Summer Reading - So Many Books, So Little Time

Well not really reading, I should say listening to because these are a couple of books that are on my ipod. 

The Quants was a little long and complicated and required concentration....not an easy book to listen to when treading on the treadmill at the gym.

On the other hand, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers was an easy audio book and so very interesting.  If you haven't read it you should.

And on the topic of reading....you know that you are getting old when you get more excited about reading the Williams-Sonoma catalog than you do about reading the latest fashion magazine. 

Next on my list of fiction books are Terry Pratchett novels and I am determined to finally get through Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

What are all of you reading this summer.  Do you have any recommendations?

Readers by Author

I'm not a huge fan of modern fiction so I can't actually vouch for this Readers by Author list from Lauren Leto via Instapundit.
But I do think that the list is amusing, here's an example:

Jeffrey Eugenides
Girls who didn’t get enough drama when they were younger.
Lauren Weisberger
Girls who can’t read. Or think.
Charles Dickens
Ninth graders who think they’re going to be authors someday but end up in marketing.
William Shakespeare
People who like bondage.
Mark Twain
Liars.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
People who drink scotch.
Joseph Conrad
People who drink old fashioneds.
Michael Crichton
Doctors who went to third-tier medical schools.
John Grisham
Doctors who went to medical schools in the Dominican Republic.
Dan Brown
People who used to get lost in supermarkets when they were kids.

Happy Friday everyone and I hope that all of you get a chance to relax with a book or two this 4th of July weekend.

Summer Reading - Music, History and Joy

On my summer reading list...if I can ever find the time to just relax and read.

From the review in the WSJ by Norman Lebrecht

Destiny in D Minor - The origins and influence of Beethoven's last symphony

Of all Beethoven's works, the Ninth Symphony is the least explicable. What on Earth was he doing decorating its finale with a chorus and soloists singing an ode of Schiller's, ostensibly about joy but in reality about brotherhood and liberation? What is the Ninth about? Is it a charter for social reform or for individual rights? A religious ecstasy? Does the symphony mean to us what it meant to Beethoven? Does it mean anything useful at all?

These are some of the questions that set Harvey Sachs off on a painstaking search to discover the roots of Beethoven's last symphony in the time of its creation. The year was 1824, and the Congress of Vienna had turned Europe back to a network of despotic monarchies, as if the Enlightenment and French Revolution had never happened.

Perhaps the Ninth was all some sort of musical Masonic code.

I shall have to read the book and find out.