Our team has carefully hand-picked a selection of fascinating reads to recommend for 2025. These books will take you on a journey across the globe, from the US to South Korea. We hope they will guide you, as they have guided us, toward a deeper understanding of the world we live in. Happy new year from Tra i Leoni!
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
“What are the consequences if the people given control of our government have no idea how it works?”Micheal Lewis sheds light onto the inner workings of the first Trump administration and its attempts to run the federal government (or lack thereof). From one US president to the next, the transition of power is a lengthy endeavour. While around the world we wait for the official inauguration ceremony, the work to build a new government starts from the morning after the US presidential election. By then, the newcomer must have found the right people to run the top 500 jobs in federal government. Transition teams should be sent into each department to learn as much as they can from their predecessors, before they inevitably must leave. In 2016, the Trump administration had grossly and wilfully underestimated this task. The book recounts the not-so-hard to believe uncooperative and destructive approach of Trump to the complex machine that is the US federal government. If this created a stall on much of the government’s work eight years ago, it only calls to question what will happen the second time around. A question that is ever as relevant in the year we are looking out on.
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Miscommunication, hidden meanings, unspoken words, these are some of the recurrent themes in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. The whole story, which is narrated as a stream of consciousness of the protagonist, Selin, is a deep reflection on language and its limitations, while also simply being the story of a girl’s first year of college. Not surprisingly, Selin is a linguistic student, so the contemplation on language is even more emphasized by her studies. What usually triggers these reflections are the interactions that Selin has with Ivan, another student at Harvard. They both attend a Russian class, they exchange cryptic emails, and they also have a concrete communication problem given by the fact that Ivan’s first language is Hungarian, and he is not always very fluent in English.
A relationship starts to build up between the two, but its nature is unclear, and this makes the incomprehension get even worse. The book discusses the effectiveness of language, in particular when the subjects come from different cultures, raising many questions. Does the language we speak interfere with the way we see reality? How deep does language go? Can it really express anything?
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
How can one live simultaneously in two worlds when one is constituted by North Vietnamese Viet Cong and the other is 1970s Los Angeles? How can one sympathize with Communist ideals of brotherhood and discipline while effortlessly engaging with an American lifestyle of excesses and unpredictability? It’s 1975, and Saigon is falling. A South Vietnamese general, while sipping whiskey in a secluded villa, compiles a list of names, people who are judged worthy of being evacuated to the United States. Helping him is his most trusted advisor, the book’s narrator, identified with the title Captain. Little does the general know, though, that his trusted man observes his every move and reports it to the Viet Cong.
“The Sympathizer” is the story of the Captain and it reads simultaneously as a memoir and a thriller, a spy story and a confession of the Captain’s nuanced life. A son of an absent French priest and a poor Vietnamese mum, an American graduate, a man of contradictions, a revolutionary cursed with the ability to see both sides of a war that, like wars often do, required all involved to be loyal to only one side. Ultimately, memorable literature is among other things a function of an author’s ability to navigate the line separating mutually exclusive certainties. By embracing ambiguity as the only possible backdrop against which to examine the legacy of the Vietnam War, Viet Thanh Nguyen constructs a memorable page-turner that is bound to leave all readers with everlasting insights about what it means to be incomplete while history is being written.
Human Acts by Hang Kang
In Human Acts, Han Kang artfully weaves together intimately human tales of suffering that give a voice to those silenced during what came to be known as the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. At the time, South Korea was under martial law and student led demonstrations in Gwangju were brutally and indiscriminately repressed by state forces. Ironically, merely a week before Han Kang was due to receive her Nobel Prize in Literature this December, President Yoon Suk Yeol declared a state of emergency and martial law was imposed in South Korea for the first time since its formal democratisation in 1987.
Han’s chapters operate as a series of vignettes of sorts, each focusing on a different character grappling with the aftermath of the horrors of Gwangju: a young boy who volunteers at the makeshift morgue organised by the protesters, the spirit of his deceased friend, an editor struggling under censorship, a tortured prisoner, an activist factory worker, a mourning mother, and finally the author herself, who slips into non-fiction to share her own story. This collective of broken voices, haunted by the echoing agony of their trauma, is a harrowing reflection on human nature and its inherent fragility.
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
“There should be a stronger word than regret.” Luckily, I do not regret buying this book for 61 cents at my high school’s book sale. Over the course of eight years, Lisa Taddeo spoke with and documented the life stories of three women: Lina, a mother living with a sexually indifferent husband; Maggie, a teenager involved in an illegal and intimate relationship with her teacher; and Sloane, a shop-owner married to a man who enjoys watching her sleep with other people. Despite these different paths, Taddeo found the common thread that ties these women together: desire. Throughout the (aptly named) novel, “Three Women”, Taddeo does a fantastic job of interweaving the three women’s narratives along with her own authorial interpretations. However, these interpretations were at times too broad; contrary to how the novel is marketed, the experiences of three white American women are in no way representative of all women. Nevertheless, this novel is a great introspection into the personal toll that desire — especially when unmet — can have on people.
Articles written by the various members of our team.
Having lived both in Italy and the UK, I enjoy exploring how multiculturalism affects our personal identities. I use language, writing and journalism as tools to decipher the world around me. And, I will of course never turn down a lively convo about current news. With a degree in Economic and Social sciences, I’m now pursuing a master’s in Politics and Policy Analysis.
Raised in Rome by Bosnian parents, I try to use writing as a tool to decipher the world around me and all its complexities by taking different perspectives into consideration. In Bocconi, I am studying Politics and Policy Analysis.
Hello! My name is Paolo, and I am a first-year in the HEC-Bocconi Double Program. As a child, I fell in love with reading thanks to Cressida Cowell’s ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and never stopped; nowadays, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Kerr, and Donna Tartt are amongst my favourites. My main interests in writing lie in politics and political economics, society, culture, and everything in between. When I am not reading, I am playing football or exploring my newfound cooking skills as a uni student.
I am a Japanese-Italian attending the BIEM program as a first year. I enjoy reading novels in any genre (particularly magical realism), and I have always been fond of writing for both academic and story-telling purposes. I also love playing and making music.
