I   Some topics are understood differently depending on the register they're perceived by. Some stories can be interpreted differently depending on which character the audience anchors the story's gravity on. A narrative carries a slightly different meaning if each of the character’s lives has a different backstory and meaning.   I’ve been reading Virgil's Aeneid  for about fifteen to twenty years, and yet I still can read it differently. I read it again recently, through a g

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK   Written in the 14th Century, around forty years after Dante's Divina Commedia , Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is the only masterpiece I've ever read. I first read it before I wrote my first novel at twenty-three, and I remember reading it intensely to try to imitate its smooth and polished prose style. Including everything I've read since then I'd probably still call it the only true masterpiece.   In this book, a single author compiles 101 stories, th

Audiobook version read aloud in the video. An Anti-Analytical Analysis It was Michel de Montaigne who came up with the word “essay” (“essai”) for this sort of writing, which in French means “attempt.” He wasn’t trying to construct a system; he examined the texture of lived experience—habits, impulses, memories, fears. An essai  wasn’t a declaration of truth but an experiment in thinking, a way to test an idea by exploring it, and admitting uncertainty. It was a genre built o