Soon to read Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, told by a friend". It's about an insane composer! Can't wait!Natalya
Finally finished C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. Amazing.Also Mother Night by Vonnegut and reread The Dead Zone by Stephen King, followed by The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela. Currently reading The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, a fascinating history of the Dust Bowl of the 1930's. Waiting in line, Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
I've just started reading "The Naked Voice: A Wholistic Approach to Singing" by W. Stephen Smith.
I just finished DAUGHTERS FOR A TIME and really enjoyed it. It's a heartbreaking but inspiring story. If you'd like to know more about it, here's the link to amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Daughters-for-a-Time-ebook/dp/B006JTTH0U/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1339014035&sr=1-1I just started LANG LANG - JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES: MY STORY. I'm not a fan of Lang Lang but I love this book. It's quite a heartbreaking and dramatic story and Lang Lang shows he has a wonderful sense of humor. I'm quoting two paragraphs from the Introduction because I thought the second paragraph was just hilarious and the first paragraph was very enlightening: "Music, my primary language, is the world's universal language, yet each country speaks its own dialect. The West and the East may share much of the same technology, art, sports, fashion, and culture, yet their differences remain vast. Because of cultural expectations, even the same music can sound different here and there. In the West, classical music is an old-fashioned art superseded by rock, hip-hop, and other pop forms that speak to the young. Yet in China, a country closed off to the West during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, classical music is considered the new fashion. Every time I play a concert in China, 90 percent of the audience is younger than twenty years old. When I give a master class there, some families sleep on the sidewalk in order to get a seat, like teenagers do here for rock concerts. Kids in China are learning classical music, and loving it, in staggeringly high numbers. Fifty million kids in China study music, and of them thirty-six million study piano. Every public school has music classes, and half the songs the students learn come from the West. Sales of pianos are falling in the United States, but sharply rising in China. China's love for classical music can often be naive. There's a joke I like to tell about a group of record producers who greeted the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy in their boardroom to discuss a new recording of Chopin's waltzes. The producers sat silently until Ashkenazy asked if they should begin the meeting. "Shouldn't we wait for the composer?" one of them asked. It makes me happy that Chinese piano students feel that classical music is so current and relevant. When a young person says to me, "Hey, Lang Lang, I know you're on Deutsche Gramaphone. I see that Mozart has a deal on that label too," I'm happy. I love the idea that the kid thinks that Mozart is alive and well. Somebody also asked me whether Beethoven plays better piano than Elise or whether Elise plays better than Beethoven (Beethoven wrote piece called Fur Elise). I answered, "What do you think?" I don't mind when a Chinese audice claps in between the movements of a concerto instead of waiting till the end. The love of the music is more important to me than traditional etiquette."
Topic: Book Lovers: What are you reading now? 