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The Great Passion is beautifully written historical fiction based on the life of Bach. In this passage Bach is helping a student get through a particularly difficult passage on the organ but I thought he was giving good life advice:

“This is how we master a problem… We run up to it until we find that it is so familiar that it no longer holds its terrors… Then we can continue without anxiety. You could give it a cheery wave as you say goodbye.”

My third Richard Powers, and the earliest and longest (675 pages) of his that I've read, this one had the least favourable effort to reward ratio. The plentiful, and lengthy, discussions of molecular genetics largely went over my head. (I didn't fare a whole lot better with the Bach.) The fact of someone's thinking to make this a major theme of their novel is strangely pleasing to me, but in practice reading it was hard work. Still a pick, though.

This was just ok considering how much I wanted it to be more. I loved the historical fiction and bit of mystery - seeing major classical music figures come to life was so cool.i could have done with a lot more of that and a lot less of love interests. I didn't really connect with the main character, but she was interesting and it made sense how she was confused about how she felt and through it.

I hope I made the right choice. Huge stack of TBR and this one floated to the top.

This did start a little slower for me, but very much picked up at the end that I actually wanted a little more. I am not sure, if my timing was slightly off for reading this and maybe in a month or so, I would have loved it even more, but it was still a solid read. If you love baroque music or just want to read a good story, then give this one a try.

#selfiescavengerhunt a selfie with a loved one! My son has his first ever Christmas concert since he started playing the cello in September tonight and he‘s both excited and nervous for it. #teamgamesleighers @StayCurious

This is a pretty dated book of music history humor. That said, it‘s still fairly amusing and I would read more by the author. Especially his history of opera, because his dislike for opera is pretty obvious in this one, so I‘d be interested to see how he works that out.

Reading a deep dive into the Elisa Lam case and listening to this newish interpretation of the Goldberg Variations by this brilliant pianist, with my sleeping dachshund at my feet. Reading heaven. #elisalam #paranormal #truecrime #bach