Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Italy: the books what accompanied me
Read 4 books in Italy. Here they is:
At the second-hand stall under Waterloo Bridge, I picked up a book I'd been wanting to read for ages: Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer. One of the best science books I've ever read. I'd never imagined parasites are so important and successful. By one count, there are four times as many parasites as there are other living creatures. Even more interestingly, the author posits that parasites are the cause of the evolution of complex multicellular organisms, like us. It's very high on the ick factor, but fascinating. I also understand quite a bit better how the body works and would like to read more about physiology - does anyone know any good popular-science books about that? (Zimmer also has an interesting blog.)
When I'm somewhere different (I can't really say foreign, as that word has lost much of its meaning in my life) I always like to make sure I read a book about the place. This trip I picked A Season with Verona by Tim Parks. What a wonderful book, one of the best I've ever read on football. Parks travelled around the country with the fans watching every Verona game. He picked a great season to write about, as the denouement was really tense - I slowed my reading down towards the end to prolong the tension - nail-biting stuff.
Lots of interesting things about football and Italy; one thing that struck me is how backwards and racist much of Italy/Italian football can be. Verona, for example, has never had a black player (or hadn't when the book was written). Their owner even said, too honestly and quite cowardly, that he couldn't buy a black player because of the fans. This amazes me - I've always through that Everton, notoriously racist, was the last team in England's top league to have a black player, buying Daniel Amokachi in 1994. (Though this is actually quite complicated. In the 1966, FA Cup Final, Mike Trebilcock was apparently the first black player - playing for Everton - to score in the FA Cup final. They also had a black player called Cliff Marshall in the early 1970s, but apparently none others until Amokachi. If any Everton fans care to correct me - Mike Fox, perhaps? - I'd be most grateful.) I'm not saying there is no racism in English football, but I think a lot less than in Italian or Spanish. After all, in Italy, a Nazi salute isn't considered racist.
Parks himself is a very good writer, and I am determined now to read more of his work, with Europa coming next.
Sticking with non-fiction, and to an extent Verona, I read Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt. More scholarly than the other books perhaps, but also most readable and really quite brilliant. We all know there isn't a lot known about Shakespeare, but there is a fair amount, and one can speculate if done reasonably and with a basis in fact, which I feel Greenblatt does. He is apparently the founder of the New Historicism school (well, it says so inside the book) so this is a strong example of that school. His use of personal and social history gives new insight to Shakespeare's works and really enhanced my appreciation thereof. There is also some great old-fashioned literary criticism, with a scintillating discussion of how, as Greenblatt sees it, Shakespeare created a new way of representing inwardness. If you have fallen off the Shakespeare horse and want to get back on, this will help.
Finally, a bit of fiction, on the plane and train home: Julian Barnes's new collection of short stories, The Lemon Table. A bit ho-hum really. I think maybe in the end I'm not quite sensitive enough for Barnes. I loved A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, as well as Love etc. (so I will read Talking it Over) but the other stuff I read leaves me fairly cold. That said, the last two stories in the book are very good, so if you see it at a friend/library/bookshop, they're worth reading.
At the second-hand stall under Waterloo Bridge, I picked up a book I'd been wanting to read for ages: Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer. One of the best science books I've ever read. I'd never imagined parasites are so important and successful. By one count, there are four times as many parasites as there are other living creatures. Even more interestingly, the author posits that parasites are the cause of the evolution of complex multicellular organisms, like us. It's very high on the ick factor, but fascinating. I also understand quite a bit better how the body works and would like to read more about physiology - does anyone know any good popular-science books about that? (Zimmer also has an interesting blog.)
When I'm somewhere different (I can't really say foreign, as that word has lost much of its meaning in my life) I always like to make sure I read a book about the place. This trip I picked A Season with Verona by Tim Parks. What a wonderful book, one of the best I've ever read on football. Parks travelled around the country with the fans watching every Verona game. He picked a great season to write about, as the denouement was really tense - I slowed my reading down towards the end to prolong the tension - nail-biting stuff.
Lots of interesting things about football and Italy; one thing that struck me is how backwards and racist much of Italy/Italian football can be. Verona, for example, has never had a black player (or hadn't when the book was written). Their owner even said, too honestly and quite cowardly, that he couldn't buy a black player because of the fans. This amazes me - I've always through that Everton, notoriously racist, was the last team in England's top league to have a black player, buying Daniel Amokachi in 1994. (Though this is actually quite complicated. In the 1966, FA Cup Final, Mike Trebilcock was apparently the first black player - playing for Everton - to score in the FA Cup final. They also had a black player called Cliff Marshall in the early 1970s, but apparently none others until Amokachi. If any Everton fans care to correct me - Mike Fox, perhaps? - I'd be most grateful.) I'm not saying there is no racism in English football, but I think a lot less than in Italian or Spanish. After all, in Italy, a Nazi salute isn't considered racist.
Parks himself is a very good writer, and I am determined now to read more of his work, with Europa coming next.
Sticking with non-fiction, and to an extent Verona, I read Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt. More scholarly than the other books perhaps, but also most readable and really quite brilliant. We all know there isn't a lot known about Shakespeare, but there is a fair amount, and one can speculate if done reasonably and with a basis in fact, which I feel Greenblatt does. He is apparently the founder of the New Historicism school (well, it says so inside the book) so this is a strong example of that school. His use of personal and social history gives new insight to Shakespeare's works and really enhanced my appreciation thereof. There is also some great old-fashioned literary criticism, with a scintillating discussion of how, as Greenblatt sees it, Shakespeare created a new way of representing inwardness. If you have fallen off the Shakespeare horse and want to get back on, this will help.
Finally, a bit of fiction, on the plane and train home: Julian Barnes's new collection of short stories, The Lemon Table. A bit ho-hum really. I think maybe in the end I'm not quite sensitive enough for Barnes. I loved A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, as well as Love etc. (so I will read Talking it Over) but the other stuff I read leaves me fairly cold. That said, the last two stories in the book are very good, so if you see it at a friend/library/bookshop, they're worth reading.
