Hi friends. When I say this newsletter has been hanging around my neck, that gives the impression that it's some kind of millstone or dreaded burden I'm longing to set down, when instead it's more like a beloved cat who wants me to play with them only I’m busy lying face-first on the floor trying to get up the will to move. That metaphor really got away from me! Here’s the point:
When I started this newsletter back in the halcyon days of 2019, I was finishing up my Master’s and waiting for my first novel to come out and not working a huuuge amount as it turned out, and also my life was pleasant and easy enough, which is to say that I often had bad days but I rarely had bad months and never, ever a bad year. Things have changed (lol). I find that I no longer have the time or energy to read the huge amounts I was reading then, and often when I do read it is books that might not be my automatic idea of Rec Material: I’m catching up on old classics that everyone already knows, or tumbling down weird non-fiction obsessions. On the occasions that I have revived this newsletter it has been with the utmost hope that I just need to Get Back Into Reading, when in fact the way I read has changed. I’m realising that more and more the regular and sustainable habit within my reading—which has always been fairly omnivorous and even random—is the books that I read for some project that I am writing. Books that explain a subject I don’t understand, books that open up a new viewpoint, books that allow me to tunnel beyond the shallow bedrock of my own experience.
And because I like writing this newsletter and I want to do it regularly again, if it’s going to be a regular newsletter that’s what it’s going to be about. Yes: books. Yes: recs. But less books per issue, and through the lens of what I’m looking for, rather than a theme I assign them to.
If you have read this very long introduction, I love you. If you would like to stick with me through this project, I love you more. And as ever, if you would like a personalised rec, pls do feel free to write back and tell me what you’re in the mood for. But let’s say farewell to MKMNM and turn our attention to something new:
One recent night I woke up at two a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. In an attempt to bring on tiredness, I picked up a slim monograph I’ve been avoiding on my to read pile, and had to finally force myself to put it down, gripped, when the first streaks of pink arrived in the sky. The book is MADONNAS THAT MAIM by Michael Carroll and it is a study of popular Catholicism in Italy since the fifteenth century. Popular Catholicism means, essentially: the good shit. Carroll organises his subject around the concept of three metacults within Catholicism—Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. According to official doctrine, the scale of hierarchy goes former to latter, but in popular Italian Catholicism it actually functions latter to former, with every small village and major city alike having a host of patron saints who punish and protect.
It’s a fascinating and lively book. If you’re looking for anecdotes to charm at slightly weird dinner parties, it’s frothing with them, from the practice of tongue scraping (that’s when someone goes down on all fours and drags their tongue up the stone floor of a church until it bleeds, leaving bloody stripes all the way up to the altar: fun!) to genuinely malevolent appearances of the Virgin Mary (a guy playing a game wounds an image of the Madonna; a stone springs miraculously out from a wall to be used for his hanging). Carroll has this charming, slightly fussy tone that is a delight (sorry for the spoiler, but he ends the whole thing with a breezy Ciao!) and the data was, for this STEM-avoidant baby, accessible and genuinely interesting. I read this book on the hunt for village saints, which keep showing up in two projects I’m working on at the moment (soon, I hope, I can be more explicit). It’s a treat.
(as an academic publication, this is slightly annoying to track it down; a library is probably your best bet, or I kept an eagle eye on ebay until I was rewarded with an affordable copy)PAIRS NICELY WITH: Italo Calvino’s selected and retold Italian Folktales. This is a gorgeous collection, so much so that even the contents page is a great time (The Man Wreathed in Seaweed, Fearless Simpleton, And Seven!, The King’s Daughter Who Could Never Get Enough Figs), but I also loved reading the intersection of Catholicism and folktales. There are several stories in here about Christ and his apostles, wandering gamely around Italy (St. Peter is the fool—who knew), and another about a randy group of teenagers who set up a rival convent and monastery.
(find it @ bookshop)ALSO CONSIDER: the ultimate Fun Italian Catholic Novel, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, not to mention the other ultimate Fun Italian Catholic Novel, The Godfather; Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, for a twisting and strange view of language, written by the same author in two different ones, plus more saints; maybe my favourite painting in the world, Max Ernst’s The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses (find me a verifiable way to purchase this as a massive poster + win my heart forever); Susan Choi’s My Education, for masochism of the (more?) enjoyable sort; Beyoncé as the Virgin Mary.
Very glad this newsletter is continuing, no matter the form it takes :)