Italian, Northern Italy, we can‘t go out to help to keep covid-19 under control and we do it for ourselves and for the others. We can‘t hug or kiss or meet anyone else. Only words in books. Reading them is not enough anymore, I need to write my words...Amo la composta solidarietà della mia gente. Gran cuore intelligente.

Comics beyond their limits. How to extend the digging power inside you of a sharp narration with the visual trenchant representation of outside reality. And vice versa. Sadness, horror, fun, delight, disbelief are some of the opposite emotions this text arise in the reader.
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So many layers. Powerful images: Nemega, a bunker face, embrasures instead of eyes and mouth - Cobra hated dogs, hood on his head seemed a swearing nun at each barking - hounding wind - sinking fog. Fenoglio brave to write a novel about partisans when everybody else wrote real memories; even braver 'cause he did it through a love triangle. A double civil war. The final frantic getaway towards life or seeked death? Milton a modern Don Quixote.

Voice Weavers-Tessitori di Voce: a beautiful project spread in Northern Italy. About reading, reading aloud, for ill or old people in hospitals and hospices. Stories whispered to a child under chemotherapy, murmured to adults in hemodialysis anchored to a bed for hours, shouted through a microphone for the deaf ear of the elderly. When books becomes medicine for body and soul both. Readers and listeners linked in a spiral of healing words.

The great story of a little village in the South of Tirol during the '40s. The II World War pushed people to choose the "great option" Germany or Italy, loosing anyway their identity. While the war requiring its percentage of men the Italian government approved a decree permitting the construction of the dam which would have submerged the village, leaving no place to come back to and no roots to all the people who had always been living there.

Impossible to get bored by his writing. Natural, fast, dynamic. I found myself taken by surprise going around the corner of many of his sentences. Published for the first time in 1951 and still so scratchy and modern. His writing is definitely the main character of this novel. When finished I felt a sort of waiting for the real action to take place.

The discovery of the collettive subconscious is the generous gift of his scientific work. This book testifies what he could do with the scorching magma of his dreams and experiences and give an answer to so many questions of the human being. We've so much to be grateful for to him. As another customer told me when I bought it.."a book that changed my life"

Only because sometimes it's challenging to have the chance to change my usual "cheese chase" point of view with a chatty "chocolate chase" approach. A deserved trip-in-time privilege to take off the usual chalky clothes and enter the charming chapel of childhood.

You bleed every single line and learn that the worst you can do is judge. You discover about human soul what you wouldn't like to, digging into the roots of violence and meeting what a man can do to survive. It's a strange book. The content is extreme mostly because you know that it's true and I wanted to stop reading it many times but I couldn't leave the perfect beauty of the author's writing. A spell. A sharp clean mind. Rarity.

"At 11 we were already hungry. It neither depended on the air of the countryside nor on the trip by van.That hole in the stomach depended on fear. We've been hungry and frightened for years". Right from the very first page author introduces us in the job of been one of Hitler's tasters. Eating, in the knowledge that every bite can be your last one. Poisoned by food that could be either life or death, food swallowed in bigger and bigger passages"

"Listen Paula I want to tell you a story so when you'll wake up you won't feel so lost" These are the first words of her mother, author of the book near her daughter's bed in the hospital. Paula won't wake up, she'll die soon and the book is the auhor's effort to distract death and gather memories of each family members as a chain to keep her alive. Another book about the incredible power of writing to overcome the Everest of human soul "death".

Whenever she couldn' t get what she had planned she cut a lock and said: "Useless to adorn a head lacking the most beautiful ornament: knowledge"

The perfect answer to one of her characters' s question "My God, what does it mean to shut the soul in a hospital?" ask a doctor in Cliffhaven's mental hospital. It's a strong, tangible evidence of the saving power of literature. Lobotomy was spared to Frame just a day before due date because she reached the status of Writer. My gratitude to her suffering and to those allowing us to read her work and know better human soul.

A Nobel prize for Literature writing the biography of a woman who would easily have deserved it. A woman who lived in the XVII New Spain. A scholar in a time when a woman was definitely not permitted to be, who knew the seduction of love and faith and expressed both in sublime poetry. A journey in Time as Paz said: "A Mexican of the XX century reads this gorgeous enigma of a nun of the XVII New Spain"

Foreman, a PhD in History, writes the biography of the Duchess of Devonshire in a way you think to be reading a novel instead of a detailed distillation of archives from Castle Howard, British Library and collections of all Britain. You perceive admiration for a woman respected by the whig and feared by the opposition, novelist, musician and amateur scientist. Frustrated by the 18th century women limits and deeply sad in her private life.

Brits from Kelly's suicide, who investigated Blair intervention in Iraq, to Great Britain just before Brexit. 2008 financial crisis, banks' rescue which cost cuts in public services. The bedroom tax which made people pay for empty rooms in social housing. Provided you're aware of his political views it contains a lot of musical references and wine suggestion you can use to make it more readable or digestible for the opposite party.

346 pages and not even a scratch...supposed to be sacrilegious and human. None of it. Only uselessly vulgar and boring.

"I think I regret more the pain I caused to Tamara than to my wife. I betrayed my nature, or something like that. It's as if I didn't answer the call to be something more than an ordinary English teacher in a dusty town". The synthesis of the fight between betrayel and adultery. There is a loser anyway. That's why the truth is the best option, it only leads to freedom but few are so brave to walk that path also in the imaginary town of Holt

Between a thriller and a horror story. A murder seen through the ears of a not-yet-born baby. The pregnant mother plans to kill his father with the help of her lover who is also his uncle. The castle in Denmark is substituted by a Georgian building. The shadow of the Shakespearean Hamlet develops himself through the crime and the main character's stream of dubitative consciousness. Mainly well written, the end could have been better exploited.

The pure art of language. Poetry in a novel. Deep thoughts extend from a simple dry line on the page and explode inside you with the power of a nuclear explosion. You don't only understand the words, you grab the feeling, you understand it through the simplicity of knowledge. Referred to the father: "Mai non fummo tanto e sí a lungo insieme come nel mio pianto" (we've never been so much and long together as in my tears)

Very interesting to understand how, what and why we remember or forget and consequently how we learn from our experiences. The cognitive functioning of the brain involved in the process of memory. With no memory of the past we have no future and our future is largely determined by what we remember.

Written in 1954, located in 1940 Vicenza and still alive and kicking. The sharp precision of a scalpel. Among many descriptions that of the "art" of gossiping. It's a kaleidoscope of murmuring, omissis at the right place and moment, subtle tremblings of the chin, painful turnings of the eye, perfect in leaving the sinner naked to the scorn of people and readers of all times. Sinners so perfectly described you can't somehow avoid to love.

As Banksy said in the London Zoo elephant enclosure!

Funny, ironic and sweetly bitter from the provoking title "My parent's don't have children" to "I always piss before a journey by car, imagine before a shamanic one!" Not bad for a young author writing on the Football Gazette.

A milestone.

It's so true at certain passages that those not understanding it deeply are the luckiest ones.

Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

Maths and its history is an absolutely interesting way to love what many of us have always found difficult or "a priori" impossible to understand, a bitter-pill-to-swallow subject at school. For anybody who wants to change their mind and discover the perfect beauty of maths.

For anybody who really wants to know, understand and love Mexico out of stereotypes and politicized views. The most important aspects of its culture. A real solid insight in Mexican spirit

A deeper scientific modern insight on plants and their world. Mancuso says they can safely live without us but not vice-versa. They play, they sleep, they communicate, they're intelligent but we've always been to arrogant to even think about it. They're not passive beings otherwise it wouldn't be possible for them to dominate the 99% of the biomass on earth.

The Italian author wrote this note to the 1978 publication: "..to all those who don't believe in God but feel the anguish of that absence". It's the monologue of Judas understanding the necessity of his betrayal for the Glory of Christ. You read it all till the last word.

Little by little everybody becomes blind or frightened to suffer the same "illness" as the neighbour, the husband, the daughter. But the blinder the characters are the sharper the vision of the reader becomes. Saramago obliges us to close the eyes and see the truth, to wake up at last when there's nothing more to do than risk to see deeply in ourselves.

I really only liked two lines when the son said: "Gabriele, why didn't you answer me?" - "I didn't want to bother myself". All the rest a bunch of banalities and superficial insights on topics approached beautifully but thousands of many other authors. No guilt in avoiding it. Ironic title then.

Full of details, funny, useful to understand some of the great composers of the past. The giants of classical music. So close you've never seen them. Absolutely amusing. A sharp eye on composers eccentricities. Suggestions on what to listen to and why. If you love music you can't avoid it. For kids and adults too

The story of the young Grenouille who is only able to express himself through the dictionary of scents and the alphabet of perfume. Any words not referring to a smell wasn't understandable for him. Abstract words like moral, justice, responsibility, thankfulness were only enigmatic concepts. Wonderfully written.

The best risk ever: "él se enfrascó tanto en su lectura, que se le pasaban las noches leyendo de claro en claro, y los días de turbio en turbio; y así del poco dormir y del mucho leer se le secó el cerebro, de manera que vino a perder el juicio. Llenosele la fantasía de todo aquello que leía en los libros..."

We need it!

Devoting himself to the study of Time is like "holding in your hand a snowflake". The fascinating development of modern physics which interprets the world in terms of events instead of things, in terms of nets of kisses instead of nets of stones.

Unforgettable! Absolutely necessary to understand past and future

Not a single line of indifference. There's always a reaction, a thought or a feeling arising in you White reading

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new

Heavy and I'm not referring to weight

Trevisan depicts sharply the core of the Veneto region and its relationship to work. "There's something worse in life than die" he says. The workaholic part of Italy. The other side of the stereotype and its influences on mind and habits of its inhabitants. But he decribes the '70s and '80s with such a jazzy writing you can't give up reading. Even notes are tasty. The surveyor landscape in the city of Palladio is actual and funny till the tears.