During my teenage son’s younger years we read together A LOT. I don’t remember how or when it started but at a certain point he began asking if we could read not just one story but a whole pile of books instead. ‘Should we do pile of books tonight, mamma?’, he would ask, knowing full well I would never, ever say no.
Though we still do read together (currently making our way through Bram Stoker’s Dracula which he is mostly reading to me), I am really the one who has continued the ‘pile of books’ tradition, but with a twist.
Whenever I am brainstorming for a new course or in the midst of preparing one, I go through my library and pull out any and all books on the subject at hand. As you can imagine, this means a massive pile of books situation on the floor next to my desk.
A quick glance at the top titles on each of the six stacks reveals the following: Homer’s The Odyssey; Vile Florentines: The Florence of Dante, Giotto and Boccaccio by Timothy Holme; Madeline Miller’s short story Galatea; The Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology; and a Norton Critical Edition of The Decameron.
So what do piles of books about classical mythology and 14th-century literature have in common? Answer: the two series I will be producing and teaching this fall!
The first, ‘Backstory: Myths & Muses in Italian Art’ is all about using the most beautiful Renaissance and Baroque works of art to explore the backstories of a range of classical characters, from the Olympian gods and goddess to the heroes and mythical creatures that populate Greek and Roman myth.
I am having the best time choosing the most fantastic stories to pair with luscious images from Michelangelo, Botticelli, Bernini, Titian, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Raphael, Donatello, Artemisia, and many more. The six-week course is entirely online (live and recorded) and begins on Thursday, September 5th. Register here by the end of this month and you even get a special two-for-one deal if you would like to join in with a friend!
The second is a hybrid (in-person and online) series that I will be teaching in collaboration with The British Institute of Florence and is a guided reading of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. I am so excited to teach one of my favorite books—and I promise you that the stories that I have chosen to highlight are some of the bawdiest, funniest, and most entertaining in Italian literature. You can sign up via the British Institute’s website—the series kicks off on Tuesday, October 1st.
One more book to mention on the pile is Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is not only our pick for this month’s Illuminare Book Club, yesterday it was named the #1 book in ‘The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century’ by the New York Times. Ferrante appeared on the list three times—with The Days of Abandonment coming in at #92 and The Story of the Lost Child (the fourth and final novel of the Neapolitan Quartet) at #80. The list actually left me feeling very poorly read as I found that I had only read 12 of the 100 books! Would love to hear what you all think of it and which of the books you think are must-reads for me.
And now back to the stacks!