Gerusalemme liberata- Torquato Tasso  (1581) 
So soon after having finished the Divine Comedy, I was reluctant to involve myself with another epic poem in archaic Italian. But decided I would anyway… no time like the present, right? 

This was written some 260 years after Dante, and it seems that Dante’s Florentine dialect was pretty much accepted as THE literary Italian by the writing of this poem. Tasso himself was from Naples, but the Italian in this is pretty recognizable to me from reading Dante, and the vocabulary is in nearly all the online dictionaries, which was not the case with Dante.  

The poem is made up of 21 cantos. Each canto contains around 90 octaves: 8 line stanzas that follow the form ABABABCC. Here is the very first octave as an example.

Canto l’arme pietose e ‘l capitano 
che ‘l gran sepolcro liberò di Cristo. 
Molto egli oprò co ‘l senno e con la mano, 
molto soffrí nel glorioso acquisto; 
e in van l’Inferno vi s’oppose, e in vano 
s’armò d’Asia e di Libia il popol misto. 
Il Ciel gli diè favore, e sotto a i santi 
segni ridusse i suoi compagni erranti.

I sing of the pious armies and the captain 
that delivered the great burial place of Christ. 
He led many with his wit and his hand, 
and suffered much in the glorious conquest; 
Hell opposed him in vain, and in vain 
the mixed peoples of Asia and Libya armed themselves. 
Heaven bestowed favor on him, and under holy 
banners he restored his errant companions. 

Figure each canto has 8 lines times 90, so an average of 720 lines. I’m trying to get through 3 cantos per week. I have not had to translate this in order to understand it, as I did with Dante. I can simply look up the vocab I don’t know and write it in the margins.  

The story is exceptionally involved, with tons of characters, so it would be unwieldy to try and give a recap here, but the gist is that Godfrey, is charged to lead the first crusade. It is a mythological version of the events. 

By the end of the month, I will have covered about 9 of the cantos. The crusaders arrive in the Holy Land, besiege Jerusalem, and then hell comes to the defense of the Muslim defenders and sows chaos into the Christian camp.  

The Elephant in the Brain- Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson  (2018) 
A look at self-deception and hidden motives in human behavior. The basic premise is that humans have an evolutionary predisposition for self-interest ingrained by a long history of competition over scarce resources. But we are wired by those same instincts to look on pure self-interest as socially destructive. So how has the brain dealt with the competing needs of self-interest, while not appearing self-interested? Self-deception.  

We could just like about our true aims, but that is really hard to maintain, so we compartmentalize and hide our true motives even from ourselves. The first part of the book explores how and why this happens, and the second half gives 9 different areas where we normally profess one motive, but are most likely moved by an even stronger self-interested motive. 

The point of the book is to get us to look hard at ourselves and come to grips with our real motives. If we are designing a solution to a problem, but only deal with the surface motives people have while ignoring the real motives, the proposed solution is likely to fail. It was a really interesting book, one that I had looked forward to reading ever since I first heard about it.  

The Florentines- Paul Strathern  (2021) 
Not a complete history of Florence, but a sort of look at the Renaissance’ beginnings  birthed out of Florence due to the mixture of wealth, freedom, and talent, that occurred in the city. The scope covers from Dante’s birth in 1265, to Galileo’s death in 1642.  

Persepolis- Marjane Satrapi  (2003) 
Story of a young girl in Iran during the tumultuous years before and after the 1979 Islamic revolution. It’s a graphic novel, unique among the books I’ve read, and it almost put me off getting it, but since it only took about an hour and a half to finish it, I figured no problem. It was a good story and it was nice to read some humor that the Iranian people found in the midst of such difficulties. 

Atonement- Ian McEwan  (2001) 
13 year old Briony witnesses an exchange between her older sister and her school friend Robbie, where her sister is angry, and Briony believes Robbie has come close to assaulting her sister. Later, Briony walks in on Robbie and her sister having sex, and given the reaction of the two, Briony assumes Robbie is assaulting her. She is confused about what to do, but bides her time. A short while later, an actual rape occurs with her cousin, and Briony, convinced it must be Robbie, tells the police and Robbie is given three and half years in jail.  

Everyone washes their hands of the incident except Robbie and Briony’s sister, who won’t forgive Briony. 

Several years later, Briony accepts that she had misjudged and sent Robbie wrongly to prison. She attempts to make atonement but much later in life, realizes there is no atonement for such a thing. 

The Road- Cormac McCarthy  (2006) 
In a post-disaster world (the particularities of the disaster are never stated), there are very few human survivors, and apparently not any real wildlife or farming either. The few people left scavenge what they can find abandoned from the before time, and…. eat other humans. A man and his roughly 10 year old boy travel the road from the mountains down to the seashore, avoiding the cannibals and trying to stay alive. The father ends up dying and the boy is taken in by another family at the end.  One review of the book says the novel is about “what makes life worth clinging to, and what love demands when survival seems meaningless”.  

When Breathe Becomes Air- Paul Kalanithi  (2016) 
This isn’t a novel, but a memoir/reflection, and it is fantastic. The author was a neurosurgeon, who found himself suddenly diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. The first part of the book deals with his own, pre-cancer, attempts to understand life. He is interested in this question and, finally decides between medicine, philosophy, and literature, to embark on a career as a neurosurgeon precisely because it is the realm of practicing medicine where he will be most familiar with the questions of the meaning of life. 

 Found myself choked up at several points before we even get to his own struggle, where he deals with the difficulties some of his patients are going through, and attempts to grasp what it is they are feeling. 

Then of course as he and his wife come to grips with his own mortality and he eventually succumbs to the disease, I again found myself on the verge of tears. This is certainly up there among the best books I’ve ever read. 

Dept. of Speculation- Jenny Offill  (2014) 
The entire novel is a series of short remembrances, detailing the author’s courtship, marriage, her husband’s affair, and subsequent breakup.  

The Sense of an Ending- Julian Barnes  (2011) 
Written from the point of view of a retired man, he recalls his youth and friendship with another young man, and his failed relationship with his first girlfriend, who then went on to get in a relationship with his friend. But returning to the current day, he gets a message that his friend had committed suicide and left his diary to him. He has to contact his ex-girlfriend to get the diary, but she states he has never understood what happened. She gives him a caustic letter written shortly after their breakup, which he hadn’t recalled. The novel is meant to address our faulty recall of events.  

Saturday- Ian McEwan  (2005) 
The story is set on one Saturday in central London. A neurosurgeon, traveling to a squash match with a friend, is involved in a near car-accident with some local thugs. They try to blame him, attack him when he refuses to pay, but when the surgeon notices the particular ticks of the leader, recognizes he has the tell-tale symptoms of a degenerative disease. This throws the leader, but the doctor promises there are some helpful treatments. As his minions question what is going on, the doctor gets away. Later on in the evening, at a gathering at the doctors house with his family, the thugs follow his wife home, and hold her at knife point to enter the home. There they are on the point of raping the daughter, when the lead thug shows his erratic behavior again. The doctor promises more help, gets him upstairs, and after a few minutes, the lead thug’s minion leaves the house. At this point, the doctor’s son charges the thug and the thug falls down the stairs and sustains a massive head injury. The surgeon ends up operating on him and saving his life, but the thug is taken into custody. 

Things We Left Unsaid- Zoya Pirzad  (2012) 
Set in pre-Islamic revolution Iran, in the town of Abadan on the bank of the river that separates Iran from Iraq. 

Clarice Ayvazian is an Armenian-Iranian mother, content in her life. A new family moves in, with a difficult older woman, her quiet son, and his daughter from an earlier marriage. The son, Emile, connects with Clarice, and from this point, she begins to realize that her life is one of serving others, but is short on personal satisfaction of her own needs. As she and Emile grow closer, she feels an attraction, but worries about it too. 

Towards the end of the book, there is a locust swarm that, I’m told, symbolizes the invasion of passion and desire, and the potentially destructive nature of these emotions, as well as a symbol of the storm ahead that would be the Islamic Revolution.  

In the end, the family moves away, prompted by some force we never discover, and Clarice settles her life with a renewed commitment and expanded viewpoint of her life. 

The Hobbit- JRR Tolkien  (1937) 
Such a well-known story, with the movies and all, that it hardly needs any recap. I added these because they were such well-known books.  

The Fellowship of the Ring-  JRR Tolkien  (1954) 
The Lord of the Rings was meant to be one story, but was broken into three books for economic reasons, so I’ve read. Having seen the movies, the story is largely known to me. The ring that Bilbo Baggins obtained in the Hobbit, has been bequeathed to Frodo Baggins. The Wizard Gandalf lets Frodo know that it was ‘the One Ring’, forged by Sauron to rule the world, and while it has the magical power to make the wearer disappear, it also exerts an ominous pull towards moral ruin for those that possess it. The only way to destroy the ring is to return it to the underground fires from which it was forged, and this requires an extremely perilous journey to the heart of Mordor, where dark forces are preparing to rise up and take over. Those same forces are looking for this One Ring, and unbeknownst to its possessors, putting the ring on, reveals their place. Frodo, and 3 other hobbits embark on a journey to return the ring and destroy it. Gandalf gathers the men Aragorn and Boromir, the elf Legolas, and the dwarf Gimli to accompany the Hobbits, and this fellowship sets off to dispose of the Ring.  

The Two Towers- JRR Tolkien  (1954) 
The four hobbits and their party, Boromir, Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli, are separated, and this book covers the two paths. Sam and Frodo move towards Mordor, and the others move towards strategic locations. 

The Return of the King- JRR Tolkien  (1954) 
Things are looking dark. Frodo and Sam are captured by the Orcs and imprisoned, but manage to escape. They get to Mount Doom and while Frodo is unable to drop the ring in the fires to destroy it, Gollum actually accomplishes it, by chewing off Frodo’s ring finger to get the ring, and then falling into the fires himself… with the ring. At that point, the power of the dark forces are broken, and the good guys win the war, hooray! 

Lots of mopping up… a hundred or so pages, but everyone lives happily ever after. More or less.