Books I’ll Read Again. 

As a new friend, met as usual at Blue Bar, which is becoming a sort of expat Casablanca, you’ve asked me for suggestions as to what to read. I don’t really know where to start as I now sit here at my computer, having finished lunch and waiting for my “dogwalker” (I can still read and write but admit to being too fragile to risk walking my four-legged friend). With books I don’t risk falling, yet it remains a question of which direction I am to go on my afternoon or evening literary excursions. 

 Would you want something on Italy? But no. You are living your own romance here, day by day, discovering what the town and the people are like. I might suggest books that I’ve read in the past year, books that take me elsewhere. Maybe just three so as not to overwhelm you. But why just three? Why not five, or two? Certainly not one. Somehow three seems to be a perfect number. Three books, not necessarily on Italy. Three books ranging over time as well as place.

Since I don’t use eBooks or kindle, it also means real books that I can leaf through and mark up if I want. Although my son says books are sacred and shouldn’t be marked up. I’m not so sure about that. And since I don’t get up to the library often, where most of the books are in Italian anyway, and you don’t yet read enough Italian, the books will have to be in English, books I can lend you just as some were either given or lent me over the years. Real books to be pulled off my shelf when I am at loose ends. Well, I think, how about books I want to read again, or books I want to share?  New books or old ones, but let me limit them to ones I’ve read in this not yet finished year of 2024. Books I love.

I look at the shelves by my door, oh dear, they are already crowded with books, some upright and others lying on their sides. One does call itself to my attention, with a wildcat stretched out on the cover. North Woods by Daniel Mason. Let me show you these woods and their inhabitants, and hope you will be as enthusiastic as I was the first time I read these pages, marveling at the depth of the author’s understanding of human as well as so-called inanimate nature as he traces the life of a house and of the surrounding woods and those who lived there over the centuries.

Close by is another book I hope you will love. A Gentleman in Moscow.  Now that is a book I’ve read and reread, given to friends both in English and in Italian. The cover is quite appropriate, a man in a suit and hat, seen from the back standing on a wrought-iron balcony and looking out on the foggy street of the city, a city that is off bounds for him. A film or a TV version of the book has finally appeared and supposedly it isn’t bad, but how can one capture the thoughts and experiences of Count Rostov, confined to a room in the servant’s quarters in an elegant hotel?  His life up to then had been that of a carefree member of the aristocracy.  He makes me think of a friend who grew up in the world of Florentine high society and who ended up living (quite happily) in a small stone house in Tuscany in the midst of a rather arid Giotto-type landscape. As for Count Rostov, I feel I know what he looks like and how he moves and thinks, and I don’t want anyone telling me otherwise.

My most recent discovery is Judi Dench and her Shakespeare, The Man who Pays the Rent. It’s been called a magical love letter to Shakespeare. There’s a small tree on the jacket with what might be a small note attached to the trunk. I’ve never seen Judi Dench on stage but have admired her in films like Tea with Mussolini, A Room with a View, Shakespeare in Love.  In her approach to Shakespeare’s genius, the spotlights fall as much on her as on her subject. When I discover a book like this, my enthusiasm is contagious, and I can’t stop talking about it.

Other books of course clamour for my attention, including Elizabeth Strout’s cantankerous Olive Kitteredge and her vulnerable Lucy Barton, DeWaal ‘s Hare with the Amber Eyes, Richard Holmes, a sort of sleuth on the tracks of R.L. Stevenson, Flaubert and Nerval.   However, I’ve decided to limit myself here to three, so they will have to wait.

The worlds in the books mentioned above may exist solely in the imagination, but they are grounded in reality and transport us into different times and places. The rise and demise and rebirth of a New England forest, Russia in the throes of social and political change, the turbulent complicated period when Shakespeare wrote his plays and Judi Dench became part of his world.

Whether they are or aren’t novels, they all speak to me. I feel I know Count Rostov and follow him as he debates on just what to take with him as he moves from his old privileged quarters to the cramped rooms formerly inhabited by servants.

Daniel Mason’s approach to nature and the transformation of a house in his North Woods could almost be mine and the house I lived in for many years, as he traces its story and that of the surrounding woods through the centuries. Yet his knowledge is not limited to instructions on how to prune apple trees and where and when to look for mushrooms but includes human nature.  It should not come as a surprise that he is a psychiatrist.

My most recent acquisition throws new light on what is involved in bringing a fictional figure to life on the stage. Judi Dench amazes me in her character analysis of the Shakespearean figures she has inhabited throughout her life. They are many, ranging from King Lear’s daughters to Ophelia and Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, whom we generally find unsympathetic but whom we can even pity as Judi Dench impersonates her, to Cleopatra. It also makes me see Shakespeare in a new light, (as I search my shelves for this play or that), and how complex and varied his figures, and the man himself, were. 

These, then, are my three suggestions. How often in the future will I read a page or two again and find new meanings in them?

They are, in a sense, my offerings. It’s your turn now to give me yours.