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I kicked off the year with:

- The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis: interesting but if you're not a bit into chess all those pages about the games get tiresome (I enjoyed them, though). The series misses so many details I only bothered with it because I appreciated the book as a light read.
- Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy: 200 pages in and yes, it is a freaking masterpiece.

Read Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters which makes Dostoevskij's White Nights even more interesting.

Tried Russo's Chances Are... but I stopped half way through it. I was caring little about everything in it.

Forgot to update here in a while. Let's recap:

Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes)
I need it to better understand Spinoza.

The Red Horse (Eugenio Corti)
This became an obsession for me. I wrote about it here: https://manueluberti.eu/books/2022/04/1 ... llo-rosso/

Cecilia e le Streghe (Laura Conti)
Delightful read, specifically because Conti's prose is perfect for the story she wants to tell.

Malvina (Maria Wirtemberska)
I don't know how much of an influence Wirtemberska has been on the next generation of psychological-drama writers, but this is actually great.

La Famiglia Manzoni (Natalia Ginzburg)
Only for hardcore Manzoni fans such as myself, I suppose.

What Art Is (Arthur C. Danto)
If I'll take away anything from my last course/exam, it'll be Danto. And maybe Lyotard.

Beloved (Toni Morrison)
Since I already love Jazz, it's a shame I waited so much before starting with this.

Horcynus Orca
After 100 pages I am deeply in love, which is good because there are 1000 more waiting for me. I didn't check if it's available outside of Italy, but maybe it's the right thing, because this is already hard in Italian with all the new words D'Arrigo invents by combining dialects. I cannot imagine a translator approaching such a wild beast.

^ Impossibly beautiful. I am reading it slowly to appreciate the amount of effort D'Arrigo put in every single phrase, but this is intense. I was familiar with modernism and post-modernism already, and I had my hard and loving times with Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, but this is a different beast altogether. Think Melville and Joyce discussing the wonders of the ocean while learning Italian. Sort of.

^ Beyond beautiful. I'll try to write about it for my blog but damn it made it hard to pick a next book to read. I went back to Spinoza, then. I'll try again with fiction in a month, I guess.

^ I did write something about it eventually: https://maglit.me/shapamo

I am on Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale now.

^ Highly recommended!

I picked up The Catcher in the Rye once again. It felt like the right time to read it again.

The Pale King
The only Wallace's I had yet to read and the reason is its unfinished status, but he is such an important writer to me so obviously I'm enjoying this anyway. I'd venture to say some parts are probably his top efforts, but yeah, it could be just another enthusiastic fan speaking here.

In Search of Lost Time
I am only half-way through the second volume, but so far it's exactly what I expected it to be. It will take me a long while to get to the end and, more importantly, to appreciate it fully, but I don't care. It's worth it.

^ After that and many things Proust related, I moved to this: https://themasthead.giuliabrazzale.eu/2 ... pam-zhang/

^ Good, but maybe not what I need right now. So I moved to Goethe's Faust, in a great (and cheap) edition I found with Urfaust included.

^ You are hardcore. :)

^ I've been enjoying it so far, but as usually with texts which are not straight prose, translation is tricky. I cannot study German too, though!

I do not read much - but did devour this one! Solvej Balle "Om Udregning Af Rumfang" original title in Danish(On Calculation Of Volume). The first book of seven. The info in the link says it is sold to other countries so it will probably be published in different languages.

It is about a woman who is stuck in the same day over and over. Very fascinating and thought provoking.

https://www.kunst.dk/english/literature ... volume-iii

^ Sounds interesting.

I must say the so-called Companions (the ones from, say, Oxford, Cambridge, Routeledge, etc.) have been proving really useful lately. Not just for philosophy, but for literature as well. They are more advanced than basic manuals and guides, so they require a bit more effort, but they help a lot and most of the times some PDF version of them is one click away.