Recent books
Hard to break these down by month since I read so many simultaneously. (That has its own advantages--see below.)
Blog Marketing - I wanted to get some ideas on promoting Moxie with a blog and wound up starting my own more general music blog. This being a marketing book, a lot of the benefit was in the segmentation plus the examples and links. Not the most rewarding read of the year, but it did get the ball rolling.
The Naked Brain (Richard Restak) - I've read a couple other books by Restak. It's science writing on neurology, a topic of some interest to me. Learning more about the brain makes happiness much easier to explain and much more complicated to obtain.
Musical Form (Robert E. Tyndall) - reviewed here.
The Power of Logical Thinking (Marilyn vos Savant) - Marilyn is fascinating. There are three significant parts of this book: the Monty Hall story, the fallacies, and the Presidential race (of 1992, described after the fact). The Monty Hall debate becomes a sociological study in this retrospective. The deconstruction of tactics, claims and "facts" in the 1992 race is interesting. But what I found useful and will need to reread is the section on common logical fallacies--equivocation, amphiboly, accent, figure of speech, composition, division; affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent; four terms, undistributed middle, illicit major, illicit minor; ignoratio elenchi, tu quoque, argumentum ad populum, argumentum ad vericundium, argumentum ad misericordium, argumentum ad baculum, argumentum ad ignorantium; petitio principii, circulus in porobando, secundum quid, post hoc ergo propter hoc, reductio ad absurdium, and non sequiter. I wish I could say I had mastered the distinctions, but at least I can recognize several when I read them--as I did immediately in a book I've almost finished. (This is why it pays to read books simultaneously.) More importantly, how did I get a graduate degree in science without a course in logic? The textbook I bought a couple years back may move to the top of the to-be-read pile.
The Discoverers (Daniel Boorstein) - Many people on my flist have read and enjoyed Boorstein, and now I have too. I want to read another, but these are mighty tomes full of ideas, a huge edifice to observe.
Horns, Strings and Harmony (Arthur H. Benade) - The physics of music, explaining things like why violins have wolf notes, why the two main clarinet breaks occurs where they do (and saxophone), why the finger holes on woodwinds get progressively larger toward the bell but are of constant size on the flute, how a trombone player can get a three-note chord by playing one note and singing a second, and why a trumpet and violin can play parallel octaves in tune with little difficulty but an oboe and English horn are a perilous combination (as I learned experimentally with an arranging mistake in high school). This was written by a physicist for technical people, so the insights for a practicing musician are obscure but very interesting. I need another pass through this, but it might be good to get a different take on it. Might be hard to find another text written as clearly, though. I'll probably go for a history of the trumpet or something.
Andrew North Blows Up the World (Adam Selzer) - Written for younger YA, this has the same style, pacing and plotting of Adam's previous three books. The threads come together beautifully at the end, and he manages a tightrope act in the kid's belief system.
Plus I found a leather-bound, gilded Scarlet Letter on sale (20% off) at a used bookstore where I had some trade credit. I love nice books like that, but it has to be a book that's worth the binding. I almost bought Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain because it's on my list to read, but I only read gilded books in the dining room, and it would be a long time before I got to it.
Blog Marketing - I wanted to get some ideas on promoting Moxie with a blog and wound up starting my own more general music blog. This being a marketing book, a lot of the benefit was in the segmentation plus the examples and links. Not the most rewarding read of the year, but it did get the ball rolling.
The Naked Brain (Richard Restak) - I've read a couple other books by Restak. It's science writing on neurology, a topic of some interest to me. Learning more about the brain makes happiness much easier to explain and much more complicated to obtain.
Musical Form (Robert E. Tyndall) - reviewed here.
The Power of Logical Thinking (Marilyn vos Savant) - Marilyn is fascinating. There are three significant parts of this book: the Monty Hall story, the fallacies, and the Presidential race (of 1992, described after the fact). The Monty Hall debate becomes a sociological study in this retrospective. The deconstruction of tactics, claims and "facts" in the 1992 race is interesting. But what I found useful and will need to reread is the section on common logical fallacies--equivocation, amphiboly, accent, figure of speech, composition, division; affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent; four terms, undistributed middle, illicit major, illicit minor; ignoratio elenchi, tu quoque, argumentum ad populum, argumentum ad vericundium, argumentum ad misericordium, argumentum ad baculum, argumentum ad ignorantium; petitio principii, circulus in porobando, secundum quid, post hoc ergo propter hoc, reductio ad absurdium, and non sequiter. I wish I could say I had mastered the distinctions, but at least I can recognize several when I read them--as I did immediately in a book I've almost finished. (This is why it pays to read books simultaneously.) More importantly, how did I get a graduate degree in science without a course in logic? The textbook I bought a couple years back may move to the top of the to-be-read pile.
The Discoverers (Daniel Boorstein) - Many people on my flist have read and enjoyed Boorstein, and now I have too. I want to read another, but these are mighty tomes full of ideas, a huge edifice to observe.
Horns, Strings and Harmony (Arthur H. Benade) - The physics of music, explaining things like why violins have wolf notes, why the two main clarinet breaks occurs where they do (and saxophone), why the finger holes on woodwinds get progressively larger toward the bell but are of constant size on the flute, how a trombone player can get a three-note chord by playing one note and singing a second, and why a trumpet and violin can play parallel octaves in tune with little difficulty but an oboe and English horn are a perilous combination (as I learned experimentally with an arranging mistake in high school). This was written by a physicist for technical people, so the insights for a practicing musician are obscure but very interesting. I need another pass through this, but it might be good to get a different take on it. Might be hard to find another text written as clearly, though. I'll probably go for a history of the trumpet or something.
Andrew North Blows Up the World (Adam Selzer) - Written for younger YA, this has the same style, pacing and plotting of Adam's previous three books. The threads come together beautifully at the end, and he manages a tightrope act in the kid's belief system.
Plus I found a leather-bound, gilded Scarlet Letter on sale (20% off) at a used bookstore where I had some trade credit. I love nice books like that, but it has to be a book that's worth the binding. I almost bought Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain because it's on my list to read, but I only read gilded books in the dining room, and it would be a long time before I got to it.