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In a preview of upcoming Five Golden Things podcasts, on my docket is to record with a friend an episode about “our top five big books.” As in, myself and this other guy will countdown through not what we consider to be our five favorite books, nor the five most popular, nor the most famous. In this case, “big books” will simply mean “the longest we’ve ever read.” (Yes, it will be a pod that skews towards book nerds, but variety is the spice of FGT.)

Whenever we get around to recording that installment, one of the volumes that I’ll place on my list of honorable mentions—in this case, only because I haven’t finished it—is Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone. It’s indeed a big book (2,592 pages!) and carries a fascinating backstory.

Leopardi was born into a relatively wealthy Italian family in 1798 and lived the majority of his brief life in his hometown of Recanati before dying in 1837. Perennially sickly and saddled with a hunched back, Leopardi spent most of his hours reading through his parents’ voluminous library and kept a running journal of his reflections at one level about all of the books he consumed and more generally about life, the universe, and everything. Editors posthumously collected these journal entries and published them as Zibaldone di pensieri (literally “a hodge-podge of thoughts”) first in 1898. A trained classicist and poet, Leopardi’s musings in Zibaldone range from ancient to modern (for the time) literature, philosophy, philology, religion, poetry, love, and politics. Together it represents one of the boldest and most complex attempts from a single to comprehend the entirety of Western civilization.

However, the plot thickens even more! Zibaldone had been on my radar since my college days as one of those “whenever you get serious about pursuing the life of the mind, you need to read this” types of works, but the only problem was that I couldn’t read a single page of Italian, let alone 2,592 of them. You see, even though Zibaldone first saw the light of day in 1898, a complete edition was not to appear in English until about ten years ago. In the meantime, it was only polyglot English language writers—in my case, folks like authors Clive James and Tim Parks—who would intimate to their readers the wonders of Zibaldone. Kind of like the ultimate band-behind-the-band sort of thing. “Oh, you like [band X]? Well if only you could have heard [band Y]. [Band Y] was a huge influence on [band X] and actually much better, but [band Y] can only be heard by Victrola and seen in the background of the Zapruder film.” The brassy knoll!

Well, sports fans, I finally grabbed my copy of Z last fall. (Why did it take me a few years finally to acquire it, you might reasonably ask? Been busy!) And while I wouldn’t say that Zibaldone is a page turner, I’ve been both ecstatic and a little relieved to discover that it is, in fact, a joy to read. My goal is to get through seven pages a week, which if I stay on track will net me 365 pages per year. Which still wouldn’t get me that far, but it would nevertheless mark genuine, if incremental, progress. Similarly to the duration of Bryce Harper’s contract, I recognize that I might die before everything finishes up. Still, I’m willing to take a swing.

And so, fair readers, and from one Giacomo to another: if Leopardi birthed Zibaldone, Angehr offers Letters To You, which will include periodic ruminations from the latter regarding the former. Stay tuned next week for my first foray into Z, in which I’ll weigh these sentiments from old Leopardi: “For an idea without a word or a way to express it is lost to us, or roams about undefined in our thoughts, and is imperfectly understood by we who have conceived it. With the word, it takes on body and almost visible, tangible, and distinct form.”

In its original context, Leopardi is off on one of his philosophy of language jags, but do you see any potential connections to other stuff there, too?

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