What is your current "read"?

I go through spells of getting fascinated by some aspect of history and I've been going through what I might call a Byzantine phase. The Byzantine empire lasted for over a thousand years, but doesn't seem to attract the attention of, say, ancient Greece, Rome or Egypt.

Even so, there are plenty of works on the subject and I have enjoyed reading a trilogy by John Julius Norwich. The books are The Early Centuries, The Apogee and The Decline and Fall. Norwich is never dull and sometimes the whole thing reads like racy historical fiction. Most enlightening and entertaining, too.
 
Italo Calvino has been an Italian writer who I have always appreciated very much. This book, in particular, it has been such a revelation for me. My dad gave it to me as Birthday gift years ago, one of the best presents I have ever had.
“Le Citta’ Invisibili” - “Invisible Cities”, opens several scenarios, short chapters as if they were poems.
I’m reading this again for the fifth time

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I've never read Calvino, though I've been intending to get If On A Winter's Night A Traveller one day, so perhaps this should spur me into action. I was, though, reminded that one book I enjoyed was Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo. Not, I'd imagine, everybody's cup of tea and no great surprise that Svevo and James Joyce were close. Svevo had a great influence on Joyce and you can see it in this novel.
 
Yes, I also recommend If on a winter's night a traveller, if you like the kind of story that tells about itself, somehow.
And if I may say so, the Invisible Cities really deserves a reading too. But I'm really biased about that.

Ah, Italo Svevo, he had a fascinating personal story as well as his books. Very true, Svevo and Joyce were great friends
with a great exchange of literary creations.
Maybe I remember wrongly but it seems to me that Joyce taught English (obviously) in Trieste, the city of Svevo, and was Svevo's teacher.
 
Joyce was about twenty years younger than Svevo, but they evidently hit it off. My understanding is also that Joyce went to Trieste to teach English and that was how they met.

I reminded well then.
Trieste has always been a culturally rich city, a meeting place for many writers not only Italians.
Sooner or later I will have to come back there to make its cultural itinerary and its grampàmpel
 
I reminded well then.
Trieste has always been a culturally rich city, a meeting place for many writers not only Italians.
Sooner or later I will have to come back there to make its cultural itinerary and its grampàmpel
Trieste is a place I'd like to visit, but along with all the other places in that category, it will have to wait. I've been to Slovenia and found Ljubljana a lovely city. It's quite small for a capital city, which helps and it has no less than three rivers running through it. It has quite an Italian feel to it, perhaps not surprisingly given its geographic location. One of my favourite cities.
 
Trieste is a place I'd like to visit, but along with all the other places in that category, it will have to wait. I've been to Slovenia and found Ljubljana a lovely city. It's quite small for a capital city, which helps and it has no less than three rivers running through it. It has quite an Italian feel to it, perhaps not surprisingly given its geographic location. One of my favourite cities.

I think you might like Trieste. A small capital city with a neoclassical style (like almost all over Italy) and Liberty style. Trieste is a crossroads of cultures, above all Mittle-European. I can only suppose Ljubljana is like that as well - I’ve seen only few photos of it, never visited.

Funny the first time I’ve been to Prague I thought “oh, looks a bit like Trieste”.
 
I think you might like Trieste. A small capital city with a neoclassical style (like almost all over Italy) and Liberty style. Trieste is a crossroads of cultures, above all Mittle-European. I can only suppose Ljubljana is like that as well - I’ve seen only few photos of it, never visited.

Funny the first time I’ve been to Prague I thought “oh, looks a bit like Trieste”.

Ah, it seems that also Kafka has been to Trieste. Cool
 
I'm still not very motivated to read, but I'm enjoying this book about the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who turned into Ishtar in Babylon, Isis in Egypt, Aphrodite in Greece and Venus in Rome.

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I've just finished quite a long history of the First World War by John Keegan. Not, I would admit, an area I usually visit, but I got the book for nothing and it's a serious history by a respected military historian. One thing that really hits you is how trivial the reasons were that led to a barely comprehensible number of deaths.

After that, I need some lightening up, so it's Wodehouse time.
 
Reading my latest Wodehouse novel, I was reminded of something. When I worked in the Civil Service, I spotted an entry on our computer system for a user in Worcestershire. The person who had entered the record had spelt it as "Woostershire." I remember thinking, "Ah, that must be where Bertie's Aunt Dahlia lives."
 
I have to say that I don't own too many cook books unless they were given to me or I purchased them as part of some requirement like the one I bought for a University course I took on Health. I might also have some recipe cards that were included with purchased products, food or gadgets.

Normally, I reference the web and read the online recipes.

I don't reference recipes to repeat them step for step, ingredient for ingredient. I reference them for suggestion purposes, to get ideas rolling in my head. And that usually works out well.
 
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