Over the last year I have drifted from doing a lot of listening to instead doing a lot of reading. A couple of years ago I read a lot of poetry and philosophy. Since then my interests have broadened out. Consulting my journals I come up with the following list, in rough chronological order, of books I have read from June 2024 to November 2025.
- Art in Theory 1900 - 2000 eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood 1,200 pp.
- "S" J. J. Abrams & Doug Durst 450 pp.
- The Cambridge Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin - Ken Hirschkop 180 pp.
- House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski just the first 340 pages.
- The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn abridged 500 pp.
- Dictionary of the Khazars -Milorad Parić 335 pp.
- The Mexico Reader - eds. Joseph & Henderson 736 pp.
- The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner ed. John Williamson 260 pp.
- The Unknown Masterpiece -Honoré de Balzac 44 pp.
- The Poems - Catullus trans. Peter Whigham 228 pp.
- Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments - Sappho trans. Aaron Poochigian 93 pp.
- Metamorphoses - Ovid trans. David Raeburn 636 pp.
- Essays on Music -Theodor Adorno 679 pp.
- Frank Lloyd Wright text 100 pp. the rest photos
- Arnold Schoenberg - Charles Rosen 105 pp.
- Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire - Jonathan Dunsby 75 pp.
- Pierrot Lunaire: Rondels Bergamasques - Albert Giraud 117 pp.
- The Human Comedy: Selected Stories - Honoré de Balzac 415 pp.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel - Rabelais trans. M. A. Screech 1,041 pp.
- Selected Writings - William Hazlitt 358 pp.
- Fables - Alexander Theroux 411 pp.
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert trans. Lydia Davis 311 pp.
One of the most feared at the time and later renowned courses in English Literature was that offered by W. H. Auden in 1941 at an American university. It had a reading list of thirty-two books for a total of some 6,000 pages. Here is the list. Lots of challenging stuff on that list. But if you add up the books I have read in the last six months it comes to 8,647 pages. And I think it is certainly as challenging as Auden's. The year previous I read large volumes of Chinese and French poetry (in translation), the Iliad, and eleven books by and on Ludwig Wittgenstein. This year I read Dante's Inferno and Paradiso--second half of the year so it's not on the list yet.
In the above list, the hardest reads were the Art in Theory collection, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Adorno and Fables by Theroux. The easiest reads were Solzhenitsyn, Sappho and Flaubert. The most enjoyable were Dictionary of the Khazars, Sappho, Catullus and Rosen's book on Schoenberg. The poorest quality book, in my opinion, was Dunsby's book on Pierrot Lunaire. Several of the books (Solzhenitsyn, Flaubert, Balzac) would tie for the best quality.
I will list the books in the second half of the year in a separate post.
5 comments:
Essays on Music, eh? Adorno is simply never easy reading but Essays is probably easier than Aesthetic Theory. :) Still, reading Adorno rip into John Cage and Boulez for resorting to techniques that absolve them of ever making decisions was interesting reading. There was basically nothing the Future Symphony Institute fellows wrote against integral serialism and aleatory in the 21st century Adorno hadn't done in even more damning terms in the mid-20th century.
Gotta say, now that I've heard some of Adorno's music his string music sounds like stuff I would've expected from Paul Hindemith having a bad week. Adorno's piano music? Eh, there's more fun to be had from Schoenberg and Berg.
But Adorno figured out he had more a gatekeeper role.
Abridged Solzhenitsyn!? Well ... okay ... :) Having all that time to write in prison is not the same as having time to read it outside the gulag.
Yeah, the version of the Gulag that everyone reads is one volume abridged down from, I think, three volumes. Agree on Adorno. Tough read and at the end you think, he really could have said that in about 100 pages...
But I find that once you get into reading stuff like this, it gets a lot easier. Plus, read some Sappho in between, rather like a sorbet!
Bryan I'm glad you're back! I've been a little worried about you, after 10 days without a post!
I read a few books as I can, but lately I'm just trying to learn how to play, when I'm not at my stupid job. Thanks for modeling proper reading behavior, I'll consider your recommendations though I already have piles of new books everywhere.
Thanks, Will. I'm fine! I'm posting fairly infrequently for several reasons: I don't often find something in the music world worth commenting on, I'm fairly busy with my "day job", much of the classical music world seems moribund these days and pop music is pretty much in distressing decline. People really spent hundreds of dollars to watch Taylor Swift and her band move about on stage, miming? I'm doing a lot more reading than listening these days, but I don't do a lot of commenting on it. I probably should. I'm reading a fascinating book by Bernard Lewis on The Middle East and have learned a surprising number of unexpected things about the Muslim world. I could comment on that without even straying into politics! But I don't have a lot to say about music these days. The most interesting and mysterious things about music we can't really talk about. Oh, and that is exactly what Wittgenstein said. Hmmm....
Oh, and what a paradise it is when we can have stacks of wonderful books that we scarcely have time to read! Compared to most of human history when books were a rare and scarce commodity.
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