I have a whole list of Italian books I want to read. The list looks like this right now:
La divina commedia– Dante Alighieri (1320)
Il decameron– Giovanni Boccaccio (1353)
Il principe– Niccoló Macchiavelli (1513)
Orlando Furioso– Ludovico Ariosto (1532)
Vita– Benvenuto Cellini (1563)
Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis – Ugo Foscolo (1802)
Le mie prigioni– Silvio Pellico (1832)
I promessi sposi– Alessandro Manzoni (1827)
I malavoglia– Giovanni Verga (1881)
Pinocchio– Carlo Collodi (1883)
Cuore– Edmondo De Amicis (1886)
Il piacere– Gabriele D’Annunzio (1889)
Il fu Mattia Pascal– Luigi Pirandello (1904)
La coscienza di Zeno– Italo Svevo (1923)
Uno, nessuno, e centomila– Luigi Pirandello (1926)
Il deserto dei Tartari- Dino Buzzati (1940)
Se questo è un uomo- Primo Levi (1947)
Il barone rampante- Italo Calvino (1957)
Il gattopardo- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958)
Il giorno della civetta- Leonardo Sciascia (1961)
Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini– Giorgio Bassani- (1962)
Le città invisibili- Italo Calvino (1972)
La Storia- Elsa Morante (1974)
Il nome della rosa– Umberto Eco (1980)
La chimera– Sebastiano Vasalli (1990)
Saltatempo- Stefano Benni (2001)
Non ti muovere- Margaret Mazzantini (2001)
Il giorno in più- Fabio Volo (2007)
La solitudine dei numeri primi- Paolo Giordano (2008)
L’amica geniale- Elena Ferrante (2011)
L’arminuta- Donatella Di Pietrantonio (2017)
Quando tornerò- Marco Balzano (2018)
Il treno dei bambini- Viola Ardone (2019)
In the 4 years of my reading program, I had been going through the list in chronological order. Some of the title I had read years ago, and most of those were more recent. But at least as I’ve been trying to fill in the gaps of my italian reading with the most important works of literature, I’ve attempted to start with the oldest and work towards more recent. But…. I decided to break that up and switch back and forth. The current book I’m reading is L’amica geniale, by Elena Ferrante. (My Brilliant Friend is the English title) This book, the first in a series she called the Neapolitan Quartet, were huge best-sellers in Italy. They were even made into television series, which I may buy and watch at some point in the future. I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this book. But one third of the way in, I’m really enjoying it. Part of that is just that it’s a bit easier to read. Certainly, the book is too new to be considered a classic. But even though I had wanted to fill out my classic literature repertoire, and had originally thought I should read any italian authors in the list in the original, I somewhere along the line just decided that I could move beyond just classics to a broader reading of italian lit in general. So I decided to fill in the list with some books that are big sellers… and highly regarded… amongst italians today.
After this, I’ll read Il deserto dei Tartari (1940) and then not sure, but probably one of the newer ones.