Summer reading is a resolution that is renewed year after year, even among the most self-critical of self-knowledge, aware that the pile of books will never run out. With rare exceptions, obviously, looked upon with envy and suspicion. Thus, advice emerges from every corner: the 300 titles of the magazine ilLibraio.itthe 50 of the British The Guardian, and the 10 titles for so-called beach readings of many newspapers of all kinds throughout the northern hemisphere.
“The newspapers are having a field day, the galleries are pouring in, the reels are overflowing,” he writes Mark Rossarion ilPost, in an amusing, cynical, ironic, semi-serious article entitled “The Splendors and Miseries of Summer Books (and of Those Who Read Them)“.
On August 4th, Pope Francis has made his public letter on the “value of reading novels and poems in the path of personal growth“. The letter, as Bergoglio himself explained, was initially addressed to candidates for the priesthood and pastoral workers, but its reasoning – “Literature educates the heart and mind, opens the way to listening to others” – was then extended to the entire community of readers, Christians and Catholics. A detailed debate was born, extended to all readers, even in their role as writers and essayists. For example, Fahrenheit, the Radio 3 program, dealt with it, where the host Tommaso Giartosio spoke about it with Alessandro Zaccuri and Valerio Magrelli.
This summer I have been actively engaged in collecting signatures for the referendum against differentiated autonomy – which continues despite the threshold of 500,000 necessary signatures having been exceeded –, we at Libertà e Giustizia have therefore decided to contribute to that list of readings to do, with a few small and reasoned suggestions.
Let’s start right here, from the reforms, suggesting reading Contro il premierato, a book published by Left which starts from the collection of authoritative interventions at the conference in Florence promoted by Salviamo la Costituzione, Libertà e giustizia and by the Coordination for Constitutional Democracy. Among the contributions are those of Daniela Padoanpresident of Libertà e Giustizia, and Domenico Gallo, member of the Presidency Council of LeG. And then many others including Gaetano Azzariti, Massimo Villone, Liliana Segre.
Happy reading!
Elisabetta Rubini: The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig
An autobiographical text written at the end of the author’s life, in which he describes Vienna and Austria before the devastation caused by the First World War. A fascinating description of a rich and cultured world, in which the great writer was formed and spent his youth.
Daniela Padoan: Michael Kohlhaas, Heinrich von Kleist
A dizzying tale by Heinrich von Kleist that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, tells of the struggle – perhaps even war – undertaken in the sixteenth century by a Brandenburg horse trader to obtain the justice that is denied him. Kohlhaas, whose name gives the book its title, rebels against the abuses and harassment imposed by a local lord. After having turned to the judges only to discover their corruption and connivance and having implored the German emperor in vain, he decides to seek justice with his own strength. A battle lost from the start, that of the just who is disillusioned by justice. After having transformed a crowd of poor and outcasts into an unlikely army capable of scoring the first victories, the vengeance of Power follows, implacably, and Kohlhaas is condemned to death. Beloved by Franz Kafka, this tale seems to be a prefiguration of The Castle and, in some ways, of our modernity.
Maria Paola Patuelli: Power of another kind, by Giorgia Serughetti
Many women at the top, in many parts of the world but, at the same time, attacks on women’s freedom are becoming more severe. How can we explain this? On which side should political feminism be placed? If feminism is, and wants to be, a force for radical transformation, its role can only be that of equality and justice for all, starting with those at the “bottom”, without any exclusion. Giorgia Serughetti, a political philosopher, has a great merit: she makes complex issues transparent, and with a linear approach. Reading becomes pleasant, which is not often the case in these thematic areas.
Paola Regina: The Passenger. Palestine, various authors
For me, it is an important read because what is said in the presentation is true, that “there is a generation that has known the hope of a possible solution to the conflict, and another – the more than two-thirds of the Palestinian population who are under thirty – who were not yet born when the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 and who throughout their lives have known only the occupation and the suffocating, increasingly authoritarian (and increasingly less effective) government of the Palestinian National Authority, not to mention that of Hamas in Gaza. There are those who have resigned themselves, those who have fled and those who, by choice or necessity, have remained and resisted.”
