My earliest reading memory
I was a boy, maybe six or seven, stuck in bed with some childhood illness. Somehow, The Black Corsair, by Emilio Salgari, Italian writer of adventure stories for kids, appeared in my hands. A vast magical world opened up to my eyes. I do not think that Salgari has been much translated into English, and I am sorry for the British boys and girls, so deprived.
My favourite book growing up
The poetry collection I Canti, by Giacomo Leopardi, my preferred Italian poet and intellectual. My own adolescent despair resonated with his. The enchantment of his lyrics was a rare consolation in my solitary adolescence. Leopardi was the brother of my soul.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Homer’s The Odyssey. I encountered it at school. Odysseus fascinated me. His life was the life I wanted. All through my young years, every time I met a young woman I liked, in my mind there was Odysseus shipwrecked on the beach seeing Nausicaa playing ball with her maids.
The writer who changed my mind
The Ethics by Baruch Spinoza, the major western philosopher. It is difficult to penetrate at first, because of the abstruse and off-putting pseudo-mathematical language. With a bit of perseverance, the fog dissipates and the book becomes a sweet and deep exploration not just of the structure of reality but also of our emotions and values. It is the book that secured my atheism.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Actually, I never wanted to be a writer. It just happened. I have always been writing, and at some point somebody decided to print my scribbling.
The book or author I came back to
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, because at first reading I could not make much sense of it, but I expected it to be a mine of ideas. I am slowly advancing into it, and this time it is not disappointing.
The book I reread
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The first time was in my youth: I devoured it, absorbed by Anna’s story. Later I went back to it because I had the habit of reading to my girlfriend before we fell asleep and I thought the book could be good for this. I was astonished by the complexities I had missed: so many marvellous and diverse characters, the beauty of the language, the depth of the annotations, the nature … on the first reading I had completely missed that the novel is not really about Anna; it is about Levin. I came back to the novel again on audiobook, while driving back and forth between Marseille and Bilbao. Each time new unexpected layers. Only, my girlfriend did not like it. She found it boring.
The book I could never read again
Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Once is great fun, but definitely enough.
The book I discovered later in life
Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. There is a delicacy of sentiments that I had not encountered before. Why were we not told at school about the richness of eastern literature?
My comfort read
A collection of poems from the Carmina of the greatest poet of the ancient Roman empire, Horace. Nobody has sung the senseless flow of life as he has.
Anaximander and the Nature of Science by Carlo Rovelli is published by Penguin on 23 February
This article was amended on 24 February 2023 because “The Red Corsair”, given in an earlier version, should have been “The Black Corsair”.
