Books that Marked my 2021

Dante, Vaclav Smil, Graham Hancock, Kazuo Ishiguro and more

Dante Alighieri: “The Divine Comedy”

In 2021 we celebrate 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. Earlier this year I decided to read The Divine Comedy live on Facebook. To make it even more symbolic I started on Ash Wednesday and finished on Easter Sunday, thus syncing my reading with Dante’s fictional timeline. I covered about three to four canto’s in each of the daily sessions. It was quite a challenge.

Dante is a constant reminder of how little progress we’ve made since the middle ages. This book is as relevant today as it was 700 years ago. Just change the names and the dates and you’re good to go. We still dealing with the same shit as back then; politics, corruption and intrigues and other primitive habits that inhibit our progress as individuals and as a species.

But more importantly, it was a trip down memory lane. I first read it as a freshman student of architecture in Ljubljana when the world opened up for me and I experienced it with all the emotional intensity that period held. Going through the verses brought back a lot of memories and flashbacks. Sometimes it was quite emotional for me. I also remembered visiting lectures and public readings by the translator (Andrej Capuder) in Cankarjev…