What are you currently reading?

[Florestan]

I abandoned the above book at around 250 pages (out of more than 800). Too many details, too many secondary and tertiary characters, too many footnotes --- all of them interrupting the flow. At about a quarter of the whole, Mozart didn't even get to compose Idomeneo. A clear instance of too much of a good thing.

Switched to this:



and it's much more of a page-turner. The essential characters and events are covered, insightful comments on people and music are offered, the flow is fluent (pleonasm, I know) and there are no footnotes whatsoever. I am already a page 282 of 416. (I'm reading it in the original French)

Marcel Brion is a master biographical narrator, I had already read his Life of Schumann and it was an equally gripping reading.

[Mandryka]

[foxandpeng]

All the books, it seems. Finally have access to every book that we own, now that we have moved house. Have spent the last week together 'oohing' and 'aha-ing' at things we haven't seen for ages, didn't know we had, and having listened to the Radio 4 programme on the Library at Alexandria, realising that Ptolemy and his boys were utter amateurs when it comes to gathering the accumulated wisdom of humanity

[Karl Henning]

Nearing the end of re-reading The Hobbit. And I've just learnt today that an old schoolmate (we've known each other practically from the egg) has jumped artistic rails and is finishing up his first novel, which I've just begun reading in MS.