kanewai's book shelf (current: italian)

[DaveAgain]

Television
I tried watching a couple netflix shows from Italy, with Italian closed-captions ... but they are as bad as netflix shows from the US. One episode was enough for Tutto chiede salvezza, Summertime, Luna Nera, or Curon. I tell myself to treat it as study-time, as they are at least more interesting than Assimil.

I watched the first episode of Il Commissario Ricciardi (UK title: Inspector Ricciardi) earlier, it's set in the 1930s and filmed in some lovely buildings, I liked it

[kanewai]

I watched the first episode of Il Commissario Ricciardi (UK title: Inspector Ricciardi) earlier, it's set in the 1930s and filmed in some lovely buildings, I liked it

I'll check it out, thanks.

[kanewai]

Quick updates

The Medici family is consolidating power in L'Italia dei Secoli d'Oro. The earlier volumes of Montanelli's work focused on people and events that were new to me. Now we're entering territory with familiar names - Dante, Petrarch, & Bocaccio have all gotten their own chapters.

In the spirit of the times, I read a few more stories from Day 8 of the Decameron. This day focuses on tricks people play, and they are surprisingly cruel. The "heroes" of each story lie, cheat, and steal ... and the storyteller celebrates how clever they are.

I finished Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (I promessi sposi], 1825), but in English. I started in Italian, but it was taking too long to get through the dull bits & so I turned to the recent English translation. It's a historical novel set in Lombardy in the 1600s. Parts of it were interesting (the conflict between the regular town folk and the cruel nobility; food riots in Milan; the plague years), and there was a surprising amount of humor and satire for an older work, but a lot of it was just a slog.

Assimil isn't working for me. At this point I need to work on cementing the basics and becoming comfortable speaking, so I'll stick with the grammar book and Memrise. Usually I find Memrise a bit too slow, but it's what I need right now. I wish they would modernize some of their other languages, like Turkish, Arabic, or Greek - those courses need a lot of work for them to be decent.