Curd Rice Daily: Blog

Connectivity

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After three weeks of being away from University, I gave in today and used my phone-a-friend option, to try connecting with a friend whose company I looked forward to everyday in class. We’ve been good friends for a while, which is not to say that he is my closest friend, yet a friend with whom I have been able to share every portion of the last five years. More often than not, we used to sit near each other in class, allowing us to talk about books and the law – which has, for the most part, been my preoccupation.

On that call today, I thought a lot about connectivity. While I’ve been privileged enough to be able to speak to my friends regularly on WhatsApp, chatting with them pretty much every day, I was thinking about how, for each of us, our preferences towards the form and manner of connectivity inspires the way our interactions take place and our relationships are built. It does take considerable effort for somebody who has an aversion toward phone calls, for example, to pick up the phone and speak to someone else. As it does for people who are bad at texting to reply to messages. However, in an era where so much technology is available, attitudes towards this technology defines, in a large way the nature of relationships that are built up.

I thought back for a while to my time at school – primary school, that is. It was difficult to become friends with new people, largely because while friendships were created out of common spaces and common circumstances (take the classes I attended, or, for example, summer camps I was able to participate in), they didn’t really sustain beyond that time period – because I hadn’t set up my e-mail ID yet, and we didn’t call each other up on the landline. The only person I do remember calling up, and that too, pretty religiously, is my childhood best friend. I believe I spoke to him after school on the phone a reasonable amount, especially when our classes changed and we ended up in different sections. It was, and remains, a fond memory – and the only reason I still remember his landline number (which has not changed).

That was on my mind today: the transitions that connections have gone through. Nokia’s old tagline was Connecting People. One day that was true of hardware. That era lies only in my memory palace now.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 5/30

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Today’s prompt is honestly the toughest prompt I’ve seen the good folks over at NaPoWriMo put out.

It’s called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. The challenge is to use/do all of the following in the same poem. Of course,  if you can’t fit all twenty projects into your poem, or a few of them get your poem going, that is just fine too!

  1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
  2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
  3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
  4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
  5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
  6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
  7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
  8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
  9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
  10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
  11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
  12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
  13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
  14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
  15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
  16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
  17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
  18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
  19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
  20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

I do not see myself weaving all 20 of these into a singular piece – for the most part because that does not interest me. Thus, I will be incorporating one of these things.

Peach Perfect 

“You’re a peach!”,
Merriam-Webster exclaims is the best example of a metaphor,
To call someone pleasing.
Au contraire, my peachy friend,
Peaches are not pleasing,
Their colour, in fact, they’re merely leasing,
Their appearance?
Round gluteus maxima, I say.

Oh, and the descriptions of their taste,
“Juicy orbs of sunburst deliciousness”,
Clearly, you pick fruit with haste,
But, come now, we must do our due diligence –
and spot the fur from a mile, nay, a marathon away.

You may think we’re brothers,
Maybe the hair gives you that notion,
In reality, we’re third cousins,
My genes contain some of the worse portions – and
as a result my appearance is a gag,
“A potato with fur”,
“A haggly sack”

I so dislike this peachy business,
Why must he get all the praise,
The next time you see someone please you,
Please call them a kiwi, I say.
“You’re a kiwi!”
You see, it rolls off the tongue,
Kiwi is two syllables,
While peach is just one.

Instability | Gate of the Sun, by Elias Khoury

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Gate of the Sun,
by Elias Khoury
Published by Picador (2007)
Rating: *****

Introduction 

This book has been on my to-read shelf since 2016, and I was intimidated about picking it up because I feared that I would not like it. When I first heard about this book, I heard only good things – from the plot, to the characters, to Khoury’s writing – people praised the decisions he made throughout. I was told it was impossible for me to not enjoy it, and that I would leave the book with several questions.

The history of the Middle East is a history I have read obsessively about because of my own connections to that part of the world and my desire to understand how so much conflict has been allowed to persist in such a localized area for so long, with and without intervention.

At the start of this year, I decided that aside from reading a large volume of books, and reading widely, I wanted to remove books from my to-read shelf. My Goodreads is filled with all sorts of things I’ve shelved, and I figured that discarding those, or reading those would lead to better predictions from the algorithm, and fresh finds – things I’d genuinely like to read. After all, there’s too little time to do all the reading I want to be doing.

Thus began my adventure with Khoury. I completed the book in class, and recommended it instantly to the person seated next to me – certain that I had found another reader. So it was to be, and long may this book continue to travel.

Plot

The book is structured as a stream-of-consciousness narration by Khaleel, an almost-son-like figure to Yunes, a Palestinian freedom fighter, who is in a coma. Although others have given Yunes up for dead, Khalil sits vigil by his hospital bedside and recounts stories, in an effort to make sense of their lives, and to make some contact with Yunes.

Detail

There is incredible detail in Khoury’s writing. He spent years listening to stories at refugee camps, and those stories fed into the novel – and that experience shines through in a manner irreplaceable by any other experience. He weaves to life the Palestine cause, and in doing so, he is able to showcase the true sense of displacement that refugees live with and the burden that places on them. There are portions of this book that it hurt to read because I felt helpless – it felt unfair, and left me with deep despair that humans had to go through the harrowing experience of seeing their home, being able to identify it, but not being sure what the world identifies it as.

There is naturally, a grandioseness to Khoury’s writing that leaves you remembering the words he writes. One that stood out for me was:

“in the faces of those people being driven to slaughter, didn’t you see something resembling your own?”

These lines asking the Palestinians to understand the Holocaust.

This is an Odyssey.

Conclusion

If you cannot tell, I am enamored by this book – for it takes ordinary stories and everyday life in extraordinary circumstances and raises them to myth. If there is a book you read this year, please let this be it.

Audiobooks

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Yesterday, I learned that Audible allows you to sign-up for the service and download a free book. Now, of course, there are a ton of audiobooks available to listen to for free on YouTube, and I could have downloaded mp3 files somewhere. I’m certain of it. However, in times of isolation, you find yourself making decisions you wouldn’t ordinarily make. That was how I downloaded the application, signed-in with my amazon credentials and hunted around for a book to listen to.

I generally wear earphones while running because I like to be doing something alongside my run. This is particularly true when I’m not running on a nice trail, or doing an out-and-back run. During these runs, I’m often circling the same space repeatedly. At the moment, my field is my terrace, and it’s that small space I’m running around in. I tried playing a couple of mind games, even writing about one of them recently, but I gave in to how mind-numbing it became and sought to fill my ears with music and podcasts. This new acquisition upended that.

I found this lovely book, The Forty Rules of Love, which is about Rumi and Shams-i-Tabrez, and has honestly been narrated by the most wonderful voice artist I’ve heard (especially since he’s the first) – he’s doing a phenomenal job of bringing both the characters and the scenes to life.

I wonder if I can read more books this way. If so, it might be worthwhile looking into how I can implement this in my day-to-day.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 4/30

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Today’s prompt asks me to write a poem based on an image from a dream.

I get this recurring dream of me floating around in space after having a heavy meal – a literal gas giant, if you will. It isn’t so bad, I’m enjoying my life up there, till I realize nobody has the power or ability to bring me down. Quite often that is where the dream stops, and it’s what I’ve chosen to depict today, tugged along by Wordsworth dearest.

Gas Giant

Ballooned up,
No strings attached –
I floated around in empty space,
Without the ability to move around freely
Something kept me in place,
Unbeknownst to me,
I caused a crisis,
An eclipse
Preventing the sun’s rays from brightening up
Anyone’s days,
I lingered,
Lonely as a cloud.

 

GloPoWriMo 2020: 2/30

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Today’s prompt is to write about a specific place.

School

Primary school was a 3-minute drive from home,
Exit the car park,
Take a left,
Take a right,
Make a U-turn,
Take a right,
You have arrived.
Every morning, I’d be a passenger, witness to this route in my semi-dazed state,
Each afternoon, I’d be a compatriot to my father, awake and
Describing every minute of my day.
Take a left,
Make a U-turn,
Take a left,
Take a right,
Enter the car park,
You are home.
In those 3 minutes, I’d fill my dad’s ears with all sorts of stories,
Excitedly babbling away – never paying attention,
To the road that he’d take,
If only I had,
Perhaps I would have recognized,
That the shortest route to my school,
Was just a straight line.
Unfortunately, that was not to be,
My grandfather and I walked, in 40 degrees,
We exited the car park,
Took a left,
Took a right,
Made a U-turn,
Took a right,
We had arrived.

Gaming

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I have a chequered history with videogames.

When I was younger, all my friends had PS2’s that they gamed on. Except my best friend and I. This sort of put us at this weird relationship with our friends. We had (and I still have) Gameboys, and we played on those whenever we had sleepovers, aside from computer games that we had access to. Aside from that though, our conversations and entertainment activities involved the outside world for the most part, with day long trips to places like Children’s City.

At sleepovers with my other friends though, and on evenings when people weren’t in a mood to go out, I’d spend the evening at their apartment playing in, or watching them play videogames on their PS2’s. It always left me very dissatisfied, because I was always terrible at these videogames whenever my turn came – and I was made fun of because I was so awful, but I never really had the chance to practice, so to speak – given that I didn’t have a console to game on. For a while, that left me disappointed.

When we went to purchase a new television – and I can remember this very, very clearly, my parents were looking at all these television models, but I was on the side looking at this brand new Playstation Portable that had just been released by Sony. It was all over the news, and it was this fantastic hand-held console that allowed you to play these incredible games and all of this multimedia the way you would on the PS2, but in your hands. I was in awe.

I was particularly in awe because the game I saw was Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and I loved the game demo I was shown.

My dad surprised me by ordering me a Playstation Portable, with 2 free games. I saw the box on the desk in my room without an explanation, and honestly, to this day, it remains one of the happiest memories for me. My parents were very strict with it, because they didn’t want me to become addicted, so I only ever played the Playstation Portable when I was on holiday. Else, during the term, it was kept away from me, so I never got to play much. I made sure my holidays were filled with the PSP though, and I enjoyed it so much. My parents encouraged that limited playing, and at the beginning of holidays, when I had done particularly well on exams, I was allowed to buy games. I bought myself Ratatouille once, and man, what an investment that was.

However, soon, the PSP stopped being the “in-thing”. I couldn’t really play online, and I wanted to – and the console I wanted was the PS3. The PS3 released in 2006, and while we were relocating to India, I remember my mother spending some time looking at the feasibility of buying me another console and deciding against it. The PS3 in general came up in conversation on several occasions: I asked for one because I really wanted to be able to play with my friends online, but it was quite over-budget, and my parents wanted to encourage me to be outside and play in the outdoors, especially given that we had just moved to this fantastic residential space with all these amenities. Everytime I brought it up, I got shot down – and I used to be quite upset each time, I remember. Till my parents relented in Grade 9, around the start of 2012.

By that time, the PS3 Slim was out, and it had all these functionalities beyond just gaming. My parents agreed that I could have one if I sold my PSP, and at the time, I was okay with that condition. I sold my PSP to CeX in Bangalore, and got a great deal for it, and off-set that money toward the PS3, and some games, with my parents funding the rest.

It was a wild few months. However, at the time we bought it, I realized quickly that my interest in playing the PS3 was limited, and I didn’t really make the time to play because the academic pressure from school was going up and I was sort of succumbing to that, by putting pressure on myself. I did play the PS3 for a summer though, the summer before Grade 10 properly got underway. I played a lot of F1 2011, and FIFA 12. During that break – and in the subsequent winter break though, I realized how little I played it, and decided to sell it. It was barely in my possession for a year and a few months, maybe? I sold it pretty quickly, and got a good deal – one that funded one of my MUN trips to Hyderabad, a deal I was pleased with.

Since then, I rarely have played videogames. Although I enjoy them tremendously, I’m not very good at them, and I don’t prioritize them. However, since November, my interest in them has returned, and how.

This isolation period in particular has got me really interested in them once again, and one of the things I am most grateful for is that each evening, I connect up to my friend abroad and play FIFA with him for a few hours before I go to bed. We chat while gaming competitively against each other, and every day, it’s one of the things I’ve drilled into my routine to ensure I’m getting some amount of socializing.

Gaming is an interest I would like to continue. Not just with FIFA, but with some storyline-based games as well. I’ve learned how because you block laptop notifications generally while gaming, and because they’re designed to be immersive experiences, you care for very little when the game is going on. That’s a fabulous thing, because it takes some of the pressures from the outside world far away from your brain. All you’re thinking about is the game itself. I’d like to retain that. Even if it’s just a little each day.

 

Cheese Chili Toast

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When I’m away from University, there is not much I miss aside from the existence of the night mess. I’ve waxed eloquent about the night mess several times, but as my time as an undergraduate student comes to a close, it is perhaps the right time to enquire: what was the greatest thing the night mess gave me?

There are several candidates for this coveted title. There’s all of the friendships I formed at the night mess, which have, contrary to my wildest expectations, become the most enduring. There’s all the moot practice I did at the night mess – round after round of saying speeches, and hearing the same feedback again and again. Implementing it as best I could before returning there. There’s all of the memorial submissions. Then there’s the committee meetings – the ones I attended, as well as the ones I didn’t attend.

However, I think the greatest thing the night mess gave me was the security of knowing I would be able to get my hands on a snack no matter how late my cravings struck me. More importantly, that this snack would be oily and unhealthy, and wouldn’t fill me up as much as they’d satisfy the craving for cheesy delights, or fatty substances late into the night.

I craved one of these snacks today and made myself some cheese chili toast. To give it flair, I used coloured capsicum. It was outstanding, worthy of the night mess’ memories. Soon, I shall make a Bombay Sandwich. I believe I will be all-conquering then.

Did Not Hurt |This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay

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This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor
by Adam Kay
Published by Picador (2017)
Rating: *****

Introduction 

The NHS has fascinated me for a long time. As a non-British person, I’m truly in awe of the fact that healthcare, on a grand and very visible scale is affordable to everybody across the nation, and is chosen by people across economic classes. I understand that national healthcare models exist around the world, and in no means am I proclaiming the NHS to be the best – I am not an expert on the matter and have read limited literature around it. It just fascinates me that the system can exist with public backing.

I know one doctor who works within the NHS. I’ve never discussed the system with him. I know a few doctors – several of them in my own family. I’ve never discussed their cases or any funny stories they may have to share. However, I have imagined, as I do think everyone in the service sector does, that they would have seen some characters in their lifetime. I’ve always wondered what that journey was like. Adam Kay peeled back the curtain in his memoir, and I was enriched for it. Through his book, he takes us through his time as a junior doctor in the UK.

Entertainment

This was a stunningly entertaining book. It’s taken from Kay’s diary, and has retained it’s original format for the most part, with short entries interspersed with longer ones. While the format does take some time to get accustomed to, Kay writes in a manner that is unfiltered and accessible, giving you an insight into how he thinks really quickly – and boy, is his brain hilarious. There are jokes aplenty, and succinct, witty, two-line observations that’ll make you chuckle. The humour cuts across Kay’s treatment of more serious, current-day issues that the NHS has to tackle, including doctor allocation, understaffing, as well as a host of personal issues that professionals in the medical field go through that we, as patients sometimes take for granted.

All-in-all, it makes something very scary (medicine and people’s lives on the line) seem less scary, and I’m grateful for it.

Emotion

There are some very, very touching tales throughout. Doctors have a lot of empathy, and Kay certainly knows when to flick this switch on. The book ends hurriedly and abruptly, and you understand – especially around the final few pages, the kind of emotional toll and rollercoaster doctors must go through on a daily basis. I found myself thinking about surgeons most frequently, or diagnosticians, who rapidly must move from patient to patient, putting negatives behind them as quickly as possible.

Footnoting

Particular mention has to be made of Kay’s footnoting. The first thing I laughed about in the book was a note about footnotes that directed me to read the footnotes. At first, I didn’t understand why. Generally, especially when I’m reading e-books, I tend not to read footnotes. This practice is largely owing to the cumbersome nature of navigating to the footnote and navigating back. However, Kay uses a fair amount of medical terminology – and supplies helpful, contextual information in laypeople-English in his footnotes. Quite often, these are supplemented with humorous anecdotes, that made the footnotes a delight.

The other option would have been to omit medical jargon that was beyond the grasp of reasonably informed individuals – but that would have been inauthentic and a disservice to the craft he performed. I’m pleased that was not the route chosen.

Conclusion

Excellent, sit-down and laugh your heart out read. Worth a Sunday afternoon.

Rogues, Raju and Redemption | The Guide, by R.K. Narayan

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The Guide,
by R.K. Narayan
Published by Penguin Classics (2006)
Rating: **** 

Introduction

R.K. Narayan has been an ever-present name in my life. My mother first introduced to me to Malgudi, but it was my father who took me to Gangarams Bookstore and helped me find and buy my first (and only copy) of R.K. Narayan’s work, Malgudi Schooldays. Aside from finding and watching the adaptation on YouTube, my next interaction with Narayan was in Grade 10, where I read his short story A Horse and Two Goats. Then I discovered that R.K. Laxman (of The Common Man) fame was his brother. I remember thinking then, as I do now, that sitting with them for a meal served on a banana-leaf would have been an absolute joy.

On a whim, I discovered an academic article titled How To Read an Indian Novel, which left me flabbergasted because of its claims, but also because I had never come across a reading guide for an entire country, especially none as diverse as India. It baffled me. I took the advice to heart though, and Narayan was recommended, his work The Guide gaining particular prominence in that critics literary imagination. Thus begun this journey, which I took to instantly thanks to it’s setting in Malgudi – a place I want to call home.

Plot

Raju, a storekeeper at the Malgudi Railway Station discovers that he can use his gift of the gab to make more money as a tour guide to visitors. He leaves his store to the station porter’s son, finding a friend and a taxi to become a guide who is known throughout India. Unexpectedly though, Raju’s life takes a turn when he falls in love with Rosie, the wife of a scholarly tourist client, Marco. Raju confesses his love to her, and Rosie separates from Marco, who had treated her terribly.

Being with Rosie leads to estrangement from his family, and Raju loses his house and store to debt. Raju encourages Rosie to take up her passion of dancing, and together, they make Rosie one of India’s top dancers. Raju then commits an act of dishonesty that changes his life once more, and he ends up in jail for forgery.

Raju returns to Malgudi after two years. Narayan pans the scene to an abandoned temple by a river, when local villagers take him to be a Sadhu and approach him for advice. As Raju’s words turn true, he is proclaimed and considered a saint, and he begins a second life at the goodwill of people. However, amidst a severe drought, one of Raju’s proclamations is interpreted to mean he will be fasting to bring rain – leading to the book’s ambiguous ending.

Characters that are Human

Very often I find myself struggling to identify with characters across fiction books owing to their clear polarizing character traits. This is truer of books that were published in the 1900’s (ones I have read) as compared to newer books, which have developed nuance into their writing. However, as is appropriate of Narayan’s writing style (in the little literature of his that I have inhaled and consumed), characters here are grey. They are human, with flaws and quirks, and mistakes committed, and their own perspective on morality.

That drives this book. I believe that having characters that are human makes books with dacoity or forgery, or even acts of dishonesty – plain, white lies even, more bearable, because they allow you to understand the perspective of the character committing those acts. For moments, they are relatable – they live and breathe, and so, they make mistakes, when they see ends they wish to have. Raju, Rosie, and everyone else in the book is wonderfully human, and I am grateful for it.

Simplicity 

Another defining trait of Narayan’s writing, I would think, is his simplicity of prose. There are short, crisp sentences. There is dry wit. There’s an ease to reading his books, which, in particular, help make this book easy to navigate – particularly since he takes you back and forth in time repeatedly. There’s no complex narrative structure at play, and no plot within a plot. This is a page-turner that is a delight to read.

Conclusions

I want to visit Malgudi, and would urge all of you to read this – for you will want to meet the characters there too.

Classical Music, Declassified | Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music by Jan Swafford

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Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music,
by Jan Swafford
Published by Basic Books (2017)
Rating: **** 

Introduction

By December, 2019, I had decided that one of the things I wanted to do in 2020 was to get back to classical music more seriously. For several years, between Grade 6 and Grade 10, classical music had consumed large chunks of my time: amidst theory lessons and piano lessons, all I was learning was classical pieces for examinations, or music in method books, all composed by famous composers. It was only in one of my later theory lessons that my music teacher at the time introduced me to the different periods of music composition. That revelation coincided with the time I was learning about literary periods, and the overlap was quite a phenomenon for my young mind.

Of course as time passed, my interest weaned off, and I stopped my piano lessons and everything that went along with it. For a while, therefore, I played the same 3 pieces I learned for exams in 2011 every time someone asked me to perform. Anyway, long story short, I figured that if I was going to get back to classical music, I ought to educate myself about it’s history and relevance, to some degree. Enter Jan Swafford.

Short Chapters 

One of the classiest things to do. With non-fiction books that present brief histories of, or introductions to individual subjects or niche areas, there’s often this desire to cover everything in the field, which stems out of the author’s own passion for the subject. I know that if I wrote a non-fiction book, for example, I’d want to cover everything imaginable about the subject. However, very often, that slips into making the book inaccessible to the general public – an outcome that isn’t the most desirable when you are trying to influence or improve general visibility for a craft.

Swafford keeps his chapters short and crisp, with a lucid writing style and dry wit that sparks off the page and keeps the pages turning. One of the more helpful things is the fact that he doesn’t seek to delve into a historical overview of every significant piece in an era or by a particular composer. He writes about the pieces that appeal to him – displaying a bias toward choral pieces, but that nevertheless allows him to explain the characteristic features of the piece by the composer.

Additionally, along with short chapters, the thing I admired was the selection of recommended pieces neatly highlighted in Bold, allowing for optional (yet highly recommended) listening alongside the reading. This book consumed me. Quite honestly, it left me wondering why books didn’t come with recommended soundtracks or playlists, and whether I could embark on another quest: to create playlists for the books I read – to capture the mood and emotion of the book most appropriately. That is, however, for another day.

Simplicity

Swafford is a composer himself. Another peril of having an expert write a book meant for beginners is the prospect of highly technical language. I’m not a complete beginner to music theory, however, there is jargon that is consistently beyond me. I am not an expert, and would not have liked for this book to have assumed any knowledge. To my surprise, the book assumed nothing. From start to finish, it felt as though someone had clasped my hand and walked me across all the 88-keys of a piano, teaching me what each sounded like and meant, but also helping me build the vocabulary into my own lexicon.

Swafford does a magnificent job structurally, building through and weaving more famous composers with less publicly known faces, allowing you to appreciate the breadth and depth of technique employed by these composers.

What I wish the book contained though was a little more contextual information at the beginning of each ‘era’ so to speak – to place and locate it precisely in history. The issue with exploring composers is that at times (quite often), their histories overlap, leading to repetition. This is not a fatal flaw, nonetheless, I did feel that it compromised my own reading of the subject.

Conclusion

I’m looking forward to reading his more “heavy” work, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, very soon. This is definitely a good starting point for anybody interested in understanding classical music better, or for anybody seeking some good classical music recommendations.