So the two weeks off between posts shouldn’t be the norm, but it took me about twelve days to finish off Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. Before I get to that book, though, I thought it might be worth taking a moment to explain how I choose some of these books, especially the classics.

I’m a lists guy, which is no surprise to those of you who read my ESPN stuff. I love lists and rankings, both for the debates they generate and, in the case of stuff like books or albums or restaurants, for the way you can work through them yourself. My favorite book-ranking is a book in itself, and probably one of the best gifts my wife has ever bought me: The Novel 100, by Daniel Burt. The book itself contains Burt’s rankings of the 100 greatest novels ever written, with a four-page essay on each book that summarizes its plot, discusses the author and his influences, then talks about how the book was received at the time it was published and how it is viewed today.

When I got the book, I was all cocky and thought I was so well-read and probably had already read 30-40 of the books on the list. I was wrong – I was only at sixteen, and had never even heard of close to half of the titles. This, of course, was a personal affront, and a challenge not to be declined, so for the last two-plus years I’ve been plowing through the books, a few of which (Lawrence’s Women in Love, James’ The Ambassadors, the latter of which I didn’t even finish) were duds but some of which are now among my all-time favorites, including The Betrothed.

(I’d like to publish the list of titles, without his essays, and if I can reach Prof. Burt I’ll do so. In the meantime, I believe the top 10 are Don Quixote, War and Peace, Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamazov, The Magic Mountain, and The Tale of Genji.)

The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi) is one of the earliest historical novels, the greatest novel in the canon of Italian literature, and a work that was influenced by and then in turn influenced a number of great English writers. The story revolves around the engagement between two young peasants, Renzo and Lucia, whose wedding is blocked by the local lord, Don Rodrigo, who saw Lucia in the street and has decided as part of a bet with his cousin that he will seduce Lucia for himself. Renzo and Lucia flee and end up separated, leading to two story lines that eventually connect again in the end.

That plot (separated lovers) isn’t all that uncommon, but Manzoni adds two wrinkles to make this novel unique. One is the introduction of some amazing secondary characters, including the Nun of Monza (based on a real person) and the fiend only known as the Unnamed. Each of them receives his or her own short story within the novel, and while I ordinarily find that sort of thing distracting, it works here because those stories are themselves very compelling.

The other twist, one I didn’t care for as much, was a very long digression in the novel’s last third where Manzoni describes the twin tragedies that hit the Italian states and particularly Milan in the late 1620s, when the novel is set. Milan was first beset by a famine that was largely caused by idiotic economic policies (like arbitrary price ceilings), and then was hit by the Black Death, introduced by invading soldiers and facilitated by the inaction of the local governments. It is a withering criticism, one that makes Manzoni something of a literary forerunner of Friedrich Hayek, but it is more history than story, and the tangent from the main plot line is extremely long.

The writing itself is crisp, and a lot of aspects of the prose and the story reminded me of Tom Jones, another book on the Novel 100 and my favorite picaresque novel. It’s a bit overlong due to that late bit on Milanese history, but otherwise well worth its heft.

Ex Libris is a novel by Ross King, the author of the bestselling nonfiction book Brunelleschi’s Dome, which told the story of the design and construction of the basilica on top of St. Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican. Set in England in the 1600s, Ex Libris is told from the perspective of a widowed bookseller who is asked by a peculiar widow to track down a unique manuscript that her father had rescued from Prague during the Battle of Prague in the Thirty Years’ War. Although King’s attempts to work 16th-century English styles into his prose dragged the novel down at times, the plot was definitely compelling and he managed to strike a nice balance between evoking the time period and grabbing your attention with action sequences, with a nice history of the printed word mixed in. It’s like a Da Vinci Code for non-morons.

The Big Over Easy is Jasper Fforde’s first novel outside of the incredible Thursday Next Series (which started with The Eyre Affair, a book to which he pays backhanded homage in TBOE). Humpty Dumpty – who is in his sixties and is living in Reading, England – well, make that “was,” because he’s been murdered. Detective Jack Spratt and his new assistant, Mary Mary, are on the case, which involves a visit to the imprisoned gang leader Giorgia Piorgia, a sighting of the serial killer The Gingerbread Man, and some magic beans. It’s typical Fforde, broad, farcical, witty, but I will say that it wasn’t as brilliantly madcap as the Thursday Next books. I was at a bit of a disadvantage, since I can’t say I know my nursery rhymes that well, but the society-page description of the wedding between the Owl and the Pussycat was one I understood.

The Catholic Church, by Swiss theologian Hans Küng, was a fascinating read as he broke down the various points in the Church’s history where various popes, emperors, or other power-brokers imposed some of the various rules, practices, and doctrines which still exist in the Church today, and which Küng argues are a major reason that the Church is in disarray. The refusal to ordain women, the opposition to contraception, and the doctrine of papal infallibility all postdate Christ’s life and the founding of what is now the Roman Catholic Church by hundreds of years. He also has a very critical take on the reign of Pope John Paul II (written two years before John Paul died) that runs in stark counterpoint to the hagiographies that greeted that Pope’s death.

Finally, The Invention of Clouds, by Richard Hamblyn, was a very good if unusually conflict-free history-of-science book. I say conflict-free because these books usually involve some massive stumbling block that keeps the protagonist from quickly (or ever) reaching his goal of fortune or fame or just contributing to scientific progress. Luke Howard came up with the first reliable method of identifying different types of clouds, using the same three basic terms we still use today (cirrus, cumulus, and stratus) at the core of his system. The concept was an immediate success and Howard, a quiet, religious family man, became a celebrity in spite of himself, culminating in a correspondence with the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Invention of Clouds is a quick read, mostly well-written and with lots of interesting facts, but that lack of some conflict or foil left the book feeling a little light. One little highlight is the description towards the end of how Howard’s system of nomenclature led to the modern phrase “on cloud nine.”

Note: I’m turning on comments for this thread as a sort of test to see how much I really need to moderate it. As long as it’s not too much work, I’ll leave them on for all book threads and will try to participate myself. Thanks for coming by.