Befuddled in Bologna.
Trying my best to find a good book.
Months before our summer holiday, while considering which Italian city we might want to visit, all of my girlfriend’s family told us to avoid the south of Italy at all costs, especially if we were going that late in the summer. Side note: As a Capetonian, the idea that August is warm is still weird. My parents were complaining about the cold back home while I was sweating in my apartment. Also, coming from the Western Cape, where we host a ‘high thirties in the shade’ kind of summer, I wasn’t really worried about the heat. This advice lead us to picking a city in the north, and some weeks later we booked our train to Bologna. It was, however, still late summer in Italy. The daily average was thirty-six degrees. Consequently, though the streets in Bologna are famous and beautiful and certainly worth the visit, we spent lots of time indoors, luxuriating in the air conditioning. One particular shop we found ourselves revisiting over and over again was a bookstore called Feltrinelli Librerie. They had an excellent English section, cool air and a fantastic, central location. My girlfriend and I must have visited this sanctuary half a dozen times in our one Bolognese week.
My girlfriend was immediately drawn to the tables that featured best sellers and new releases and novels made famous by TikTok. I went to the non-fiction section. I glanced around and recognised some old friends; Atomic Habits by James Clear, The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell. As my eyes flitted from spine to spine along the shelf, some books faintly piqued my interest, but only for a fleeting moment. I picked none up. Next shelf. More familiar names. Outliers, Gladwell again. Soon I had scanned the whole bookcase—a head taller than me and double as wide—without so much as a sparked desire to read, or, quite unimaginably at the time, purchase any of the books I stood before. The only books that drew me in had already done so previously, the first time I had read them. My expression soured. My girlfriend then spun me around, clasping three books in her jittery, excited hands. She had a problem, she simply needed all three books, but didn’t have the budget to adopt them all. I had to help her thin the herd.
After reading the blurb on all three and reasoning out-loud with my girlfriend about what kind of book she had read last and what kind she might want to read next, we were no closer to culling any of them. She was simply too attached to all three. With a pained expression, she told me that she’d simply have to spend more time with each one and read a little section in order to assess which of them truly called out to her the most. As she sought a quieter corner of the bookshop to be alone with her new friends, I spun again to face the shelves, determined to find something for myself.
The clothbound Penguin classics called me closer. Though the colours and patterns appearing on each cover matched to the story within its pages—Animal Farm is adorned with an affronting red and black pattern imitating wooden pens—each book’s binding matched the next, forming a beautiful collection. An urge to buy was lit inside me. Just as my girlfriend had before me, I needed one of these books. But which classic to take home with me? Though I had heard of many of the authors and titles, I didn’t actually know what many of the stories were about. Puzzled, I called the only person I know who’d read half of the books I was struggling to choose from, Dad. After discussing the appeal of Verne, Tolstoy, and the Brontë sisters (though I can’t for the life of me tell you which one), I was no closer to finding a book whose cover I wanted to open. The thing I had fallen in love with was the design, the collectability, the idea of clothbound hardcovers, so reminiscent of leather-clad studies and extensive private libraries. I didn’t especially want to read Anna Karenina, stupid as that instinct may be. I didn’t want to read any of the books I picked up, regardless of the shelf they came from. Every back-cover description exhausted me. I gave up half-way through some.
My girlfriend managed, distressing though it was, to choose just one book, and we walked out of the shop and into the Italian heat. I was disappointed that I couldn’t find the perfect book. One that I couldn’t wait to get home and read. It seemed that my girlfriend had found just that. Despite my love for writing, despite my love for books, despite my love for reading, nothing sparked me on that trip. It made me a little sad. I wanted to buy a book, to treasure, to spark memories of Bologna and hiding from the heat in shops. Perhaps I was just broke, hesitant to give the money away. I think, more likely, that I was a little burnt out. I like reading books that challenge me, books in which I can learn something or gain a new perspective. That kind of reading is often work, and requires me to put a little energy into whatever I’m reading. While I was browsing books in that little shop in Bologna, I had an expiring visa, expiring job contract and expiring rental contract. I had two months to change every one of those facets of my life. Living like that makes me tired, I think. Well, now I’ve got the visa. One down and two to go. My appetite for reading hasn’t quite waxed to its previous size, but I have loaned H is for Hawk from the library, and it is just beautifully written. Soon I hope to be in a bookshop with my girlfriend, and run to her, half a dozen books in hand, clueless as to which one I love more.
My girlfriend bought what she and my mom call a ‘cozy book’. I think if I want to feel cozy, I usually turn to Netflix … If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.