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fearlessinger · 2 years

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Hello if this is weird be free to ignore it . But what are your favourite books ? ( Aside from TOA )

Hi! It’s not weird, don’t worry, that’s a lovely question!

Not gonna lie tho, you’re putting me in a tight spot bc I’m terrible at picking favorites lol. for me it’s always “here’s my Current Obsession, and here’s everything else that left a mark on me one way or another which is basically everything I didn’t immediately forget 5 minutes after having read it.

So, to make things easier for myself I’m gonna exclude a priori anglo literature bc there’s enough talk about that on this website already. This is still in no way an easy task ahhh

Italo Calvino. Honestly a lot of the names & titles I’m gonna cite may vary depending on when I’m asked but no matter what his name will always be somewhere at the top of any personal fave list of mine. I can’t even choose ONE book to recommend, everything he wrote is fantastic and no work of his is like the other, even his essays are a joy to read. In a famous cycle of lectures he outlines what he thinks of as indispensable qualities of the kind of literature he wants to write and read: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency - in order of importance, and it’s the best summary of his style I can think of. It has this ethereal, almost weightless, fairy tale-esque quality, even when it tells of real history. It has depth of meanings and truths but it never gives them to you straight; rather it invites you to make your own way to them, and the journey feels somehow both deeply personal and universal at the same time. His books are ones you can and will want to devour in one sitting and then think about for months afterwards. My first encounter with Calvino was The Baron in the Trees and its spiritual successors, The Cloven Viscount and The Nonexistent Knight, but the ones I’ve reread most out of all of them are The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which is really a book about the act of storytelling, and Marcovaldo, which is a gentle, humorous, melancholy portrait of the extremely modest, simple life, aspirations and dreams of a farmer turned industrial laborer in 1950s-60s Italy.

Jules Verne. I just inhaled his books as a child and will always hold them dear in my heart. I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s not aged well, but nonetheless this is the kind of adventure I dreamed about quite literally, these stories just opened up my imagination like WHOA. Special mention for the In Search of the Castaways - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas - The Mysterious Island unofficial trilogy, definitely my fave of the bunch, starring my proto-Blorbo Captain Nemo, a prime example of poor little meow meow ante litteram, LOVE that guy so much. And I’m gonna say something a lil heretic here but you can skip the slower sections! You can jump ahead dozens of pages if you want! You do not need to read everything to be able to enjoy these books, go straight to the good parts, skim everything else or go back to it later, put your own interest and pleasure first! (This honestly goes for all kinds of literature. Books do have a fast forward button and you should always feel free to use it)

In the same vein, Dumas (père). Just let me be the basic-est of basic bitches for a sec and rec The Three Musketeers + sequels. I know, I know there’s like 3000 adaptations of these works around we all know the story but I still think the og novels are worth a read bc they are great and just straight up FUN.

Bianca Pitzorno is a tragically underrated kids’ lit author and the main reason why she’s so underrated is bc she writes almost exclusively about GIRLS. The horror. Her books were such a huge formative influence on me, with their fully fleshed out fully flawed female protagonists, driving their own stories both for good and ill. I’m afraid there may not exist english translations of most of her work, but if you manage to get your hands on a version that you can read of L’incredibile storia di Lavinia, La bambola dell’alchimista, Polissena del Porcello, La bambina col falcone, La bambinaia francese… I promise you’ll be in for an unforgettable ride. I love especially how weird a lot of her stories get, and how unabashedly hopeful they all are - sometimes even too much, but hey, that’s what kid me needed and I doubt I was the only one.

The Divine Comedy. Listen. Listen I don't know how this rec (I know you didn't ask but this has turned into a rec list apparently whoops) is gonna work if you don't know Italian bc poetry is so hard to translate even when the translators are given enough time and money to do it properly - something that's tragically more and more rare these days - and while I'm a big proponent of the 'just fucking read the text, you can always look at the commentary later' school of thought this is a case where the text is old enough and full enough of pointed yet obscure-to-us-modern-readers references that you really are gonna miss out on a lot if you don't have a good commentary on hand. So like, I'm not gonna pretend it's no work to read the Comedy, but damn if it isn't worth it. I know on tumblr Dante is mainly known as the guy who wrote self insert rpf of the Bible and I'm not here to tell anyone to stop joking abt it bc it's damn funny but I wish more people realized, too, how immense and nobilitating of a compliment to fanfic it is, to compare it to the Commedia. How empowering the comparison should be, bc IT IS. Because the Commedia is an absolute masterpiece. Not just on the technical plane (the way it straight up SINGS when it’s read out loud) but in the way it goes right to your heart. It's a work so full of love and so unashamed of it. It is about religion, yes, specifically a very medieval kind of catholicism, but it’s also fundamentally about PEOPLE. All of them, the good, the bad, the infinite combinations in between. About how only through the work of knowing them and loving them you can hope to get to truly know and love god.

Cesare Pavese. No joke this man’s writing can and WILL give u depression. You gotta take it in small doses. There’s two works of his that I can never stop thinking about: The Moon and the Bonfires, about rural northern Italy and the partisan war and family and blood and the way roots ground you and trap you simultaneously, which I will never read again because I'm not strong enough, and Dialogues with Leucò, a collection of imagined dialogues between Greek mythological figures exploring existential themes through incredibly effective and piercing back and forths, which I’ve reread a number of times and loved more every time. It’s a very short and incredibly dense book, and one that I recommend wholeheartedly.

One hundred years of solitude. This is where I realize that there’s a bit of a common thread tying all my biggest faves together and it’s a kind of… mythological quality I guess? Tho not always strictly tied to classical mythology, obviously, of the storytelling. Not that it’s not grounded in reality, because it very much is, but that it sort of transcends it also on some level? Idk. This book made me feel small and finite in the best way, it told me of a whole world that I didn’t know about and yet that I could recognize and resonate with nonetheless in so many ways. Just a stunning, deeply compelling read all throughout.

I’ve been writing for like an hour already so I’m gonna stop here for now lol

I’ll leave you with the (not rrverse) book that’s next on my to read list bc I may as well keep plugging Italian authors, especially when they are actually writing in english: Let the mountains be my grave by Francesca Tacchi. I have high hopes for this one, the premise sounds extremely my jam

#books #recs #anon

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