Welcome to Litsy!

My favorite #musician is my offspring B! They‘ve been playing the cello for 5 years now. This was from a fiddle club performance from earlier this summer. #CharacterCharm

Before anyone gets hot under the collar, the Passion in question is Bach's St Matthew (and music more generally). 🙂
I love Bach and, completely unreasonably, expected reading this book to feel like listening to his music. Well... it wasn't that, although the rehearsing and first performance of the StMP was truly evocative. Otherwise it tends towards overlong and has saggy-middle-syndrome. JSB comes across as tiresome but I loved all the context.

I took about 10 books to a charity shop the other day and came home with only two new ones! ?
Raymond Briggs's "When the Wind Blows" was one, the tagged being the other.
When first published in 1925, it seems it was presented as the diary of J.S. Bach's wife, not, I think, with an intention to deceive but as a literary device. Anyway, its reception was positive in terms of sales, but critically panned as mawkishly sentimental.

I love the gorgeous cover of this book, and how the title is displayed like sheet music. As a lover of classical music with a profound interest of the darkest time in Europe, this story grabbed me. A secret hand written musical script is kept throughout the centuries, nearly destroyed after WW2, and discovered again many years later. Its new guardians soon discover that anti-Semitism is not so distant in the past.

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.