, horror, and unsettling accounts of day-to-day life in the fifties all make up the list. Not all stories are of the same level. While most are mature for prime time, a few could have used some more tinkering, yet they were worth publishing as a precious testimony of an (infinitely talented) writer’s creative process. At one point, two versions of the same tale are put side by side, thus allowing a look into how Shirley Jackson revised her stories and perfected them over time. I think my Italian (Adelphi) edition includes a selection of the original collection of more than fifty, which is probably a good thing (I read somewhere that a second book with the missing pieces is planned).

I would probably not recommend this book as a first-time Jackson reading. Her renowned fiction would be a better entry point¹, with The Lottery serving as her must-read short-stories collection. Just an Ordinary Day is an excellent addition to any Jackson collection, with some of its tales deserving recognition at the top of her writing.

The last three tales conceal prophecies about the near future, corresponding to today’s present. I was impressed by Primo Levi’s 1971 Forehead Writing, where a world in which everyone can become a testimonial for a product is described vividly and bitingly. It’s impossible not to think of what we see and display on social media these days. Papi’s comment in this regard is illuminating:

With the selfie, photography ceased to be an instant captured by the observer to become a representation of the one being shown. The double lens blurred the boundary between observer and observed, turned the subject into the object, the viewer into the spectacle.

Italica brilliantly recapitulates a hundred years of Italian history through the words of some of the best writers who lived through them. It talks about the Great War, fascism, racial laws, the Merlin law, terrorism, “Mani Pulite,” and other events and situations that have conditioned Italy’s twentieth century and still have after-effects in our lives today.

An astute Goodreads reviewer noted that Britain’s decline’s eccentric and grotesque aspects are this work’s central theme. The peregrinations of Thomas Browne’s skull, dubious capitalism, carpet bombing of Nazi Germany, 20th-century Imperialism, the case of Roger Casement, Belgian Congo genocide, quasi-repatriation of Michael Hamburger, Tai-ping rebellion, Joseph Conrad’s Congo excursion, Edward Fitzgerald’s life and times, etc.—and how these end, or, indeed, constitute decay, dissolution and death. That’s a lot of output for a few days-long walk-about.

I learned about many people and events I was unaware of, and I’m grateful for that. The writing is excellent, as it is the Italian translation. But this work lacks a solid central character; the narrator’s travels don’t tie its disparate strands together adequately, making the whole not as gripping as desired.

“Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.” So begins Italo Calvino’s compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which “has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be,” the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating fine details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take.

Invisible Cities is a collection of thoughts taking the form of cities or cities taking the form of thoughts. It is an aesthetic and allegorical description of some fictional, mostly surreal cities. Some of the portrayals are fabulous: these cities suddenly come to life in the reader’s mind thanks to Calvino’s mastery, who manages to materialize absurd cities, which have nothing of the cities we are used to observing day after day; yet they appear to us almost natural, absolutely possible, and charged with a suggestiveness that no earthly city could have. In addition to the vivid images, however, we will be confronted with the thought that the shapes of those cities give rise to the figure of their inhabitants, who may represent various sides of human nature.

I can’t help but think of suggestive architectures mentioned in other works, like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series or Hayao Miyazaki’s animes. In Peake and Miyazaki, architecture plays a fundamental and often active role (think of Howl’s Moving Castle). Likewise, Calvino’s Cities are absolute protagonists, while Marco Polo and the khan are mere means to the narration.

Invisible Cities is one of Calvino’s best works. Like others of his, it might even appear light to the superficial reader while it’s chock full of precious insights and profound thoughts delivered by a master at the art.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. ― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Actually, some of Yourcenar’s prose is marmoreal, but not so that you can’t get through it. Also, it is beautiful. What made her remarkable, however, was not so much her style as the quality of her mind. Loftiness served her well as an artist: she was able to dispense love and justice, heat and cold in equal parts. Above all, her high sense of herself gave her the strength to take on a great topic: time.

I was caught off-guard by the idea, conceived by many critics, that her writing style resembles a man rather than a woman.

First, many of her narratives were set in the past. Second, they often involved towering passions compacted into tight, steel-band forms. […] She continued to embrace anti-sentimentality; indeed, she showed a fondness for brutality. And those traits, together with her highly controlled prose, encouraged reviewers to say—as they would say throughout her life—that she wrote like a man. As one critic put it, he could not find in her work “those often charming weaknesses… by which one identifies a feminine pen. The hand does not yield, it does not caress the paper; it is clasped by an iron gauntlet.” This opinion was fortified by the fact that most of her protagonists were men.

Intriguing and, now that I have been enlightened, shareable.

It was immediately apparent that I was facing something exceptional. The memoirs are drafted by an elderly emperor Hadrian for his young friend “Mark,” the future Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian does not flinch. He tells of his many great successes but does not hide his mistakes and weaknesses. The former he points out so that his protégé can steer clear of them; the latter he investigates, not without that indulgence that every elder is entitled to.

The emperor writes of practical things: the organization of the state and turbulent provinces management (he devoted a significant part of his career to visiting the remote provinces, so much that he was criticized for being too absent from Rome), the conspiracies he foiled and the problematic management of the enormous army, with all its quarrelsome commanders and legions. But Hadrian also tells about his private life: the boundless ambition of his youth, the passion for Hellenic culture and how it influenced his reign. He writes about his fleeting loves and the relationship with the young Antinous, his only true love, tragically lost way too soon. To overcome the trauma of the loss, Hadrian does what is precluded to ordinary mortals: deifies his beloved. He establishes a cult of Antinous, which, surprisingly so in the eyes of modern man, flourishes everywhere in the vast empire, taking different forms depending on the receiving religion. Like any ordinary person, the emperor wonders about the eternal questions that plague humanity. He offers answers to some while others are left unanswered, impenetrable even to the divine emperor.

The text is compelling, intimate and full of such accurate details that I soon wondered whether what I was reading was a literary invention or a historical document. The truth lies somewhere in between. According to the sources, Hadrian did write an autobiography, but it is lost. The Memoirs is indeed a work of fiction; the result, however, of meticulous historical research carried out, between ups and downs, for thirty years. Everything that Hadrian recounts is historically attested. Where doubts exist, the author chooses the most reliable historical hypothesis, not failing at times to adjust, rehash, or add where necessary. The author’s notes, included in my edition, are invaluable in fully understanding and appreciating the amount and quality of work done. Yourcenar conceived the idea in 1924-25, when she was only 22 years old, only to publish it in 1951. Nowadays, historical novels are common but not in the early twentieth century, when the memoir letter form was probably unheard of. The result is a daring and unconventional work for the time, a high-risk publication that was instead an immediate success with both the public and the critics who acclaimed it.

My long-held fears were unfounded after all. Although with some guilty delay, this book goes straight into my all-time top ten.

See also: Becoming the Emperor

Exhausted by a recent breakup and with only a few savings scraped together from her job in a pub, a tent, a few clothes and some tools, all packed on the back of her bike, she was determined to prove herself.

After almost two and a half years, she returned to London, having lost much weight but wiser by decades. She had ridden through unforgiving landscapes and war-torn countries and witnessed civil uprisings that forced her to forge documents. She had fended off multiple sexual attacks, biker gangs, and corrupt police convinced she was a drug dealer. She had survived life-threatening illnesses, personal losses, and brutal accidents that left permanent scars and a black hole in her memory. She had also fallen in love with two very different men.

This book is an absorbing account of a true adventure, not just a motorcycle adventure, lived by a woman of exceptional character, strength, tenacity and resilience.

Today it seems incredible that at the time, no one was interested in this story and that thirty years had to pass before it was published. Distance in time is sometimes felt, especially in the lack of details or how some parts of the journey are glossed over. Fortunately, Beard kept an accurate diary, on which she drew heavily. The result is, in any case, 336 compelling pages, well worth reading.

These musings were recently conjured by reading Neuromancer. The Birth of Cyberpunk, a fine, splendidly illustrated short essay on Gibson’s influence, published by Sabukaru Online (which feed I promptly added to my RSS reader.).

When Gibson penned his opening line ‘the sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel’ he merged reality and the digital in a way that seems almost prophetic today, as online footprints grow exponentially and internet universes creep into reality. Instead of two separate realms, there’s a ripple and blur.

I might re-read the novel. I’m curious about my opinion as a senior reader.

His prose is rich, and his erudition is immense. His love for this long-lost world is touchingly apparent. Roumeli is not just travel writing but a moving celebration of Greece and its culture. Patrick Leigh Fermor is one of my favorite authors and yet, of all of his books, this is not my favorite¹. There’s a certain lack of focus (the whole Crete divagation, while poetic and evocative, has little to do with the context of this book²), and some musings on Greeks’ nature, while interesting, tend to run long.

Of all the stories of maritime adventures I’ve read, that of the Endurance, masterfully told by Alfred Lansing in this book, is the most incredible and shocking.

And I meant that. As the book’s title suggests, that story is simply unbelievable, yet true. Imagine my astonishment this morning at the news that the Endurance was found in the depths of the Antarctic.

Scientists have found and filmed one of the greatest ever undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank. The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the weekend at the bottom of the Weddell Sea.

More here, along with incredible footage.

The text is too long, though. It’s almost 700 pages, and I suspect they could have been half of that without sacrificing content. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his behavioral finance and hedonic psychology research. He spent a career researching these topics, and most of the biases and behaviors mentioned in the text are his discoveries (with colleagues.) He tries hard to be popular and mostly succeeds, especially in the first, second and third parts, where the juiciest ah-ha moments await the reader. The rest is more about his prospect theory and behavioral finance; it probably holds the most relevant conclusions for an informed audience but suffers from repetitions and perhaps too many examples, riddles and tests.

By pure coincidence, just the other day, 3 Quarks Daily posted a 2011 Google Talk in which Kahneman was invited to talk about Thinking Fast and Slow. I found it very good at explaining, let’s say, the first part of the book (System 1 and System 2, their interactions and their influence on everyday human behavior.) Examples and stories mentioned are from the book. My suggestion is first to watch the speech. It’s 45 minutes well spent, then decide if you want to invest in the book.

Following the trial hearings, we are taken back to the years of the advent of Nazism in Germany. The regime first incited and then actively advocated anti-Semitism, a historically present sentiment in many parts of Europe and beyond. These are the years of establishing the SS and other Nazi police forces. Eichmann, penniless and unemployed, managed to join the SS ranks thanks to an acquaintance. He was appointed to the Jewish emigration office, an assignment he took seriously. He read books and became an “expert on the Jewish question”. Over time, Eichmann career progressed as his office duties evolved, from emigration to deportation and extermination. However, despite the undoubted successes, Eichmann never managed to reach the highest levels of the military hierarchy. He could never get close to his idol, the Führer. For what reason?

Why couldn’t he ever get into Hitler’s inner circle? The critical point of Eichman in Jerusalem is, I think, precisely the answer to this question. According to Arendt’s reconstruction, Eichmann was and always remained a mediocre man. He was undoubtedly a good bureaucrat, an expert in organization and logistics, but light years away from the brilliant and appealing person he always aspired to be. Arendt makes no discount, reporting the many moments during the process in which Eichmann reveals his true stature.

The banality of evil of the title lies precisely in this aspect: a modest bureaucrat who merely fulfils his job slavishly, without questioning his role, as a cog in the machine, can do evil. The Nazi machine exterminated six million Jews, and the office Eichmann directed was the fulcrum of that tireless activity. And yet, the man in charge, and with him, his subordinates, for the most part, were ordinary people who carried out their tasks heads down, no questions asked. How many Germans (and collaborators in the occupied countries) did the same thing in those years?

Since its publication, the book has not ceased to raise controversy, particularly concerning the role of Jewish Councils of Elders (Judenrat), organizational structures imposed by Nazi Germany. Arendt proposes that they actively collaborated in drawing up the lists of Jews to be deported. In any case, Eichmann in Jerusalem is an exceptionally documented and well-argued historical research. It is worth reading, especially so in our time when the memory of time passed tends to fade away.

Until now, 2020’s Greenlandic Legends has been my favorite, mainly because it’s partly different from the others, which all share a common Scandinavian cultural background. In this regard, this year’s Finnish Tales is even more remarkable. Quoting the short, excellent final essay by the translators Giorgia Ferrari and Sanna Maria Martin¹:

Within the Nordic panorama, Finland holds a unique position and has a precise identity: entering Finnish culture means coming into contact with the Finno-Ugric world, starting from the language, which has nothing to do with the Scandinavian ones, which are only geographically close. At the same time, Finland is anything but an island separated from its surroundings: its particular position between East and West has made it, if anything, a borderland, a point of intersection between different cultures, enriching it with influences from both directions. And this can only be evident even in popular tales.

Indeed, in these tales, you find echoes of myths and tropes from Scandinavian culture but always intertwined with unique Finnish themes. Notable examples are:

• The tietäjä, whose supernatural power arises from great knowledge.
• The vetehinen, a male (!!!) water spirit of the forest.
• The syöjätär, the devourer, or the “wicked mother.”
• The nimikkopuu, a tree planted on somebody’s birth; tied to their destiny
• The shamanic rituals, often associated with the use of magical words and songs

The principal collector of Finnish folklore was Eero Salmelainen (1830-1867), who published four seminal titles from which all of the stories in Finnish Tales are selected. Of course, Grimm’s influence is evident in Salmelainen’s work. Remarkably though, Salmelainen started his collection forty years later than the Grimms. One reason might be that until then (and up until now, I might add), Finnish folklore has always been hiding in the shadow of Kalevala’s poetic poetry.

Should I be concerned? I don’t know. No doubt I’ve been super busy at work, often feeling exhausted in the evening when I tend to read more. I suspect I’ve also been watching more TV than usual, probably due to the evening fatigue and because I want to spend more time with Serena. The fact that I read more non-fiction might play a role too. Fiction tends to be more addictive and more inviting to the weary mind. We’ll see what happens next year.

These are three books I especially enjoyed reading in 2021:

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle. This little Shirley Jackson masterpiece stands out from my (admittedly small) 2021 fiction selection. Quoting my own words from the review: “This book is brilliant because it takes the canonical witch/haunted house theme and flips it over, instantly reversing the perspective. The story is told from within the house. Village folks are the bad guys. Those who seem to be motivated by good intentions only fulfill their ego or strive to behave with good manners, as society expects them to do. We cannot help but feel at least a drop of compassion and sympathy for the devil.”

• Endurance. Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. I’ve read three maritime adventure books this year, all excellent works. Alfred Lansing’s report on Shackleton’s expedition is my pick because the story is outstanding and powerfully told. “Alfred Lansing has reconstructed all these events with great care, drawing mainly on the many diaries kept by the crew and interviewing the few survivors still alive. […] the result is always smooth and dry, never yielding to hyperbole or exaltation, always close to the facts, which on the other hand, certainly do not need enrichment.”

• Consider the Lobster. David Foster Wallace is one of my favorite authors and this book does not delude. “You may not have a strong interest in lobsters or pornography, but the essays in this book are terrific.”

Honorable mention goes to About the Meaning of Life, King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne, and Nomadland. See my Books I Have Read page for the list of books I read in 2021 and before.

I know of nobody else who writes as thoughtfully and intelligently as DFW. That he manages to write so informatively, with humor and genuine wit, on almost any subject under the sun is mind-blowing – it’s also why I am willing to forgive his occasional stylistic excesses. (Can you spell ‘footnote’?) You may not have a strong interest in lobsters or pornography, but the essays in question are terrific. The reporting on Ziegler and McCain is outstanding, heartbreakingly so, because it makes the relative shallowness of most reporting painfully evident.

Yes, I know all about his weaknesses - the digressions, the rampant footnote abuse, the flaunting of his extraordinary erudition. I know all this, and I don’t care. Because when he is in top form, there’s nobody else I would instead read. The man is hilarious; I think he’s a mensch, and I don’t believe he parades his erudition to prove how smart he is. I think he can’t help himself - it’s a consequence of his wide-ranging curiosity. At heart, he’s a geek but a charming, hyper-articulate geek. Who is almost frighteningly bright.

If you have never read DFW, my advice would be to start with his non-fiction, which is way more accessible than his fiction (with the notable exception of The Brook of the System, which was my first adored DFW reading.)

We know perfectly well what we want to have - wealth, pleasure, power - but we no longer know who we want to be. In the severe crisis in which we are immersed, we continually need adversaries to define our identities. We often find ourselves, enemies, even of ourselves, in a sort of permanent inner war. The philosophy of Vito Mancuso is a precious anchor in these difficult times: renewing in us the desire for ancient reflections, it shows us the way to go back to the deep roots of our consciousness and teaches us how the meaning and direction of our life on this Earth must be rebuilt in small steps, day by day, in the awareness that we are in the presence of something more important than ourselves. Only in this way will we enter into harmony with the logic that determines our path and love that natural simplicity within us is the real secret to a worthy life, a life worth living, an authentic life.

Ambitious, to say the least, especially considering that we are talking about a short essay of a hundred pages at most. In the preface, we learn that the content of this book is nothing more than the revised and expanded transcript of a speech given by Mancuso during a summer event at a city library. Yet, we should not be misled. About the Meaning of Life is not superficial. Instead, it is a well-exposed and reasoned synthesis of Vito Mancuso’s general thought on the meaning of life, a theme to which the author has dedicated much of his work. Mancuso’s philosophy is in some ways original, especially in its courageous detachment from the dominant Western Catholic doctrine from which he comes (and to which he tends to return.)² The in-depth and never prejudicially critical study of alternative philosophies, like those of the far East, is evident and leaves its mark. The writing is always fluent, the reading pleasant and rarely tricky. On rare occasions when we feel the lack of footholds, the footnotes (pun intended) aid with valuable suggestions for further study. Yes, a short text, but with dense content and lots of food for thought. It deserves more readings. Some of Mancuso’s major works, like the Four Masters of Life mentioned above, are certainly recommended for a deeper investigation³.

His passion for the most popular areas of Istanbul and, in contrast, the atavistic nostalgia for the simple life of the nearby fishermen islets exudes from these stories, which often run similar one after another. The composition is sometimes complex, making the text hard to parse and comprehend. Several novels are noteworthy, though, especially those narrated in third-person, where the narrator is not involved. The author is holding back his poetic prowess and the resulting text is more linear. Notable examples are The samovar, on the elaboration of mourning, and A story for two, a touching story of friendship between a bird and a fisherman. Some first-person ones are exceptional, too. For example, Milk is Sait Faik’s worthy tribute to Proust’s madeleine. One short story on the protagonist’s struggle with a street kid was profoundly touching.

I bought this book because I wanted to know more about Istanbul, a city I know little or nothing about, and its people. I am only partially satisfied. Reading it, I realized that the author was, of course, not addressing the foreign reader at all. He was writing, of course, for his people, the citizens of Istanbul, and himself.

The merits of the expedition leader, Sir Ernest Shackleton, are, of course, spectacular. Every decision he made and his care in leading the crew during that year and a half of unspeakable suffering, sacrifice and hardship led them all to safety. There was no shortage of hotheads and slackers, which made the successful outcome even more impressive. Shackleton himself was not a saint. For the sake of fame, success and money, he planned an expedition that had very little chance of success, in which death was by far the most probable result. And yet, he planned every detail with great care, never doubting the final victory. More than anything else, what is surprising in this story is that no saviour finally came to rescue the crew. They saved themselves. After more than a year camped on drifting ice floes, driven by sea currents and Antarctic winds, they finally landed on the deserted and unforgiving Elephant isle. Shackleton once again had to take to the sea, leaving most of his men behind, to cross the terrible Drake Channel on little more than an open lifeboat. This one feature alone, the victorious crossing of the world-renown troubled waters of Drake Channel on a lifeboat, was something never attempted before, nor ever repeated afterwards, and would have been enough for history books. Once miraculously landed in South Georgia, Shackleton and his men were not done yet. They had to cross snow-capped mountains never before touched by man to reach an outpost of whale fishers and finally set sail in a ship to return to retrieve the men marooned on Elephant Island.

Every moment of this story feels like an epic, fictional movie, but it’s not. It is reality as experienced firsthand by actual human beings. Alfred Lansing has reconstructed all these events with great care, drawing mainly on the many diaries kept by the crew, Shackleton himself included, and interviewing the few survivors still alive. Lansing’s work is precise, methodical, careful. Still, the result is always smooth and at the same time dry, never yielding to hyperbole or exaltation, always close to the facts, which on the other hand, certainly do not need enrichment. A fantastic story, beautifully told.

Mathematics was my apprenticeship to revolution because it taught me to distrust absolute truths and unquestionable authorities. Democracy and mathematics, from a political point of view, are similar: like all creative processes, they can’t stand remaining unchanged.

Not a book for everyone, perhaps, but suitable to those who like to think and be challenged with ideas. Background theme to which I am susceptible: the necessity for school to illuminate our existences. I wouldn’t say I liked the frequent references to contingent situations in Italian politics. I bought an short essay on the interconnections between mathematics and politics; I expect it to make me fly high, far away from the quarrels and events of daily politics. Also, sometimes the similarities between the two fields seem a bit too far fetched.

I don’t think this book is currently available in English. I read it in the original Italian edition.

Nelson is firm in her dissection of the source material. However, it can be a challenge to weave critical discussion of sources and fluid narrative, and at times this book leans a little on the dry side. Nelson does not speculate; she instead focuses on what we know or can be reasonably inferred from the sources. The downside is that some of the more exciting episodes from Charlemagne’s life are glossed over: the 792AD rebellion of Charlemagne’s eldest son, Pippin, receives only three pages of discussion, whereas Charlemagne’s canal-building project, which follows, receives double that. Personally, as a general reader rather than a historian, I would have preferred more on the “interesting bits” of Charlemagne’s reign, but a more academic reader may not mind.

Overall, this is an excellent biography, and I would recommend it to an informed reader. The scholarly attention to sources might deter the casual reader, but the motivated ones will take profit from the effort.

The introductory chapters to various musical eras (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modernism and beyond) were, for me, the most interesting ones. In these chapters, Swafford explains the changes in society, technology and taste that influenced the musical styles, themselves a revelation of the spirit of the time. In this sense, Language of the Spirit is not just a classical music book but also a historical essay, often sharp and full of intriguing information on the periods crossed.

The author’s effort in using simple language, understandable even to the uninitiated, is evident, and the goal is well achieved, for the most part. Sometimes, however, albeit very rarely, it goes into the technical, where someone like me, who lacks a solid background, might struggle.

The recommended listenings are excellent. For every single one, I wanted to stop reading and listen to it. That’s the approach recommended by the author, but I never managed, too eager to finish the chapter. I then tried to make a Spotify playlist out of them, failing miserably because of my pedantry; I only wanted the suggested executions, often missing on Spotify.

Language of the Spirit is a recommended introduction to classical music and its history. It allows the reader to collect a phenomenal list of composers and their works while, at the same time, delving into the momentous changes faced by (mainly European) society over the last few centuries.

Something has happened to me, I can’t doubt it any more. It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything evident. It came cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little put out, that’s all. Once established it never moved, it stayed quiet, and I was able to persuade myself that nothing was the matter with me, that it was a false alarm. And now, it’s blossoming.

He has a relationship with a woman, but it is exclusively carnal: the two exchange almost no words. Selt-Taught Man, an individual who spends his time at the local library reading all books in alphabetical order, is one of his few acquaintances. When Self-Taught Man invites Antoine for lunch, he notes on his diary: “I had as much desire to eat with him as I had to hang myself.” Antoine has no interest in relationships. They take too much effort.

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends.

Antoine feels like he never lived but only existed. These days, we would probably call Antoine’s sickness with a different name, depression maybe. If you ever felt like Antoine, Nausea is going to be a difficult read. If you didn’t, I suspect it will be hard for you to feel any sympathy for the protagonist. Sartre writes beautifully, with razor-sharp precision. Despite his attempts to refuse it, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. Nausea was Sartre’s debut novel, and he always considered it his best fictional work. Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre, is a challenging but rewarding read. I think Sartre goes straight amongst the masters at describing the human condition.

When I spotted the book lying in the bag, I inquired about it. Serena took it out of the bag and handed it over to me with a smile. Imagine my surprise, amazement and gratitude when I started browsing through hundreds of beautiful works of art, all in the form of club flyers from all ages and musical genres.

In what can best be described a well of hip Club Culture Graphics, Proud 2 B a Flyer rounds up the most exciting party announcements made for the street. Before the explosion of popular musical forms in the past 40 years art associated with music has been in corporate hands, with music companies and commercial artists, but the club flyer has changed all that. The evolution of the club flyer mirrors the musical movements that have used its simple direct from to capture the imagination of their audiences. The early techno scene employed flyers to great effect and diverse musical scenes caught on quickly. Proud 2BEA Flyer brilliantly documents the flyer stylings of the electronica scene and also includes special sections featuring Jazz, Hip Hop and Brazilian music. Other fascinating selections are found in chapters such as Drawing, Series, Unusual Shapes and Regular Nights. (source)

And indeed, this is an excellent collection of inspiring, mesmerizing works¹. No text, just flyers. I have never been much of a clubbing person, but I always followed the music, of course, and was fascinated by the graphical world around it. This book brings back memories of an age now gone when there were no smartphones, and you only happened to know about an event when and if you were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, to have a chance to come across one of these street flyers.

Some call them homeless. The new nomads refer to themselves as ‘houseless’. Many took to the road after their savings were obliterated by the Great Recession. To keep their gas tanks and bellies full, they work long hours at hard, physical jobs. In a time of flat wages and rising housing costs, they have unshackled themselves from rent and mortgages as a way to get by. They are surviving America.

Jessica Bruder is a journalist. For three years, she followed the lives of a group of nomads who live in their RVs or even in their cars, moving from one seasonal work to the next in their pursuit to survive the collapse of their own personal American Dream. Her writing is dry, concise, with little room for personal feelings or ramblings, to the point that, at times, she sounds distant, almost detached from the events being told. That isn’t the case, as you can tell by the second half of the book when she finally decides to take the plunge and get herself a van to live herself the “workcamper” life. That is a tipping point in the book. The author becomes the main character, the story is personal, and the reader is more involved.

Bruder interviews many folks and followed a few of them in detail. Linda May, amongst others, is the centrepiece of the story. Linda was 62 when she took social security and was forced into living in a van. Most people living the “workcamper” life are in what would be their retirement age. They are in their 60s, 70s and sometimes even 80s. Yet, they work very hard at their seasonal jobs, like at Amazon warehouses as inventory scanners or in Minnesota and North Dakota, for the seasonal harvest of sugar beets. These work experiences are depicted with great detail. Bruder herself walked the plank and experienced how demanding these assignments are on the body and the spirit (Amazon provides painkillers to their aged employees). Despite all the difficulties, these people carry on with great dignity and, often, upbeat attitude, well represented by Linda, a lovely elderly woman.

I had no idea that the “workcampers” subculture existed in the USA. As someone who has always been mildly fascinated by the RV life (like many others, we sometimes fantasize about travelling the world in a camper when we retire), I admit I was pretty shocked by this work, an engaging and very unsettling read. I am grateful to Bruder for her hard-earned report.

At one time there was a social contract that if you played by the rules (went to school, got a job, and worked hard) everything would be fine. That’s no longer true today. You can do everything right, just the way society wants you to do it, and still end up broke, alone, and homeless.

PS. By pure coincidence, I came across the awarded Nomandland movie only a few days after finishing the book. It was great. At first, I was startled by the acting of some roles. Then, by the final credits, I realized that it wasn’t professional actors who played those roles. It was the actual persons from the book, Linda May included, who played themselves.

The book is merciless towards Hitler’s heirs and not accommodating at all towards Germans of that age in general. Reading the behaviors and things said in those days is gruesome. Under track are the horrible consequences of war and concentration camps. The resulting picture is that of the supreme horrors and mistakes that humanity can reach.

The text focuses on the protagonists of those days, the Nazi hierarchs (not just the most infamously well known) and their Allies and Red Army counterparts. There are few notable exceptions, like the story of Marlene Dietrich, already a Hollywood star, who served as an American army officer and returned to Germany to look for her sister lost in the fog of war. To her dismay, she found that her sister had prospered, cooperating and taking advance of the Nazi regime. Marlene bought her sisters’ silence, and for the rest of her life, fiercely negated the very own existence of a sister.

I found the part on the German population and its shocked, instinctive reaction to the regime’s fall particularly informative. The immediate turncoat of most, along with the lying denial of knowing anything about the atrocities.The disturbing (George Orwell’s word), immediate sympathy for the Allies. Also, the eulogy for the few who courageously conducted a desperate, clandestine and seemingly hopeless resistance within the Reich. It is especially relevant that the author is German.

This book leaves me stunned. It is always painful to read about that historical period. The millions of deaths. The suffering. The atrocities. We need to keep going back, walk the way over and over, never to forget, never to repeat. To that end, Eight Days in May is a book everyone should read.

By May 8, 1945, Germany was a humiliated, devastated country. Most major cities were annihilated, the economy had collapsed, and millions of people were reduced to hunger. The contrast with today’s Germany is mind-blowing. With the help of the winning countries, sure, but predominantly and undoubtedly thanks to grit and desire for rebirth, Germany resurged from the catastrophe as a modern country and a sought-out model for democracy, economy, justice, and reception of diverse cultures.

Being the Tablet “a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture”, it makes sense that a good part of the article focuses on Proust’s ambivalence about his Jewishness. Still, there are many other interesting tidbits to be learned. On the novel itself and its development, on some relevant characters and their real-world counterparts, and Proust himself.

Most of these matters, as is natural in early drafts, differ from the final versions: the iconic madeleine in these pages is the far more prosaic toast. Sound, not just taste or the narrator’s position standing on cobblestones, is added to the battery of things that can revive the past. Proust writes here, after trying in vain to resuscitate a lost day of his youth, that “I let my spoon fall onto my plate. There was then produced exactly the same sound as that of the hammer of the brakemen who that day struck the wheels of the train at its stop. At that same moment the burning and blinded hour when this noise rang out was revived for me …” Perhaps most surprisingly, the Narrator, here given his actual name, has a younger brother, an annoying one to boot, who “though only five-and-a-half years-old, was of a rather violent nature.”

What would we think of a person who, having a vast wardrobe of beautiful clothes, always wore the same suit out of laziness? These situations appear unlikely; yet, they are examples of the attitude that many have towards their language: they have access to an immense, incalculable patrimony, which out of indolence, or fear, or inexperience, they use partially. Even if the Italian does not need to be saved or preserved, we should love it more because it is a magnificent instrument. It is a shame to limit ourselves to only a superficial frequentation.

Vera Gheno is a sociolinguist. She teaches at the Universities of Florence and Siena. She collaborates with the “Accademia della Crusca”, the most important research institution of the Italian language and the oldest linguistic academy in the world. She is also a phenomenal popularizer. I am sure that some concepts and notions expressed here are well known to the knowledgeable person, but this book is not targeted to that kind of reader. I think this work is purposedly aiming at the general public.Yet, I suspect it would remain enjoyable to those in the field mainly thanks to its always fresh and entertaining style.

One of the many takeaways is that languages change, evolve, and constantly adapt over time. Hence there is no standard, norm, or canon set in stone. New words are minted continuously. At the same time, some others decay and slowly disappear. Words initially borrowed from foreign languages (English, yes, but also French, and many other unexpected ones, like Hungarian) enter the dictionary to become part of the norm. We old farts should not be so quick to condemn our kids’ slang: some of their jargon will soon be forgotten, some will join the canon. The same happened, of course, in our time and forever before.

The collection is rich and varied. We go from the heretics who went with Fra Dolcino to the partisans who stopped the Nazi fascists in the mountains of Cuneo and Belluno, up to the contemporary movements against the high-speed train in the Susa Valley. Some high-profile mountain climbers are present as well. Tita Piaz, the Dolomiti Devil; the Nuovo Mattino climbers who, inspired by the revolution going in Yosemite , let go of the classic “fight with the Alp” approach to mountain climbing; the very notable (and totally unknown to me) story of Guido Rossa, worker, trade unionist, and fantastic rock climber. The Italian Alpine Club internal struggle from which the Mountain Wilderness association originated.

Enrico Camanni, the author, is essentially a journalist, and it shows. I know him since the mid-90s when he was the editorial director of the then best mountain magazine, Alp. I might be wrong, but I suspect that this work is mainly composed of articles previously written for magazines and other works, here edited and enriched. That is not necessarily a negative, but I find the prose sometimes short-lived, other times emphatic, erratic in some ways.

Overall a good book. I appreciated some reflections and considerations, especially those around the now unbreakable, intertwined bonds between the lowlands and the highlands.

According to a famous and fortunate Homeric expression, words are winged, not so much like birds but rather like arrows, which cut the air quickly to go straight to the target and break through the listener’s heart. The Greeks have always known that the word is used to convince and show truth and correctness. But they also know that it has a magical force in it: it can turn into a spell, capable of dominating and dragging the listener’s soul; to bewitch like music and to heal like medicine; but, above all, to deceive and mislead.

Laura Pepe teaches ancient greek law at the University of Milan. In her career, she published many academic works and also scientific divulgation books. The Voice of the Sirens falls in the latter category.

For the ancients, the Sirens were horrifying monsters, half birds and half women. Yet, they had something that made them irresistible: the voice, persuasive and captivating. In this book, along with other similar mythological figures such as Circe, Calypso and Elena, Sirens are protagonists of a journey that starts from Homer and focuses on the Athens of the 5th century. Athens, the city of democracy and, even before that, of the word. Retracing little-known stories and famous passages of prose and poetry, Professor Pepe investigates the incredible potential of peithó, persuasion, the word that both seduces and convinces.

The word, the most powerful sovereign, can carry out the most divine deeds: it knows how to convince the true and the just, but it can also deceive and mislead. Pepe shows its strengths by looking at the protagonists of politics who address people gathered in assembly, and then at accusers and accused, who work hard to convince the court’s judges. Finally, she looks at the masters of persuasion, the sophists, who were also active in 5th century Athens.

Professor Pepe does a great job at reminding us how and why Ancient Greece

• between history, myth, poems and philosophy - has shaped our way of thinking and dealing with the world. In almost thousands of years, we have significantly progressed in many incredible ways. Yet the mechanisms that drive modern societies have evolved only marginally and, what’s humbling, the fundamental questions raised by the great minds of that age remain unanswered¹.

Fulton was in his early twenties when he started his journey. The book was published only a few years later, in 1937. Stories were still fresh and not conditioned by the passing age. That is important because within the next decade the world would change forever. Take Japan. There he is greeted by a flock of enthusiast, merry motorcyclists who will accompany him across the country, celebrating the strong bond between the United States and the Rising Sun. In few years, the same situation will be inconceivable.

This book is not your typical motorcycle log. It is about stories, people, and societies more than routes, timetables, and usual motorcycle porn. The Author might happily skip thousands of miles across some undoubtedly incredible terrain just because he feels the urge to tell about that memorable encounter he had in Teheran or Tokyo or that otherwise small insignificant Malaysian village.

The tone is often naive and amusing. Even dramatic events are often narrated in a light, entertaining fashion. But make no mistake, this was a genuine adventure, filled with thrilling and dangerous moments. It is somewhat startling that the Author could cross so many God-forsaken places only to get his bike stolen when he was back home in New York. Thankfully he got it back one week later.

In few occurrences, a colonial attitude surfaces. That might sound jarring to the modern educated reader, but we have to put it all in context. After all, in 1932, Fulton was the offspring of a wealthy American family. He was studying in London when he left to explore the world in reply to a dare. Given the premise, I think he instead emerges as a curious, unassuming person who is willing to learn, understand and, of course, explore.

In the same years, Patrick Leigh Fermor, another young student, embarked on a similar journey. He went all the way across Europe down to Constantinople, on foot. Leigh Fermor memories are also available for your reading pleasure in a remarkable three-book series¹. Together, the stories of these two fearless authors draw a great picture of an age when the world was still enormous and divided into many diverse, often isolated cultures and societies.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human.

What happens when our technology suddenly abandons us? In this novella, DeLillo explores the immediate consequences of such an event. It’s a brief exploration, though. We don’t get to go too far into the story. The book ends abruptly, and we’re left stranded there, pondering and wondering. I imagine this is intentional. Upon reflection, I concede the author’s goal is achieved, but I have to say, my immediate feeling is unfinished work.

The writing meets DeLillo’s high standards. If you’ve read him before, you’ll recognize his peculiar style at first sight. The idea is also good, albeit not super-original.

I found The Silence to be good, but not as good as I expected. After reading Underworld, the bar is set pretty damn high. Anything from DeLillo should pertain to the mind-boggling department. This novel fits more in the ok department. It could serve as a great, gentle introduction to DeLillo, though, as his other works can indeed be intimidating.

Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It’s called the Real Book.

But if you were going to music school in the 1970s, you couldn’t just buy a copy of the Real Book at the campus bookstore. Because the Real Book… was illegal. The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. It was a self-published book created without permission from music publishers or songwriters. It was duplicated at photocopy shops and sold on street corners, out of the trunks of cars, and under the table at music stores where people used secret code words to make the exchange. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It’s a story about what happens when an insurgent, improvisational art form like Jazz gets codified and becomes something that you can learn from a book.

The whole story, both as text or podcast, is available here.

In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex - an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page-turner, Nathaniel Philbrick restores this epic story to its rightful place in American history.

In The Heart of the Sea is a nonfiction work. By telling the story of the Essex Whaleship’s final voyage, it successfully brings back the difficult, dangerous, and adventurous lives of the 19th-century whalers.

The book is organized into four main parts. In the first part, the author recounts Nantucket’s culture and it’s people way of life. The isle of Nantucket was the then flourishing world capital of the whale-hunting industry. It is difficult for a modern-world citizen to conceive how big a deal the whale-hunting industry was back then. Just think that, back then, all the street lamps and most common lamps were burning - you guessed it - whale oil.

In the second part, we follow the Whaleship Essex and its crew as they hunt sperm whales across the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific. This is where we learn what living the whale-hunter life on board an 18th-century ship was like, and let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty. We also get to know most crew members, starting from Captain George Pollard Jr. and First Mate Owen Chase. They will both have a prominent role in the events that will follow.

The third part is the earth of the story. Essex’s wreck was caused by an enraged sperm whale. After the disaster, the crew then had to go through a dramatic ordeal. They were alone, on three tiny whaleboats in the middle of the Pacific, 3.700km west of South America, with scarce food and water. The choices they made at that moment were crucial. Unfortunately, they weren’t the right ones. I think this is an essential point in the story. Ignorance, and superstitions, induced the survivors to make the wrong call on their next move, which led to terrible, unbearable consequences.

The fourth part follows the survivors as they come back to the isle and then spend the rest of their lives struggling to arrive at peace with the events they lived and the actions they were forced to commit during their 1820 ordeal (Philbrick just loves using this world, “ordeal”.)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Philbrick did a great job reconstructing and then telling the events in a fascinating, engaging way. Not that the story needed embellishments, really. Having read the account of the disaster compiled by First Mate Owen Chase, Hermann Melville used it as inspiration for his Moby-Dick. Philbrick actually tries to reconstruct Melville’s encounters with both Captain Pollard and First Mate Chase. I appreciate how the author always informs the reader when he’s entering speculation territory.

In the spring of 1955, in the countryside around the village of Materada, Francesco Koslovic –even his name straddles two cultures– world is falling apart. Following the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947, Istrian-Italians and Dalmatian-Italians, who have long and peacefully inhabited the area with Croatian and Slovene communities, have to choose. Abandon their homes and the hard-worked atavistic land, migrate to Italy, become Italian, or stay in a now-hostile territory. Francesco and his brother have to make the call with their families. They had a portion of their land confiscated by the Yugoslavian regime. They know the situation is dire. But this is their promised land. As they procrastinate and time goes by, most farmers around them, the friends who make their community, slowly but inevitably leave along with their families. The sense of abandonment is palpable.

This novel tells the experience the author had to experience himself, along with his own family. He moved to Trieste in 1954. Throughout his whole life, however, he kept going back to Materada, to his roots. Writing this tale must have been a cathartic effort. Initially, I had a hard time connecting with the story. That happened, I think, precisely because of my ignorance about surrounding historical events. Materada was a great, painful, worthwhile read.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? When I was living in London at the start of my career in the mid-1970s, I became friends with Philip Roth, who took an avuncular interest in my work. Where many others thought my writing was wild and weird, he thought I wasn’t being wild enough. He once came to my apartment and spread the typescript of my first novel (The Cement Garden) over the floor. He was on his hands and knees, moving the chapters around. What he wanted was for me to be bolder, crazier. He said, “You have to write as though your parents are dead.” My parents were alive. I took that advice.

Great advice. How often do we restrain from writing, posting, or expressing our thoughts because of our shyness? Or fear of being judged? Besides, I would take any advice from someone who has this to say about Bach:

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, TV show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without? Since the age of 16, my constant resource has been the music of Bach. Piano first, then all the rest. Like all music, it is as abstract as literature is specific, but Bach’s inventions are more so—like the processes of thought before language, deeply human without saying anything at all. In his music I think I confront the most naked demonstration of genius. Wrapped inside the beauty is a form of merriness and a joyful pulse. The same pieces that thrilled me in my teens—the Goldberg Variations, the Well-tempered Clavier—thrill me now.

I loved how he saved the day by brilliantly answering the most boring writer question of all times.

What time of day do you write? The morning. My philosopher friend Galen Strawson divides humanity into those who feel they are living in a constantly unfolding narrative, a life story that informs our every moment, and those who existence is discontinuous. I now understand that I belong in this latter group, even while I’ve often persuaded myself I was in the first. […] Now I can relax. I belong with those whose lives are lived in discrete patches. We can, of course, remember our childhoods, our first loves, our failures and joys when asked to, but almost all of our daily experience is disconnected from any awareness of the past. We also acknowledge that most of that past is lost to us forever. We, the non-narrativists, or episodists, wake in the mornings and we begin anew. I am my own blank sheet. As the day wears on, familiar concerns—domestic, professional, political, crowd in. The thing about that waiting desk is that you must turn up—and get there before the blank sheet that is you turns dog-eared.

Manguel’s writing is mesmerizing and capable. The lover of libraries and their books (in that order because this text is more about libraries than the books they contain) will undoubtedly fall into the rabbit hole and devour this book. Check this out:

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but this space of books remains in existence. To someone standing outside, in the garden, the library at night appears like a vast vessel of some sort, like that strange Chinese villa that, in 1888, the capricious Empress Cixi caused to be built in the shape of a ship marooned in a garden lake of her Summer Palace. In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.

This book is a treasure chest filled with remarkable, carefully crafted gems. With books like this one, I feel bad for not taking notes as I read. Each chapter is on a topic: the library as power, as order, shape, shadow, mind, workshop, and the list goes on. Some are more exciting than others, but overall the selection is rich, varied, and original enough to keep the reader entertained all along. The author’s library, assembled during his whole life, spent a “professional reader” (not kidding, as a teenager, he was reading books for a now-blind Jorge Luis Borges) and collecting books all-along while moving across three continents, is the recurring theme. One way or another, you’ll find it mentioned in every chapter, and for good reasons, because it must have been formidable¹.

The text mentions a remarkable number of ancient and modern authors with their works. The author shows his culture, but not in a pedantic or annoying way. One chapter is about the advent of digital libraries. I share his preference for the printed form. He goes a great length into explaining why old school is better, and I tend to agree with most of his reasoning. I think, however, that he is too dismissive of the digital form. It brings so many previously unthinkable features. He acknowledges some. It has always been my dream to own both forms of all my books: printed and digital. If there were one service that allowed me to buy both at once, at the same price, I would be all-in.

Last but not least, my favorite quote from the book:

Immensely generous, my books make no demands on me but offer all kind of illuminations.

Still imbued by the TV Series’s atmospheres, now knowing about its connection with Jackson, I was ready for another dive into her literature of psychological suspense and terror. Terror, not horror. Because one thing to appreciate in Jackson’s writing is that she relies on the former rather than the latter. To elicit emotion in the reader, she uses the tension between characters’ psyches and the complex relationships between mysterious events. Stephen King opens his own novel, Firestarter, with this dedication: “In memory of Shirley Jackson, who never needed to raise her voice.”

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a masterpiece. Let’s just marvel for a moment at the mastery of the incipit:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

Tone and pace are subtly, masterfully set right there in the opening paragraph. The main character is already outlined. In hindsight, by the end of the book, we can tell that we were hinted at a lot more than we initially thought. As I was reading, I could not help but think how clear and terse Jackson’s prose is. Only apparently simple, it draws scenes and characters with gem-cut precision. The unsaid does matter.

As Jonathan Lethem once noted, all of Jackson’s work creates an atmosphere of strangeness and contact with a vast intimacy with everyday evil… and how that intimacy affects a village, a family, a self. This is, in fact, true for all the three Jacksons’ works I read. Another common theme is the persecution of people who exhibit “otherness” or become outsiders in small communities, like those found in remote villages. This mirrors the author’s own experience. When she moved with her husband from New York to a small, rural Vermont village, they were isolated and ostracized by the local community. According to Letham, mainly because of anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism.

In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, however, there is room for love and devotion. Only, they are probably extreme or distorted in sinister and remarkable ways.

This book is brilliant because it takes the canonical witch/haunted house theme and flips it over, instantly reversing the perspective. The story is told from within the house. Village folks are the bad guys. Those who seem to be motivated by good intentions are only fulfilling their own ego or striving to behave with good manners, as society expects them to do. We cannot help but feel at least a drop of compassion and sympathy for the devil.

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.

Given the premise, one might expect an action-packed escape story. Instead, the rhythm is deliberately slow-paced, and the tone is quiet. In fact, some reviewers find the book a little slow. I disagree. It’s calm, yes, but definitely not slow. Hiram Walker, the main character, has this quiet attitude. Because he is the narrator, we see the world from his own perspective.

Coates prose is excellent if sometimes a little meandering. Several times while reading, I was brought back to scenes from Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Mind you, this novel is nothing at all like Django. There is violence, and brutality too, but they stay under trace. Yet, somehow this novel manages to validate the movie’s events; it makes them very believable.

I was a little disconcerted when supernatural elements started pouring into the story. The plot deviating from the historic genre into what, fantasy? Then it landed on me. This work is obviously the result of long and passionate research. If fantastical elements are introduced, it must be because they fit with the story somehow. A little research reveals that, indeed, that is the case. Myths of slaves escaping their condition by magic means or powerful ritual songs were deep-rooted within their culture. In this novel, legend becomes reality. What I initially found to be jarring turns out to be the perfect plot-twist, the expedient that allows the story to unfold.

The Underground Railroad, the network of secret routes and safe houses used by the enslaved to escape into the free states of the North, is a fascinating subject. I did not know about it, and I am grateful to this book for teaching me.

I think this book does an excellent job at recounting slavery from the enslaved (or the Tasked, as the author calls them) viewpoint and their culture.

I first became interested in these two ships’ Arctic adventure after watching the fictionalized TV series The Terror with my son Marco. As a former navy sailor myself, I appreciated how they realistically reconstructed the claustrophobic every-day life on board the Victorian age ships. However, I did not enjoy how the script soon took part from the real events, turning the story into something closer to Jurassic Park, and that’s where I stopped watching the series.

This book, instead, is incredibly well-researched and written. To help tell the story, Palin has traveled to various locations across the world – Tasmania, the Falklands, the Canadian Arctic – to search for local information and experience the terrain and the conditions that would have confronted the Erebus and her crew. For anyone interested in history, exploration and heroic tales, this is a book for you.

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Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. I love Patrick Leigh Fermor. Over the years, I read almost everything he wrote. He has been described as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene,” and for a good reason. He bridges the genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an ancient world living alongside the twentieth century. Here he carries the reader with him on his journeys among the Greeks of the mountains, exploring their history and time-honored lore. The Mani, at the tip of Greece’s-and Europe’s-southernmost peninsula, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the high range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is still very much a part of its people’s daily lives.

Bonus tip. The book that got me hooked with Patrick Leigh Fermor is A Time of Gifts, a memoir of the first part of his journey on foot across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933/34. A fascinating read.

Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust. This is the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, arguably the twentieth century’s finest novel. Indeed, while reading the first part, a boy’s impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzling back to life years later by the taste of a madeleine, I could appreciate why Marcel Proust is considered the best writer of all time. The second part, the short novel Swann in Love, “an incomparable study of sexual jealousy,” which follows, is also excellent. I have to admit I kept postponing this book basically for all my life, as I was intimidated by its fame. I am glad I finally got to read it as a mature adult but make no mistake, this book is a must-read, in due time, for any avid reader.

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. An audacious revision of Faust and Pontius Pilate’s stories, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. I was surprised by both the audacity and modernity of the story and Bulgakov’s own writing style. Of all the scenes, those that probably impressed me the most were Satan’s ball and Margarita’s flight. The Master and Margarita is a true masterpiece. With Swann’s Way, it sits right there at the top of my classics stack.

Helgoland, by Carlo Rovelli. Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist and writer. His work is mainly in quantum gravity, where he is among the founders of the loop quantum gravity theory. In this book, Rovelli recounts the story of what has been acknowledged as the most radical scientific revolution of modern times: quantum physics. In June 1925, in Helgoland, a bare and windswept isle in the North Sea, a 23 years old Werner Heisenberg started it all. Since then, in almost one century, quantum physics revealed many controversial if not disturbing new ideas, most of them confirmed over time, leading to all kinds of technological innovations. I don’t think this book has been translated to languages other than Italian as of yet. By googling a little bit around, I found English translations announced by Penguin and other editors.

De Brevitate Vitae (On the Shortness of Life), by Seneca. I am impressed by this short book. I expected it to be a challenging, hard descent into the ancient philosopher’s mind. It was a joyful read instead. Even today, Seneca’s writings offer potent insights into the art of living, the importance of reason and morality and continue to provide profound guidance to many through their eloquence, lucidity, and timeless wisdom.

On a more personal note

I strive to read good books. Of course, defining what makes a good book is is very subjective. In my case, good books challenge my understanding of the world in which I live. That might sound too broad (and ambitious) of a goal, and probably it is. I tend to read all kinds of different books: novels, essays, classics, with non-fiction gravitating towards topics such as history, science, and, only more recently, economy and finance. As you might have guessed from the list above, lately, I have been reading classics a lot. I don’t read too many programming or computer science books. Not these days anyway. As I get older, I prefer to distance myself from the topics I focus on at work all day long.

Reading is my zen mode. I do other activities that achieve similar results, such as walking, hiking, motorcycling and working out, but reading, I come to recognize, reigns supreme. It’s been with me since I was a kid and, also, compared to the other activities, it is very affordable in terms of time and effort.

I read 28 books in 2020. It appears I have performed slightly below my recent average. I once commented on Twitter that “the number of books per year” does not make for a useful metric. At the very least, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Take 2018 and 2019. In 2018 I read 30 books; in 2019 I only read 25. It sounds like a steep decline until we look at the “pages read per year” metric. As it turns out, I actually read more in 2019 than in 2018 (8394 vs. 8322. Ok, it’s more of a tie.)

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