アレッサンドロ・ミケーレの読書リスト

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

“For this selection of texts I reached back into my memories and, from the ocean of books there, pulled this list of titles. I didn’t remember the details of every scene but I had a strong mood in my mind. This has been such an interesting process. I felt I was in therapy because I chose this collection very randomly, but when I look at it all together, I realise my choices are saying very precise things about me. These texts are about time, about life and fragility, all written by very powerful writers. I think real power is knowing how to be fragile. Every single book in this Document is connected like an invisible chain. These writers are from many different eras and worlds, but to me they’re all in the same playground. They think and talk in the same language.” 

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

“I love this book because it’s about time – the time that’s passed, the time that is coming. It’s a book of philosophy. The characters are in a sanatorium on top of a Swiss mountain and in the conversations between them, the book becomes about life and death. On the mountain, the main character, Hans Castorp, feels the seasons changing, which is a beautiful way to describe life. In this section, he becomes trapped in a snowstorm. He’s in the middle of nature, in the middle of nowhere, he feels he’s in danger, but also the snow seems to me to be like life – we don’t know where we are going, we don’t have all the answers, but the snow that surrounds us is soft, mysterious. He’s lost himself in this part of the book and he later has visions that are kind of revelations – the whole book is about revelation.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

“This is a book I was obsessed with as a child, especially this part, which again, is about time. I’m a bit like the Mad Hatter – I don’t care about the time either. I love the idea that he’s broken up with time and celebrates his ‘unbirthday’ every day of the year. I also understood from childhood that it’s a good idea not to follow the rules that humans build around time, because I had a father who didn’t have a watch and he would go to his appointments, in the middle of a big city like Rome, just by looking at where the sun was in the sky. Of course he was always late, but he’d just tell me to bring a book – ‘The sun was behind the building, so I didn’t see that it was almost 5 o’clock.’ I love the way a person can change their perception of life like that. Maybe the only time that we really need to understand is the seasons. The night that my father died, he said to me, ‘We’ve spent a lot of time together … I can’t remember how many springs and how many winters we’ve had together.’ And I was just trying to keep in my mind the sun, the wind, being together with my dad as a little child. So, although I’m not late for my appointments, I try to be a little like my dad, to develop this way of living in all the things I do. This book is an incredible piece of philosophy, translated in an easy way not only for children, but for everybody to understand that they should enjoy the moment. As Lorenzo de’ Medici said, ‘Whoever wants to be happy, let him be so: there is no certainty about tomorrow.’”

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

“This book is a masterpiece. It describes the life of Emperor Hadrian on the eve of his death with such passion and vulnerability. Again, it’s a piece of philosophy, a big question mark that we can get inside. It is a poem about love – he describes the intense love he had for a young guy – and life, and about a very specific way to be powerful. He’s dying but he has the courage to describe the fragility of his soul, and from this text I take the impression that the soul is like a tiny animal, like a little baby – yes, it’s dying, but it’s also as delicate as a baby that is new to life. So the end is like a beginning.”

The Canticle of the Creatures by St Francis of Assisi

“I think San Francesco d’Assisi is a rock star – a flower-power rock star from the 1970s. Can you imagine, this was written in 1225, yet it could be the beginning of the eco movement. I’ve loved this since I was a child – I read it young because I went to a Catholic school. I’m not Catholic now, I feel more of a pagan. But I’m fascinated by the ideas, the mythology. San Francesco felt the power of nature and felt part of nature, which was a very contemporary way to feel as a human – that we are not the centre of the universe, just a piece of it, like a plant or a wolf. In this poem he talks about the sun and the Earth as though they’re precious friends. And ‘Sister Death’, the idea that death is part of the cycle of the universe, the most natural thing to do, just like being born. Going around Italy in little towns and castles and monasteries, I’ve heard so many stories about him – he’s like a wizard, the inventor of a cult about love and nature. This is also the oldest script of literature in Italian by a known author – there may be one other, no one is quite sure. But how incredible that arguably the first composition in Italian is such a beautiful, contemporary poem.”

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

“English people are the best at writing letters. In the 1980s, my friends in London would write me incredible cards and it was the most beautiful way to give something that is touchable of their love and their attitude. This is one of the most amazing letters of all. Jane Austen is a heroine for me, a proto-feminist. I collect her books and have one of the first printings of Pride and Prejudice. In this letter she has the most perceptive way of describing this world and the complicated relations between men and women – how, chained by society’s rules, we can be confused about what is really going on between us human beings. At a time when relations were almost scripted, she uses these scripts to question those conventions. We are still stuck in many conventions, so it feels very modern and valuable today. What fascinates me is this – it’s a love letter, written by a man’s hand in the book, but a woman, Austen, is driving the brain of this man. So it’s the dream man and the dream letter from a man who maybe didn’t exist at the time. In this text, a woman writer is figuring out how to be a very gentle man. I love the idea that in the Georgian era, a woman who had to publish her first books anonymously can also pretend to be a man. And of course, that is why we love Mr Darcy in the end, because Mr Darcy is a woman.”

Thanx 4 Nothing by John Giorno

“John Giorno wrote this on his 70th birthday. Giorno is another Jane Austen, defying all the rules, but in 70s and 80s New York. When I encounter his work, I feel like I’m meeting him in person. He tried to destroy the established language, destroy the complications of communication. He put his soul and body out there, spoke about our needs. He put poems on answering machines, he knew that we need to be connected to live. Even his name, John Giorno, sounds like one of his poems. I love words and I’m fascinated by people who are capable of choosing the right ones to make you feel a connection. It is such a powerful thing. I truly believe you can change the world with just one word.”

The Dragonfly by Amelia Rosselli 

“Amelia Rosselli lived in my neighbourhood in Rome and I knew many people who knew her. They told me she made the most incredible conversation with people around her table. The Dragonfly, this light, mysterious animal, is a metaphor for talking about the complicated idea of being a human. Many parts of this poem are heartbreaking – and what she went through in her life too, her father murdered by the fascist regime. She was intelligent and strong and brave, but this poem is about being fragile, and that’s beautiful.”

A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway

“A revolutionary manifesto. I used this for a Gucci show in 2018 because it’s my obsession, this idea of how we can be a persona, how we build ourselves in this life. I’m always trying to go inside this very complicated forest that is the way that we perceive ourselves, the way that we build ourselves as people in a very artificial way, how we decide to put on masks. Are we more real with the mask or without? Am I more real when I’m alone in my house getting ready to go out, or is the real me the one that is sitting at a table with friends? Haraway understands this building of ourselves. Animals also change themselves to live on the Earth, so it’s a very natural thing, and Haraway grasped this in a very contemporary way. These ideas are also very old, they go back to San Francesco d’Assisi – that we are part of nature. This manifesto really opened a conversation that is still on the table now, and it was written in 1985.”

A User’s Guide to Détournement by Guy Debord and Gil J Wolman

“Guy Debord was at the forefront of the big conversation we have now about social media, the way that we need to present ourselves. He’s describing something here that I really play with as a person in fashion, the way you can manipulate your personality and the way you look. The way you can put things into conversation that apparently come from the past but manipulate these pieces to make something new. I think it’s like music – you play a note, which may be an old note, but the note can sing and sound very different depending on how you use it. The past is now so inside the present that looking at things in a linear way feels like a very old attitude. It’s a kind of utopia that doesn’t exist, a postwar obsession. So I will say that this piece is not Guy Debord – it’s me.”

Reflections: Walter Benjamin by Hannah Arendt

“This essay brought Walter Benjamin to wider notice when it was published in 1968. It’s one of the most moving pieces about an artist, written by a friend. Arendt and Benjamin were two artists who struggled against fascism in this moment where the world was collapsing into so much violence and horror, and yet she describes him here as a pearl hunter. It made me think of One Thousand and One Nights, about a fairytale, how this thoughtful man, another incredible manipulator of words, decided to die by suicide, escaping from France during the Second World War. It is an incredible story of friendship, and she also translated his books. I believe in friendship, and in this essay she’s trying to build a bridge with a friend who is no longer alive.”

Bliss by Katherine Mansfield

“I discovered Katherine Mansfield as a friend of Virginia Woolf and Peggy Guggenheim during that modernist era. In this incredible little story, she talks very openly about things that women were not allowed to say before this moment – an attraction between two women and how ambiguous our relations are. Many of the writers I have chosen for this Document know this very well. This tiny story about a complicated triangle between a woman, her lover and a new flame makes me think this could be the other side of Mr Darcy’s letter – Jane Austen didn’t know this triangle could be possible. It fascinates me that we build these relationships with other human beings, and this story is like spying on other lives from the window.”

I Appeared to the Madonna by Carmelo Bene

“Carmelo Bene was a major figure in the Italian avant-garde. A bit like John Giorno, he screamed a lot in a country that was very conservative. Just the title of this book was blasphemy at that time, in such a Catholic country. He did the same with language, with playwrights like Shakespeare, upending the meaning of the words and destroying them, but in order to embrace and really understand them. He put himself in front of people and risked everything. I know people who saw him onstage, and he would speak to the audience in the middle of a performance – he also pissed on people in the audience. He was an eccentric Shakespearean character – he was inside that character and he destroyed it too. I’m told it was impossible to speak with him because he turned every conversation upside down.”

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

“I met Han Kang at the theatre – I go often, since I discovered a passion for it at almost 35, because my partner is a such a theatre lover. After I met Han I read this book, in which the protagonist decides, almost like a ritual, to go deep to the heart of a very big question – why we are living here on this Earth. It’s another look at what happens when a person defies the social norms. She writes in a very intense way about this woman who allows herself to slowly die and transform into a plant by eating nothing, in a way to escape the violence and control of society. And we don’t know whether this is a suicide or a transcendence, a kind of religious process.”

The Iliad by Homer 

“I love the classical world, maybe because I grew up in Rome and studied Latin and Greek. This is the most beautiful piece about love between two friends or – we don’t know – maybe lovers. Written in the epic way, the sentiment makes me cry if I think about it, this intimate relationship between two men, two warriors, in a moment of battle. Patroclus is a brother, a twin, and it’s about how desperately we can need another person.”

Metamorphoses: Daphne and Apollo by Ovid

“I’m a big fan of transformation, which happened in the pagan world and was destroyed by the Catholic and Christian worlds. The relationship between human beings and nature was stronger in the past. Ovid could write about humans changing shape, transforming into a tree, being part of nature. It’s another way to describe our complicated lives on Earth. We translate our arcs with stories to understand better the mystery of what we feel, what we need, who we are or who we can be. It’s the same with this Document – we’ve made our way through many words from many eras, we have travelled together through the same arc, and now we come back to ourselves. Our lives are still the same.”

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally now. Order here

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

“For this selection of texts I reached back into my memories and, from the ocean of books there, pulled this list of titles. I didn’t remember the details of every scene but I had a strong mood in my mind. This has been such an interesting process. I felt I was in therapy because I chose this collection very randomly, but when I look at it all together, I realise my choices are saying very precise things about me. These texts are about time, about life and fragility, all written by very powerful writers. I think real power is knowing how to be fragile. Every single book in this Document is connected like an invisible chain. These writers are from many different eras and worlds, but to me they’re all in the same playground. They think and talk in the same language.” 

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

“I love this book because it’s about time – the time that’s passed, the time that is coming. It’s a book of philosophy. The characters are in a sanatorium on top of a Swiss mountain and in the conversations between them, the book becomes about life and death. On the mountain, the main character, Hans Castorp, feels the seasons changing, which is a beautiful way to describe life. In this section, he becomes trapped in a snowstorm. He’s in the middle of nature, in the middle of nowhere, he feels he’s in danger, but also the snow seems to me to be like life – we don’t know where we are going, we don’t have all the answers, but the snow that surrounds us is soft, mysterious. He’s lost himself in this part of the book and he later has visions that are kind of revelations – the whole book is about revelation.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

“This is a book I was obsessed with as a child, especially this part, which again, is about time. I’m a bit like the Mad Hatter – I don’t care about the time either. I love the idea that he’s broken up with time and celebrates his ‘unbirthday’ every day of the year. I also understood from childhood that it’s a good idea not to follow the rules that humans build around time, because I had a father who didn’t have a watch and he would go to his appointments, in the middle of a big city like Rome, just by looking at where the sun was in the sky. Of course he was always late, but he’d just tell me to bring a book – ‘The sun was behind the building, so I didn’t see that it was almost 5 o’clock.’ I love the way a person can change their perception of life like that. Maybe the only time that we really need to understand is the seasons. The night that my father died, he said to me, ‘We’ve spent a lot of time together … I can’t remember how many springs and how many winters we’ve had together.’ And I was just trying to keep in my mind the sun, the wind, being together with my dad as a little child. So, although I’m not late for my appointments, I try to be a little like my dad, to develop this way of living in all the things I do. This book is an incredible piece of philosophy, translated in an easy way not only for children, but for everybody to understand that they should enjoy the moment. As Lorenzo de’ Medici said, ‘Whoever wants to be happy, let him be so: there is no certainty about tomorrow.’”

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

“This book is a masterpiece. It describes the life of Emperor Hadrian on the eve of his death with such passion and vulnerability. Again, it’s a piece of philosophy, a big question mark that we can get inside. It is a poem about love – he describes the intense love he had for a young guy – and life, and about a very specific way to be powerful. He’s dying but he has the courage to describe the fragility of his soul, and from this text I take the impression that the soul is like a tiny animal, like a little baby – yes, it’s dying, but it’s also as delicate as a baby that is new to life. So the end is like a beginning.”

The Canticle of the Creatures by St Francis of Assisi

“I think San Francesco d’Assisi is a rock star – a flower-power rock star from the 1970s. Can you imagine, this was written in 1225, yet it could be the beginning of the eco movement. I’ve loved this since I was a child – I read it young because I went to a Catholic school. I’m not Catholic now, I feel more of a pagan. But I’m fascinated by the ideas, the mythology. San Francesco felt the power of nature and felt part of nature, which was a very contemporary way to feel as a human – that we are not the centre of the universe, just a piece of it, like a plant or a wolf. In this poem he talks about the sun and the Earth as though they’re precious friends. And ‘Sister Death’, the idea that death is part of the cycle of the universe, the most natural thing to do, just like being born. Going around Italy in little towns and castles and monasteries, I’ve heard so many stories about him – he’s like a wizard, the inventor of a cult about love and nature. This is also the oldest script of literature in Italian by a known author – there may be one other, no one is quite sure. But how incredible that arguably the first composition in Italian is such a beautiful, contemporary poem.”

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

“English people are the best at writing letters. In the 1980s, my friends in London would write me incredible cards and it was the most beautiful way to give something that is touchable of their love and their attitude. This is one of the most amazing letters of all. Jane Austen is a heroine for me, a proto-feminist. I collect her books and have one of the first printings of Pride and Prejudice. In this letter she has the most perceptive way of describing this world and the complicated relations between men and women – how, chained by society’s rules, we can be confused about what is really going on between us human beings. At a time when relations were almost scripted, she uses these scripts to question those conventions. We are still stuck in many conventions, so it feels very modern and valuable today. What fascinates me is this – it’s a love letter, written by a man’s hand in the book, but a woman, Austen, is driving the brain of this man. So it’s the dream man and the dream letter from a man who maybe didn’t exist at the time. In this text, a woman writer is figuring out how to be a very gentle man. I love the idea that in the Georgian era, a woman who had to publish her first books anonymously can also pretend to be a man. And of course, that is why we love Mr Darcy in the end, because Mr Darcy is a woman.”

Thanx 4 Nothing by John Giorno

“John Giorno wrote this on his 70th birthday. Giorno is another Jane Austen, defying all the rules, but in 70s and 80s New York. When I encounter his work, I feel like I’m meeting him in person. He tried to destroy the established language, destroy the complications of communication. He put his soul and body out there, spoke about our needs. He put poems on answering machines, he knew that we need to be connected to live. Even his name, John Giorno, sounds like one of his poems. I love words and I’m fascinated by people who are capable of choosing the right ones to make you feel a connection. It is such a powerful thing. I truly believe you can change the world with just one word.”

The Dragonfly by Amelia Rosselli 

“Amelia Rosselli lived in my neighbourhood in Rome and I knew many people who knew her. They told me she made the most incredible conversation with people around her table. The Dragonfly, this light, mysterious animal, is a metaphor for talking about the complicated idea of being a human. Many parts of this poem are heartbreaking – and what she went through in her life too, her father murdered by the fascist regime. She was intelligent and strong and brave, but this poem is about being fragile, and that’s beautiful.”

A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway

“A revolutionary manifesto. I used this for a Gucci show in 2018 because it’s my obsession, this idea of how we can be a persona, how we build ourselves in this life. I’m always trying to go inside this very complicated forest that is the way that we perceive ourselves, the way that we build ourselves as people in a very artificial way, how we decide to put on masks. Are we more real with the mask or without? Am I more real when I’m alone in my house getting ready to go out, or is the real me the one that is sitting at a table with friends? Haraway understands this building of ourselves. Animals also change themselves to live on the Earth, so it’s a very natural thing, and Haraway grasped this in a very contemporary way. These ideas are also very old, they go back to San Francesco d’Assisi – that we are part of nature. This manifesto really opened a conversation that is still on the table now, and it was written in 1985.”

A User’s Guide to Détournement by Guy Debord and Gil J Wolman

“Guy Debord was at the forefront of the big conversation we have now about social media, the way that we need to present ourselves. He’s describing something here that I really play with as a person in fashion, the way you can manipulate your personality and the way you look. The way you can put things into conversation that apparently come from the past but manipulate these pieces to make something new. I think it’s like music – you play a note, which may be an old note, but the note can sing and sound very different depending on how you use it. The past is now so inside the present that looking at things in a linear way feels like a very old attitude. It’s a kind of utopia that doesn’t exist, a postwar obsession. So I will say that this piece is not Guy Debord – it’s me.”

Reflections: Walter Benjamin by Hannah Arendt

“This essay brought Walter Benjamin to wider notice when it was published in 1968. It’s one of the most moving pieces about an artist, written by a friend. Arendt and Benjamin were two artists who struggled against fascism in this moment where the world was collapsing into so much violence and horror, and yet she describes him here as a pearl hunter. It made me think of One Thousand and One Nights, about a fairytale, how this thoughtful man, another incredible manipulator of words, decided to die by suicide, escaping from France during the Second World War. It is an incredible story of friendship, and she also translated his books. I believe in friendship, and in this essay she’s trying to build a bridge with a friend who is no longer alive.”

Bliss by Katherine Mansfield

“I discovered Katherine Mansfield as a friend of Virginia Woolf and Peggy Guggenheim during that modernist era. In this incredible little story, she talks very openly about things that women were not allowed to say before this moment – an attraction between two women and how ambiguous our relations are. Many of the writers I have chosen for this Document know this very well. This tiny story about a complicated triangle between a woman, her lover and a new flame makes me think this could be the other side of Mr Darcy’s letter – Jane Austen didn’t know this triangle could be possible. It fascinates me that we build these relationships with other human beings, and this story is like spying on other lives from the window.”

I Appeared to the Madonna by Carmelo Bene

“Carmelo Bene was a major figure in the Italian avant-garde. A bit like John Giorno, he screamed a lot in a country that was very conservative. Just the title of this book was blasphemy at that time, in such a Catholic country. He did the same with language, with playwrights like Shakespeare, upending the meaning of the words and destroying them, but in order to embrace and really understand them. He put himself in front of people and risked everything. I know people who saw him onstage, and he would speak to the audience in the middle of a performance – he also pissed on people in the audience. He was an eccentric Shakespearean character – he was inside that character and he destroyed it too. I’m told it was impossible to speak with him because he turned every conversation upside down.”

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

“I met Han Kang at the theatre – I go often, since I discovered a passion for it at almost 35, because my partner is a such a theatre lover. After I met Han I read this book, in which the protagonist decides, almost like a ritual, to go deep to the heart of a very big question – why we are living here on this Earth. It’s another look at what happens when a person defies the social norms. She writes in a very intense way about this woman who allows herself to slowly die and transform into a plant by eating nothing, in a way to escape the violence and control of society. And we don’t know whether this is a suicide or a transcendence, a kind of religious process.”

The Iliad by Homer 

“I love the classical world, maybe because I grew up in Rome and studied Latin and Greek. This is the most beautiful piece about love between two friends or – we don’t know – maybe lovers. Written in the epic way, the sentiment makes me cry if I think about it, this intimate relationship between two men, two warriors, in a moment of battle. Patroclus is a brother, a twin, and it’s about how desperately we can need another person.”

Metamorphoses: Daphne and Apollo by Ovid

“I’m a big fan of transformation, which happened in the pagan world and was destroyed by the Catholic and Christian worlds. The relationship between human beings and nature was stronger in the past. Ovid could write about humans changing shape, transforming into a tree, being part of nature. It’s another way to describe our complicated lives on Earth. We translate our arcs with stories to understand better the mystery of what we feel, what we need, who we are or who we can be. It’s the same with this Document – we’ve made our way through many words from many eras, we have travelled together through the same arc, and now we come back to ourselves. Our lives are still the same.”

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally now. Order here