Review - Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions (Annik LaFarge)

This is a very interesting, readable book with a fairly extensive bibliography that seems to be part-way between biography and travel writing. Despite my near-complete lack of any background in music, I found it easy to understand and enjoy the descriptions of music--and the availability of the companion website made it that much more accessible.

I went into reading this book with an understanding of Chopin as a symbol of Polish national identity far more than of his work as a pianist and composer--as a Polish American who has had some proximity to the cultural side of American Polonia, having some exposure to Chopin in this context is likely inevitable. The book’s narrative seems to approach Chopin almost from the opposite direction, predicting that the reader is familiar with Chopin first as a piano composer and second as a feature of Polish identity worldwide; I suspect that for such a reader, the way the author deals with Chopin-and-Poland would be just as readable and understandable as I found her approach to Chopin-and-piano-music.

There are places in the narrative where it briefly becomes more a story about someone else (the Marquis de Custine for a while, George Sand fairly regularly), but I don't consider that really a weakness--it is important context, and it is interesting.

All in all, it's a really interesting look at Chopin's impact on many people around the world both during his life and well after his death, but also at how Chopin's world shaped him.

I received an electronic copy of this book free through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca, revised bilingual edition

I finished reading this anthology a few weeks ago, and apparently forgot to ever post a review. While García Lorca is one of the best-known Spanish poets, I was actually quite unfamiliar with his work before picking up this collection. Perhaps starting with an anthology of this size was jumping in off the deep end, but it was an enjoyable experience. Because this edition uses several different translators, there's a lot of variation even beyond what's inherent in the poems. Despite a very limited knowledge of Spanish, I found I enjoyed it being a dual language book--especially for sections where I didn't like some of the stylistic choices of the translations much and could then compare with the original. All in all, a very enjoyable collection of poetry.

Reading Challenges for 2021

I usually do set a numerical goal on the Goodreads reading challenges each year, and find them to be a great way to feel some sense of accomplishment in reading [x] number of books in a given year. Since I also started reviewing some digital ARCs through NetGalley last year, I've been writing more reviews in general (though the non-ARC books I read I may or may not review). I've toyed with the idea of doing some additional challenges before, but haven't--so I'm going to try for it this year! Because this is my first time doing this, I tried to choose challenges that mesh pretty well with what I already tend to read. This means, basically, that they're challenges I could have done okay on with books I read naturally over the course of a year. Yeah, that might not quite be in the "move out of your comfort zone" spirit of many challenges, but it seems like a way to ease into it. So, without further ado, I'm going to be trying the following: Rose City R...

Review - Shikake: The Japanese Art of Shaping Behavior Through Design

I received an electronic ARC of this book through NetGalley for an honest review. I'm never quite sure what to make of the "The [Cultural] [Art, Magic, Theory, etc.] of [Thing]" trend in book titles. I've admittedly not read that many, but they often seem to deal with something that is not so much a unique aspect of the titular culture as merely a method of doing things that is being labeled either by the author's country of origin or, in the case of those written by authors from the same country as the target audience, where the author first "discovered" the method. I get the impression that for this book, it's mostly a "Japanese art" because Naohiro Matsumura is from Japan and uses a Japanese term to describe the book's subject--not because design meant to gently modify behavior and encourage people to engage with aspects of their environment is specifically Japanese (though maybe it is more prevalent in Japan--I don...

Undirected Reading

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