- The Waste Land and Other Poems (T. S. Eliot)
- Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)
- Johannes Brahms (Jan Swafford)
Books Read:
- Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment (Mark Pedelty)
- Band of Sisters: U.S. Women's Military Bands during World War II (Jill Sullivan)
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky)
Mark Pedelty's Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment is such an interesting and inspiring read! Pedelty is an anthropologist who learned to play an instrument and formed a band in order to study musical environmental activism as a participant-observer. In this book (part ethnography, part history) he explores music's ability to promote sustainability, moving from a global to a national to a regional to a local viewpoint. It's really interesting to read about the ways music can affect communities, especially on the local level (this is where the ethnographic viewpoint comes in). This book is super accessible - don't let the title fool you; this is not a book for musicologists (or even musicians) only!
I interlibrary-loaned Band of Sisters when I thought I was going to be writing a paper on a similar topic (women in college bands in WWII), but I decided to read the book even after I changed my topic. The book is a quick read and quite fascinating - I found the writing quite dry, but the information itself is still interesting. Sullivan includes a good amount of oral history, and the thing that stands out the most about this book is how much playing in a band meant to these women - obviously, they are all quite old now, but many still say it was the greatest time of their lives.
I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower with some friends over spring break and realized that I remembered very little about the book (I read it in high school). So I checked the book out from the library and reread it in a couple of days. I appreciated it more than I did in high school - in high school I related to the "wallflower" part, but not much else (which is probably why I didn't remember much), although I do remember that several friends quoted "and in that moment I swear we were infinite" all over the place (which I think was kind of a hipster thing). I liked that the movie acknowledged the popularity of that line by moving it to the very end, instead of pretty early on as it is in the book. I think the movie represented the book really well, and I'm glad it inspired me to reread the book.
I interlibrary-loaned Band of Sisters when I thought I was going to be writing a paper on a similar topic (women in college bands in WWII), but I decided to read the book even after I changed my topic. The book is a quick read and quite fascinating - I found the writing quite dry, but the information itself is still interesting. Sullivan includes a good amount of oral history, and the thing that stands out the most about this book is how much playing in a band meant to these women - obviously, they are all quite old now, but many still say it was the greatest time of their lives.
I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower with some friends over spring break and realized that I remembered very little about the book (I read it in high school). So I checked the book out from the library and reread it in a couple of days. I appreciated it more than I did in high school - in high school I related to the "wallflower" part, but not much else (which is probably why I didn't remember much), although I do remember that several friends quoted "and in that moment I swear we were infinite" all over the place (which I think was kind of a hipster thing). I liked that the movie acknowledged the popularity of that line by moving it to the very end, instead of pretty early on as it is in the book. I think the movie represented the book really well, and I'm glad it inspired me to reread the book.
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