Musicophilia
I’m starting a new category here on books I’ve read, mostly to keep track of what I’ve read and what I thought about it.
I’ll start with Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. I read about this in Wired and maybe somewhere else on the web also. I even posted about it before getting around to buying the book.
Musicophilia was an excellent read. It constantly made its way into conversations, especially when I started reading it, and people always found it very interesting. Epilepsy attacks triggered by music, musical hallucinations, music and amnesia, music therapy for Parkinson’s, the “hypermusical” Williams Syndrome are all fascinating topics. Oliver Sacks is curious, compassionate, and awe-struck about all the cases, and his narration flows perfectly. My only reserve on this book is that it felt like a procession of cases and rarely took the time to find common threads or arrive at conclusions. Maybe that wasn’t the point, but I missed that sense of “getting somewhere”.
I got the same impression from Malcom Gladwells Blink. However, the cases in both are so interesting and compelling that not only do they make a great reading, they also stay with you.
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