July 29, 2021 at 10:54 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: COVID Reading, English writers, fantasy, Italy, reading lists, short story
I arrived in Genoa. I trod the pavement of my ancestral palace. My proud step was no interpreter of my heart, for I deeply felt that, though surrounded by every luxury, I was a beggar . . . We kept nightly orgies in Palazzo Carega. To sleepless, riotous nights, followed listless, supine mornings.
— Transformation, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 – 1851)
This is one Mary Shelley story self is not familiar with. Interesting that she chose to write it from a man’s point of view (Oh wait, isn’t Frankenstein also written from a man’s point of view? It is! So are all Shelley’s stories written from a man’s point of view? What’s up with that?)
This is an extremely long story. Self has been reading it the whole day, and she’s still not done.
Oh, hello, what have we here? The MC encounters a dwarf squatting on top of a treasure chest, on a wild and lonely stretch of beach. All the dwarf wants is the loan of the MC’s “fit and handsome” form for three days. Then he will grant the MC his dearest wish (which is to abduct his fiancée and murder her father?)
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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May 19, 2021 at 8:44 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, destinations, Eavesdropping, Family, Memoirs, Places, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: COVID Reading, history, Italy, memories, nonfiction, reading lists, spring
Although it is rather unexpected to find a passage about Siena in a book about fine bourbon in Kentucky, self does have good memories of visiting this part of Italy with her niece, Irene, in 2015. Maybe later, when she has time, she can find a few pictures from that trip and add them to this post.
Wright Thompson travels to Siena so he can watch Siena play Florence. He’s met at a train station by his friend, Fred Marconi.
Rows of trees lined the road, pine and cypress. Castle keeps rose from the hills.
Marconi’s family has lived in Siena for at least five hundred years . . . and he is proud of his history. This wasn’t some old man talking. He was a forty-two-year-old graffiti artist who plays bass in a rock band. He’s got a Ramones tattoo. He baptized his three-year-old son on the 750th anniversary of the battle that took place on the peaceful field he was driving me to see.
“This was one of the biggest battles in the Middle Ages,” he said. “It was September fourth, 1260. Dante talked about this battle in The Divine Comedy and said it was a terrible day. The Sienese turned the Arbia River into a red river of blood.”
— Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last, p. 20
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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October 28, 2020 at 9:52 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, destinations, Links, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Recommended, short story collections, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: COVID Reading, Italy, Just published, reading lists, Valerie Miner
Excerpt from Story # 1: Il Piccolo Tesoro
I chose this Ligurian village in the sensible way, by spreading a map of Italy across my kitchen table in Toronto, closing my eyes, and sticking a pushpin into destiny.
Stanza in affitto: one of the phrases I know by heart.
At the door of the rambling house, I knock assertively.
“Good morning.”
These stories are mostly about women who travel. Alone.
Self doesn’t pretend to have anything in common with Valerie Miner. Not. In. The. Least!
It’s been ages since she’s been in Italy. Or maybe it just feels that way. 2015. The world was so different then.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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August 26, 2020 at 6:13 pm (Books)
Tags: COVID Reading, historical novel, Italy, novel, reading lists, satire, Stendhal, translation
Still Chapter One, The Charterhouse of Parma:
There now occurred a great event in this family. The Marchese had arranged the marriage of his young sister Gina to an extremely rich personage of the highest birth; but the man powdered his hair: on this account Gina received him with peals of laughter; and soon committed the folly of marrying Count Pietranera.
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August 26, 2020 at 2:30 pm (Books, Recommended)
Tags: COVID Reading, historical fiction, Italy, novel, reading lists, Stendhal, summer, translation
Milan, 1796, at the Palazzo of The Marchese Del Dongo:
Eight days later . . . when it was widely acknowledged that the French were guillotining no one, the Marchese del Dongo returned from Grianta, his castle on Lake Como, where he had valiantly taken refuge at the French army’s approach, abandoning his sister and his loving young wife to the chances of war.
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April 9, 2020 at 12:00 am (Books, destinations, Food and Drink, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Recommended, short story collections, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: COVID Reading, Ernest Hemingway, Italy, Milan, reading lists, restaurants, seasons
Food in this story: chestnuts. In Milan. In the fall. The war is just over (Which war? Self had to google: World War I)
Also, the Café Cova, “next door to the Scala” which “was rich and warm and not too brightly lighted, and noisy and smoky at certain hours” (a tourist trap now, according to Yelp)
We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. On one of them, a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterward in your pocket.
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March 29, 2020 at 6:55 pm (Books, Recommended, Sundays)
Tags: angst, England, English writers, Italy, novel, reading lists
While the narrator and his boring chum Collins take themselves to Ravenna (which no one will be going to for the duration because COVID-19) for the summer:
- I wrote long letters to Sebastian and called daily at the post office for his answers.
Ah, the pining!
Stay tuned.
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September 1, 2018 at 9:00 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: Daphne du Maurier, Florence, Italy, noir, novel, praise, reading lists, Saturday
The callow young nephew is off to Florence (his first trip to Italy) and this sentence perfectly captures his confusion:
- Used to the silence of a well-nigh empty house — for the servants slept away in their own quarters beneath the clock tower — where I heard no sound at night but the wind in the trees and the lash of rain when it blew from the southwest, the ceaseless clatter and turmoil of foreign cities came near to stupefying me.
Beautiful sentence, where it starts and where it ends is a complete arc. It is so balanced.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 19, 2018 at 10:49 pm (Books, destinations, Lists, Memoirs, Recommended, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: Australia, book lists, China, Italy, Japan, nonfiction, novel, reading lists, Spain, Stanford, travel books
Stanford professors, the editors of Stanford University Press and Bing Overseas Study Program staff were asked to recommend books for summer reading and they came up with some interesting titles:
Books To Shift Your Perspective
- An Act of Terror, by André Brink
- Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey
- The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell
- Hadji Murad, by Leo Tolstoy
- Stoner, by John Williams
- The Removes, by Tatjana Soli
- Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta, by Michael Copperman
- Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult, by Bruce Handy
Books on Globality and Migration
- Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat
- Signs Preceding the End of the World, by Yuri Herrera
Books for Travelers to:
Australia
- In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson and Ellen Titlebaum
China
- Age of Ambitions: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, by Evan Osnos
Germany
- Memories of a Nation, by Neil MacGregor
- The Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past is Shaping Its European Future, by Stephen Green
Italy
- The Italians, by John Hooper
Japan
- A Geek in Japan: Discovering the Land of Manga, Animé, Zen and the Tea Ceremony, by Hector Garcia
Cape Town, South Africa
- Keeper of the Kumm, by Sylvia Vollenhoven
Spain
- The New Spaniards, by John Hooper
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April 7, 2017 at 10:44 pm (Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended)
Tags: history, Italy, reading lists, Roman Empire, Tom Holland
Italy’s “Warlord” period: A general named Sulla vs. the son of a defeated general, Marius. Marius’s son is 26. Upon hearing that the temple of Jupiter in the Rome’s Capitol has been set ablaze, the 26-year-old rushes to the scene, ignores the statue of Jupiter and the recorded predictions of the Sibyls, but hauls away “temple treasures” that he uses to pay to raise “more legions” to fight for him.
The tide of battle favors Sulla. He is joined by an army led by a boy — Pompey, “barely twenty-three.” But what a boy. He was referred to as the “teenage butcher.” He killed not with the passion of youth, but with cold ruthlessness.
Sulla knew how to destroy his enemies: if he suspected them of disloyalty, he would provoke them into rebellion, then massacre them, all the while assuming the mantle of the defender of law. This was how he wiped out a mountain people called the Samnites, who wore “gorgeous armour and high-crested helmets.” While Sulla was battling his way across Italy, the Samnites headed for an unprotected Rome. And there, “before the Collins Gate,” Sulla caught up with them and engaged in the “late afternoon” — the battle lasted into dawn. Sulla’s ferociousness had everything to do with the fact that no conqueror had ever entered Rome, and he threw everything he had against the Samnites.
Then Holland breaks from the battle to discuss the seven classes of citizen, and how voting was determined by voting blocs. The rich had the most voting blocs, the poor practically none: “Disproportionate voting power” is how Holland describes it. OMG, so many parallels.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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