A Look At The Past Decade

The end of the year is always a time for reflection, and the same holds true for the media. This year dozens of lists and articles that look back over the past ten years are in almost every newspaper, magazine and TV special. I ran across one of particular interest from Il Corriere della Sera – a look at the top ten most influential books in Italy over the past decade. It's no surprise that Roberto Saviano's Gomorra took the "top prize". It was such an influential work that really brought to light the mafia problem in Naples and Campania as well as the collusion between politics and organized crime (although, not the first writer to make such an accusation but the first in a long time to do, and to do so at such a global level, having also been made into a movie). A number of foreign writers also topped the list, not surprising J.K. Rowling for her books on Harry Potter and Dan Brown for his The Da Vinci Code.

Other Italian writers and works included the contentious and now deceased writer and journalist, Oriana Fallaci; Andrea Camilleri for his Il giro di boa, and De Cataldo's Romanzo Criminale which was also made into a film featuring Kim Rossi Stuart.

If there's a book that you read that was published in the last decade that should have been on the list, feel free to leave a comment. I'm sure that there might be others that have contributed just as much if not more than those on the list.