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What books are you currently reading?

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#1 ·
What books are you currently reading.

WELL! I'm surprised that a cultured and intelligent bunch of individuals like yourselves haven't already made a "What books are you Reading" thread. :p Well, since we don't have one, I suppose I'll start it off. :cool:

--Non Music Books--
Currently, I'm reading a compilation of stories written by Fyodor Dostoevsky; who, if is as good of a writer as the current story I'm reading, "The Double," suggest, might be my favorite author. "The Double" is REALLY something else, and I WHOLE HEARTEDLY suggest it to anybody with an appreciation for psychology and classic novels. Here is an excerpt from the third chapter of the story that I have picked out. The main character is on his way to a party and decided on a whim to stop off at the doctors office. ;)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Though Mr. Golyadkin pronounced this with the utmost
distinctness and clearness, weighing his words with a
self-confident air and reckoning on their probable effect, yet
meanwhile he looked at Krestyan Ivanovitch with anxiety,
with great anxiety, with extreme anxiety. Now he was all
eyes: and timidly waited for the doctor's answer with irritable
and agonized impatience. But to the perplexity and complete
amazement of our hero, Krestyan Ivanovitch only muttered
something to himself; then he moved his armchair up to the
table, and rather drily though politely announced something
to the effect that his time was precious, and that he did not
quite understand; that he was ready, however, to attend to
him as far as he was able, but he wold not go into anything
further that did not concern him. At this point he took the
pen, drew a piece of paper towards him, cut out of it the
usual long strip, and announced that he would immediately
prescribe what was necessary.
"No, it's not necessary, Krestyan Ivanovitch! No, that's
not necessary at all!" said Mr. Golyadkin, getting up from his
seat, and clutching Krestyan Ivanovitch's right hand. "That
isn't what's wanted, Krestyan Ivanovitch."
And, while he said this, a queer change came over him.
His grey eyes gleamed strangely, his lips began to quiver, all
the muscles, all the features of his face began moving and
working. He was trembling all over. After stopping the
doctor's hand, Mr. Golyadkin followed his first movement by
standing motionless, as though he had no confidence in
himself and were waiting for some inspiration for further
action.
Then followed a rather strange scene.
Somewhat perplexed, Krestyan Ivanovitch seemed for a
moment rooted to his chair and gazed open-eyed in
bewilderment at Mr. Golyadkin, who looked at him in
exactly the same way. At last Krestyan Ivanovitch stood up,
gently holding the lining of Mr. Golyadkin's coat. For some
seconds they both stood like that, motionless, with their eyes
fixed on each other. Then, however, in an extraordinarily
strange way came Mr. Golyadkin's second movement. His
lips trembled, his chin began twitching, and our hero quite
unexpectedly burst into tears. Sobbing, shaking his head and
striking himself on the chest with his right hand, while with
his left clutching the lining of the doctor's coat, he tried to
say something and to make some explanation but could not
utter a word.
At last Krestyan Ivanovitch recovered from his
amazement.
"Come, calm yourself!" he brought out at last, trying to
make Mr. Golyadkin sit down in an armchair.
"I have enemies, Krestyan Ivanovitch, I have enemies; I
have malignant enemies who have sworn to ruin me . . ." Mr
Golyadkin answered in a frightened whisper.
"Come, come, why enemies? you mustn't talk about
enemies! You really mustn't. Sit down, sit down," Krestyan
Ivanovitch went on, getting Mr. Golyadkin once and for all
into the armchair.
Mr. Golyadkin sat down at last, still keeping his eyes fixed
on the doctor. With an extremely displeased air, Krestyan
Ivanovitch strode from one end of the room to another. A
long silence followed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
As this book is an old one and the copyright has since expired, you can read it here.
http://www.kiosek.com/dostoevsky/library/thedouble.txt

If you'd rather read it on paperback, you can buy the small compilation I'm reading at barns and noble for 5$. :p
ISBN: 978-1-59308-037-2

--MUSIC RELATED BOOKS--
I have just perchased the wonderful recommendation from Jtech81 and am reading it.



PS: You all don't need to write a book on the books you're reading like I've done, I just HAD to share how great "The Double" is. ^-^;;;;
 
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#43 · (Edited)
AH! Another Dostoevsky book. XD I haven't read it yet, but I think I'm going to start reading it very soon. Another forum member said it was her favorite Dostoevsky book. ;)
 
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#46 ·
I'm reading the tales of thousand-and-one nights. Rather not what you'd read to the kids, as the stories usually are about some sultan who is angry because his wife is having an affair with a black slave when he's gone, orgies, bachannals and homosexuality.
 
#48 ·
AH! It would be such a shame to let this thread vanish like so many threads do.

OK! I've read quite a bit since my last post. I've just finished all sorts of miscellaneous Sherlock Holmes stories(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and am just about finished with "The Golden Compass."
 
#50 ·
I LOVE Sherlock Holmes as well. ^^ I've read all of the sherlock holmes stories, and still re-read them here and there. ;) It's amazing how many there are. It really feels like you're reading them for the first time when you re-read.
 
#59 ·
I'm quite a fanatic... all thanks to my piano teacher who decided to give me



as a present. Amazing. I like three of his novels the best: The Valley of Fear, the Hound of the Baskervilles, and A Study in Scarlet.
 
#52 ·
I've recently finished Blair Tindall's book called Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music that gives you quite an insight into some of the circles classical musicians of the past few decades have moved in. I've recently started the biography of Rubenstein: My many years. So we will see how that goes.......:)
 
#55 ·
I attempted War and Peace, R-F, but it was such a monster I had to put it down.
I'm currently trying to finish Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and then I'll hopefully move on to either Lolita or East of Eden.
 
#58 ·
I've not read War and Peace, Rachovsky. Man, I feel just like I did when I started to listen to Classical Music- so much to do, so little time! :)
My Dad got one of those nifty E-readers recently, and I've been reading it on that. It's a huge novel, but the great thing is that with the E-reader it never looks like that, seeing as it's all in that screen!
 
#62 ·
I've just started the book "Piano Lessons." Truly, poetry to any pianists sole. ^^ Here is an Excerpt:

------
Play the first note right. The morning--sunrise, eleven degrees, wind dancing across overnight snow--waits for a perfectly struck single note.

"Traumerei," by Robert Schumann, begins with middle C (a year ago this was the only note I could find on the piano). The next note is an F in the right hand joined by an F in the bass; then a cautious chord in both hands and five ascending treble notes lift the song into the air. There's a quick, deep pulse in my throat and a fast breath, and I'm smiling, watching the page, trying to stay up with the melody.

I've come to a quiet place in southern New Hampshire to write about the past year and my involvement with the piano. Often in the early mornings I'll bring a thermos of coffee and my music here to the library, a small stone building at the edge of a field. I'll unlock the heavy front door, turn up the thermostat, take the cover off the piano--it's a Steinway B Model, made in Hamburg, West Germany, in 1962--and play for an hour or so. The ivory-topped keys are cold at first, and so are my hands. I start with exercises, playing in unison an octave apart, up and down the keyboard. Sometimes I notice a tremble, a shaking in the last two fingers of my left hand. In the morning light, though, my hands look young. (The backs of my hands have always seemed old, wrinkled; once at a grade-school Halloween party someone recognized me by my hands, not covered by my ghost costume.)

Then I'll practice "Traumerei." This piece--only two pages, three minutes long--is teaching me piano. There are technical knots to be worked loose, clues to mysteries hiding in the notation. I would be happy to play it several thousand times.

Vladimir Horowitz used to play "Traumerei" as an encore; he said it was a masterpiece. Robert Schumann was only twenty-seven when he wrote the music, and I have the feeling he finished it in a couple of hours, one afternoon. It seems a passionate time in his life; in a letter to a friend he said: "I feel I could almost burst with music--I simply have to compose." Schumann was in love with Clara Wieck, a young piano virtuoso. Her father disapproved and had taken Clara away on a recital tour. "Traumerei" is one of thirteen short pieces in a collection called Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood). As Schumann put it, the songs were "reminiscences of a grown-up for grown-ups." (Traumerei translates as "reverie.") And he said in a letter to Clara, "You will enjoy them--though you will have to forget that you are a virtuoso...they're all easy to carry off." Schumann told Clara these pieces were, "peaceful, tender and happy, like our future."

I can see him at his writing desk, and piano, in Leipzig. Excited, dreaming of Clara, his own career as a pianist doomed by a hand injury but by this time knowing that he could be a composer. Twenty-seven years old! Not ten years before, he was a college student, writing home to his mother asking for more money.

I am living like a dog. My hair is yards long and I want to get it cut, but I can't spare a penny. My piano is terribly out of tune but I can't afford to get a tuner. I haven't even got the money for a pistol to shoot myself with....

Your miserable son,

Robert Schumann

He loved drinking and cigars. It seems a historical rumor that he had syphilis. He was probably manicdepressive early as an adult, and later suicidal. He heard hallucinations. "He is in terrible agony," his wife, Clara, wrote in her diary. "Every sound he hears turns to music. Music played on glorious sounding instruments, he says, more beautiful than any music ever heard on earth. It utterly exhausts him."

Robert Schumann died in a mental asylum, at age forty-six. He starved himself to death. Clara did see him, once, as he was dying, but he was kept away from his family for two years. A visitor once peered through an opening in his door and saw him playing a piano, lost apparently in improvisation, but playing music that made no sense. As I sit at this piano in New Hampshire, I have outlived Schumann by six years.

I bought a piece of granite the other day, from a monument company across the road from the town cemetery. I gave the guy twenty dollars and put the "surveyor's post" in the back of my station wagon. Granite is heavy; I don't know why I was surprised. The post is two feet high and about four inches square, with two rough sides and two that have been trimmed smooth. I don't think I'll have to explain this to Neenah, my wife. That the permanence of the granite appeals to me, that the years going by so quickly need marking, with piano lessons and stone. "Oh, that's a good thing to bring back from New Hampshire," she'll say.

I noticed the posts when I was out running, before lunchtime, along the town streets and then out a bit into the country. You'd see them at the corner of a yard by the driveway. The older houses would have large granite posts out front, sometimes chiseled with a street number. And you'd see the odd stub of a post marking a boundary, the stone weathered and chipped by lawn mowers or snow blades. When Robert Schumann died, in 1856, granite buildings in this town had been standing for ten years.

There's not quite enough light on the piano and I have to squint to see the faint marking "a tempo" at the end of the first eight measures of "Traumerei," meaning a return to normal after the slowing of ritard. I've repeated these measures, with some parts a bit softer, taking a teacher's advice: If you don't have something different to say in the repeat, why bother playing it? The tricky middle section waits, a difficult passage in the bass clef, a climb to the treble for another. I remember to relax my shoulders and try to make my hands heavier and pretend these are my favorite parts. It's whistling past the graveyard--and it almost works. I play one chord that's not sounded clearly, I forget to hold an A in the left hand, my foot hits the sustain pedal to slur over a mistake in fingering, but the notes are correct, and there's still a singing quality to the melody.

It's a lovely-sounding piano. A seven-foot grand, shiny mahogany. I have the top all the way up, as you would for a concert. It is my dream, when I touch the keys, to release the notes. It is music waiting there, and for me it is as real as the blown snow against the windows, and the evening's quarter moon rising through a cold fog, or the stories told of wolves that lived on nearby Mount Monadnock, sheltering in the red oak trees. Robert Frost wrote about valleys and mountains like these and once of a farmer whose land was so high up that his neighbors could watch the light of his lantern as he went about his chores.

I can feel my shoulders tightening again as I get close to the end of"Traumerei." I try to sway a bit on the piano bench, and I sing out loud with the phrases. The opening theme returns, starting with middle C. Then up to a solid, proud seven-note chord and (ritardando) a stately, quiet finish. There is a fermata over the final chord: a black dot with a half circle on top. A "bird's eye" musicians call it. The symbol means, "Hold it as long as you want to, you've earned it." And there's a pedal marking at the bottom; the pedal goes down as you play the chord so all the other Fs and As on the keyboard sound in sympathetic resonance.

I gently release the pedal and the final, whispering tones are dampened and lost in the warming rush of air from the furnace. There's a small puddle of water from my boots on the flagstone floor. The sunlight has now reached the trees at the edge of the field.

On the shelves around the piano are bound volumes of sheet music, Strauss and Wagner, Mozart. Schumann's works are here, in several volumes. I can play one of his songs, imperfectly (I've surely played "Traumerei" more times than he did), and it's really the only piece of music that I've learned. But it was an unanticipated, almost reckless year. I was at first surprised and delighted by the piano, then daunted, then discouraged. By the fall I had almost given up. By October's end, though, I was learning. In November and December, as now, I wanted to spend all my time practicing.

I'll take the granite post back home to Washington and, when the weather warms, dig a hole for it at the edge of the garden, You could set your coffee cup on top of the post, or a trowel.

I'll play the piano for my wife, early in the morning, and tell her about my adventures.
 
#70 ·
I've just finished "Golden Compass" and am starting on "Daughter of Fortune." So far, the book is amazing. ^^ I'm also reading "Piano Lessons" and will probably pick at "The Subtle Knife." (The second book of the Golden Compass books.)
 
#72 ·
Oh, good books Danae. XD I've only read "The Appeal" and "A Philosophy of Boredom" though.
 
#75 ·
I'm currently about 20 pages away from completing The Reader by Bernard Schlink. I have not yet seen the movie, but, in an odd twist of events, the trailer for the movie sold me on the book. I don't really want the book to end - it is tormented, and twisted, and honest. I love the protagonist's character, and the bizarre and captivating relationship with the antagonist. I highly recommend this book.

I am also reading The Last of the Crazy People by Timothy Findlay. He is a Canadian author, and likely one of my favourites. Some of his other novels, The Wars and Not Wanted on the Voyage have been incredible adventures with intense political and social undertones. I'm not too far into this one, so I am not sure where it is going in that regard, but the story is quite strong and I am enjoying it.

In Music, I am reading What to Listen for in Music by Copland. I am really enjoying it thus far; his writing is actually quite decent. I look forward to completing the book though - I am only about half-way through.

I am also reading George Monbiot's Bring on the Apocalypse. He is a columnist in Britain who is very openly critical of human destruction and catastrophe. I am right now in the section he has written about the environment, and it has certainly caused me a great deal of frustration. I highly recommend this book - I think it is highly informative and has the potential to change people. I look forward to reading Heat, his other highly publicized book, soon after I finish this one.

Danae - The Shock Doctrine is an incredible read. Naomi Klein is a very impressive intellectual.
 
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