Books like The Dark Heart of Italy — picked by fans

I came upon this title quite early in my academic career while working in an Accountancy and Finance Department and struggling to convince myself, and I suspect my then boss, that there was a lot of mileage in the business of sport as an area of research activity.

Wray Vamplew’s book – a systematic economic analysis of the emergence of mass spectator sports in the UK in the years leading up to the First World War based on primary financial and other records – played a major part in convincing me, at least, that there was indeed a future as well as a past in this type of study!

If you want to understand where many of football’s current developments arose from, this is a great place to begin.

David Conn’s book was first released in 1997, just a few years after the inception of the English Premier League.

It was the first critical evaluation of the new business of football, in which he sought to understand what was being lost as the game was transformed into a branch of the entertainment industry, while at the same time accepting the many unarguable benefits that were accompanying that transformation.

Its quality and importance are evidenced by the fact that it has been republished at least five times.

It remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand more about the opaque world of football finance, governance, and ownership.

This novel gets to the heart of football’s importance to communities, in this case a small Scottish industrial town beset by poverty and unemployment in the 1950s.

In this comic novel Jenkins writes simply but evocatively about football, about its emotion, and its beauty.

But perhaps more importantly, his writing focuses on the town’s people and their relationships, with each other and with the town’s Junior football team as they dream of winning the Scottish Junior Cup.

While it would be unwise to overly romanticize how football was in the past, at the same time looking back does make you question whether everything about the modern game should be interpreted as progress.

Football is replete with characters and opinions.

The individual at the heart of this book, the legendary football manager, Brian Clough, had no shortage of either.

However, what is extraordinary about this book is that it introduces the reader to an entirely different version of Clough than the one we are most familiar with from the media.

It is a remarkable and scarcely credible story, one which is moving, and which highlights the kindness of the man, his family, and of many of the then players and employees of Nottingham Forest.

It also reminds us just how distant football, its clubs, and its star players and managers, have become from their people in recent decades.

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. 

She’s best known for her novel The Namesake, which was made into a film, and her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. They’re good. Read this one. As a side note, she also moved from the US to Italy, learned Italian, and began publishing in Italian. Her work has now been translated from Italian and back to English. This is, itself, astonishing. As is this book.

Again, this is technically a novel but reads, daringly, as short fiction. A woman, middle-aged, single, and childless, goes about her days in a large Italian city. She shops for groceries, chats with friends, thinks about her childhood, and thinks about aging. Each section is short, unadorned, perfect. You won’t believe how perfect. I love this book also because it’s so obviously “domestic fiction,” concerned with private life, with tiny moments of transition, but puts a solitary woman at the center. It is… show more.

During Italy’s post-WWII economic boom of the ‘50s, in an anonymous northern Italian city, an unskilled laborer named Marcovaldo struggles to support his wife and five children (or seven, or four—the number changes). In twenty tightly-plotted tales, we observe him stealing a trout, stealing a rabbit, getting lost in the fog, shoveling sidewalks, trying to fall asleep, trying to stay warm in the winter. Each “adventure” complicates absurdly, and some are more dire than others. Though on the brink of poverty, Marcovaldo hangs on, strives and fails, and strives anew, never losing his naive sense that things will turn out fine. The best comic writing is always tinged with the tragic, making you laugh and making you feel, and Calvino is a master.

After a trip to Florence to see Michelangelo’s earlier works and then David, I struggled to understand the genius, his intense pursuit of excellence, and how his surroundings influenced his art.

The author set me in one of the most fascinating eras of history and made me feel as if I were an apprentice in Michelangelo’s shop. I wept to comprehend the artist and realized that perfection was not a choice for Michelangelo, but a non-negotiable burden.

As I now observe genius in a musician, a scientist, or a mother caring for an autistic child, I give credence to what I learned from Oliver Stone’s portrayal of Michelangelo.

Elmore Leonard is the master of the dialogue-driven novel.

In Pronto, the US Marshal Raylan Givens, who wears a cowboy hat and is a quick draw, defends a former bookie who is on the run in Italy. It’s the basis of the TV show Justified, which is also a great legal thriller.

Leonard always gives an authentic voice to his characters, whether they are a bookmaker on the run or a Marshal from Kentucky.

The first thing that drew me into this book is the feeling of “I could see that happening… what would I do if it were me?” The second really enticing element comes when McAllister introduces a future timeline where the three siblings have had a falling out and their cover-up plan seems to have not worked. There is then a constant question of how did they get from here to there? The book is further enriched by the interesting relationships between the two sisters and brother. They each have their role in the family dynamic, largely set by a traumatic event in their childhood, and these have a significant impact on how they respond – individually and collectively – to this new highly stressful event.