books

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....

I only read 17 books in 2022, confirming the slowdown of the last few years. The total number of pages decreased too, albeit not too much compared to the previous year. In 2021, though, there was a significant drop, as in 2020, I read 28 books or 8073 pages. Stats have been going down since 2015, which is interesting. Like last year, I’m not sure why I’m reading less. More tired?...

I tend to shy away from publishing cases, so Stoner has been resting on my yeah-maybe-one-day list for years. Over time I stumbled on notable mentions that kept the book on the fringe of my attention zone. Then one day, I read a brief and intriguing [review][2] in Giovanni Zagni’s excellent newsletter, Incertezze. Like me, Zagni suffers from the stay-away-from-editorial-cases idiosyncrasy, but he finally gave in, read the thing, reread it, and finally tagged it a modern classic....

This short novel was a genuine surprise. I certainly didn’t expect Voltaire to be this accessible, witty, sarcastic, and also outrageous for the era (1759). Below the surface of a seemingly entertaining and often absurd sequence of improbable events is a constant philosophical struggle. Quoting from the back cover: 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....

When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamin Labatut, is a strange narrative object. It mixes fact and fiction in imaginative ways, sometimes making it hard for the reader to distinguish between them, which is probably a testimonial to the experiment’s success. As I was reading, Wu Ming’s unidentified narrative objects (UNO) came to mind. If it doesn’t qualify as UNO, it comes close enough. It certainly fits the ‘faction’ (fact+fiction) genre, if such a thing exists....

Masen’ka (or Mary) is Nabokov’s debut novel. It was written when he was in his twenties, living as an émigré in Berlin, just like the story’s protagonist. In the introduction of my Italian edition (Adelphi), the author admits that some life events poured into the narration. The depiction of Ganin’s life in a pension filled with fellow Russian ex-pats, and the relationships between them, is undoubtedly reminiscent of Nabokov’s own experience....

The Crow Comes Last is a collection of thirty short stories written between 1945 and 1948, primarily based on the author’s wartime experiences as a resistance fighter during WWII and then in postwar Italy. Some are brutal, others funny, and some are gritty. They all revolve around the themes he perfectly defined while talking about his book: I prefer to divide the subject into three parts, to highlight three thematic lines of my work from those years....

Nerdy prelude. Local Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were all the range when I was a teenager. With my group of local hackers, we hacked our way into ITAPAC, the then-leading Italian packet-switching network (we are talking pre-Internet era here.) Via ITAPAC, we’d connect to so-called “out-dial systems” in the USA. From one of those, we’d finally call our target BBSes with a local call at no cost. We felt so invincible!...

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).

In my early morning stroll, I sometimes listen to audiobooks. This was the case with The Count of Monte Cristo. Rai Radio 3, the third channel of the national broadcasting service, has been airing Ad Alta Voce (Aloud) for many years. In the program, top-tier actors read old and new literary classics. The quality of these productions is astounding. Audio editions are often edited, which was the case with The Count, as the unabridged edition surpasses the 1200-page count (a little-known fact is that most printed editions are also edited for brevity)....