100 books like Upon This Rock

Along with vivid characters, this book gives great house–a gorgeous and notorious Italian villa, which was the site of an infamous murder in the 1970s.

One friend, now hyper-successful, invites her old buddy to join her in the villa. The invitee becomes obsessed with solving the long-unsolved murder, and is increasingly sketched out by her old friend’s motives for asking her to come.

The story jumps back and forth from the swinging ‘70s to the present day, with tensions building in both past and present. The ending jump-scared me.

Gerald Asher is a wine writer who is celebrated for his range, his knowledge, his ability to see below the surface of things, and his compelling writing style. This book of essays about wine is one of my favourites, ranging as it does from wines with food, in which he goes in unexpected directions, to whether or not and how to decant wines, to drinking wine in Greece surrounded by the gods, to wines from Portugal and California and Oregon and Italy and France. He takes me to places I’ve never been and to wines I’ve never drunk, all with no effort on my part. Along the way, I learn and I enjoy. What a pleasurable book!

I loved this book because it’s a biography that reads like a novel and because its subject is a woman who was celebrated in her own time but has been almost totally forgotten since.

In an age when “respectable” women were discouraged from writing and publishing, Vittoria Colonna became one of the most revered poets of the Renaissance, moving in the same circles as popes, princes, writers, and artists.

I love how Targoff brings to life Colonna’s different environments – from the rocky island of Ischia off Naples, where she lived as a newlywed, to the convent where she sought refuge after the death of her husband (who inspired much of her poetry). I also appreciate the nuanced presentation of Colonna’s friendship with Michelangelo, which shows us how influential she was as his spiritual mentor. 

In prose that is engrossing and rich in color, culture, and voice, Dunant’s historical fiction novel incorporates stories of two of the women that I included in my own book.

The courtesan Fiammetta, loosely based on the life of Veronica Franco, and her healer La Draga, inspired by Elena Crusichi, pulled me into eighteenth-century Venice and its opportunities and dangers for enterprising women. Paired with reading Franco’s actual poems and letters, edited and translated by Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal, I developed a deep admiration and compassion for Franco and Crusichi during Venice’s heyday.

Dunant has again written a page turner that I read more than once.

Once a dictator dies, his statues might come down and his books might disappear from school curriculums, but his legacy can endure for generations. Mussolini was the man for whom the term “totalitarian” was coined, and he pioneered many of the techniques of domination that other dictators deployed later in the century. When it was all new, a lot of people thought he might be onto something and “Il Duce” even enjoyed the support of such famous figures such as Churchill and Gandhi. The sight of his bullet ridden corpse strung upside down outside an Esso gas station in Milan must have seemed like the ultimate fall from grace, an indelible image of his regime’s failure. But that was not the end of the story, and in this remarkable book, Luzzato explores what happened next — both to Mussolini’s corpse, and to his ideas, as they continued to linger on… show more.

This is a three-volume anthology of Italian American writers recalling family dinners, holidays, funerals, weddings, Italian customs, and Italian relatives. These volumes depict Italians in their everyday life far removed from any mafioso dramas. Reading these stories helps Italians verify the meanings and pronunciations of Italian words and gestures, those things called “Italian” used long ago but since forgotten with the passing of our elders.

The distance in this novella takes a unique form as Toni, working on the building of her bookshop in the space of a one-time bakery belonging to her family, discovers something special in the walls. The discovery takes her to the arrival and experiences of her ancestors in Chicago’s Little Italy, the same locale of the soon-to-be bookshop.

My favorite part of the book is the relationship that develops between the Toni of today and the Vittorio of the past, as well as the understanding Toni comes to about her ancestors through Vittorio’s voice. Time and death present forms of distance, but Vittorio’s message transcends both, reaching Toni in a positive way. The possibility that someone can forge a beautiful relationship with a deceased ancestor is a neat feature of this book.

This book is a fantastic, broad overview of the Italian Renaissance (or rinascimento, the term Ruggiero prefers and which his subjects would have recognized). The Italian Rinascimento was a period, according to Ruggiero, of vibrant cities, social change, and cultural expression, in which intellectuals, politicians, and artists both looked back to an idealized classical past and forward to uncharted territory.

I love the way this book focuses on issues that preoccupied the people he studies and incorporates topics often absent from works on the Renaissance, including women, sexuality, economics, disease and death, and religion, among others. Even more important, perhaps, is that it is clear, accessible, and engaging, and demonstrates a wealth of knowledge developed over an illustrious career as a historian of early modern Italy.

If you’ve ever fantasized about restoring a crumbling medieval Italian villa, then you’ll get to live that experience vicariously through this memoir.

The author has a wonderful sense of the absurd as she recounts her family’s multi-year efforts to turn a roofless villa into their dream home, complete with a complicated teenage daughter who is trying to find her way in the rural Italian countryside where the family has been transplanted.

Brimming with idiosyncratic and endearing characters. 

Pick up E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View and cue a Puccini aria. British author Forster wrote a lavishly romantic novel with a transgressive theme. Heroine Lucy Honeychurch struggles against her straitlaced Victorian background until a trip to Florence loosens her inhibitions. Does she marry her fiance, the arrogant Cecil Vyse or the Bohemian socialist George Emerson? Although the ending may be obvious, it is the vicarious trip through early 20th-century Tuscany—complete with a kiss in a field of violets—that is the delight.