Carlos Ruiz Zafón: The Shadow of the Wind
I feel like too many of my book posts lately have been of the form “Eh, didn’t really float my boat.” Well, in this case my watercraft was 100% buoyant. The Shadow of the Wind not only should have been...
View ArticleSteven Erikson: Memories of Ice
Book three of The Malazan Book of the Fallen does at least return to the same general location and cast of characters as the first book, but in a way, doing so makes the giant scope of the project even...
View ArticleDmitri Tymoczko: A Geometry of Music
I have always been a sucker for music theory and analysis. The combination of the fairly strict rules underpinning the way in which music works with the creative freedom expressed on top of them is...
View ArticleSteven Erikson: The Malazan Book of the Fallen
I’ve already posted about the first three books of Steven Erikson’s mammoth epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen [1] [2] [3], but I’ve finished the series in the meantime and if I try to...
View ArticleDaniel Abraham: The Price of Spring
This is the fourth and final volume of the Long Price Quartet fantasy series, of which I have previously reviewed the first three volumes. Basically everything I said about the other books continues to...
View ArticleTed Gioia: The History of Jazz
So I have gotten really interested in jazz over the last year. (Apparently this is de rigueur for men as they enter middle age.) I’ve always had a vague understanding of the musical syntax, and can...
View ArticleEvan Dara: The Lost Scrapbook
Another one of those long difficult books that I bought on principle and then let languish on my bookshelf for a decade (literally; I just went to Amazon to see what the reader reviews were like and it...
View ArticleRichard Taruskin: The Oxford History of Western Music, volumes 2-5
I wrote about volume 1 of Richard Taruskin’s history of Western music a couple of years ago. Although I finished volume 2 shortly thereafter, I never got around to writing about it, and then I stalled...
View ArticlePerri Knize: Grand Obsession
I recently spent a fair amount of time and energy researching a piano purchase, and as I had always concentrated more on the notes than on the instrument making them, it was very educational both to...
View ArticleDavid Temperley: Music and Probability
This is a book about music cognition: attempting to understand how people understand the music they hear. Temperley’s main thesis throughout the book is that a profitable way to study music perception...
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