Book 69 - Eric Berne "Games People Play"

Eric Berne "Games People Play" (Penguin)





I'm not sure how I feel about this book. There is some comfort in being handed a template of how to evaluate people's hidden motives, but it seems too amenable to becoming a stereotyping instrument. "Here's the diagnosis; here's how you 'cure' this person". I feel that I'd possibly have a more nuanced understanding if I'd read more of Berne's underlying theory, but this treatment of his concept of Game Analysis is presented as allowing its stand-alone use as a therapeutic tool. I think I'd want more from a transactional analyst than that they'd read this one book.

I also found his attitudes towards gender roles almost excruciatingly archaic, with several implications of victim blaming for rape and domestic violence. Well, I suppose it was written in 1964 by a middle-aged white man living in the USA, but still...

Nevertheless, I found much to interest my curious brain and did enjoy reading the book, those cringe-making moments aside.

Book 70 - David Foenkinos "The Mystery of Henri Pick"

David Foenkinos "The Mystery of Henri Pick" (Pushkin Press)





This is a book about writers, of all sorts, good, bad, tried and failed, tried and succeeded. It is also about readers and publishers and good people and egotistical people which would be the readers because as it is pointed out” Reading is a completely egotistical pleasure. Unconsciously we expect books to speak to us.” It is also inferred that “words always have a destination.” Interesting I never knew that but can acknowledge its truth.

Anyway, a library of rejected books is created within a library in a small town in Brittany. A masterpiece is discovered and attributed to the most unlikely man. As sometimes happens things are blown out of any sense of reality and there are always the outliers who just have to wreak havoc to prove their brilliance and around and around, we go and the mysterious writer has to be defined and the house of cards is crumbling. The story is told in the most delicate of indelicate ways with a slight disconnect between all of the characters and the unreality of every situation.

Amusing little book.

Book 71 - Matthew Boyden " The Rough Guide To Opera"

Matthew Boyden " The Rough Guide To Opera" (Rough Guides)




As an entry into the Rough Guide canon, Opera: The Rough Guide offers a slightly breezy approach to the art form, along with a touch of attitude and a tendency toward British idioms. Like its sibling Classical Music on CD: The Rough Guide, it gives brief biographies of composers, plot outlines of significant works, and recommendations for which recordings are best. Oddly, the book takes a number of strange stabs at politically incorrect figures of the past--comparing Wagner to Hitler because of their shared vegetarian eating habits--and makes some downright erroneous statements: Maria Callas was never a student of Rosa Ponselle at all, much less her "most famous student."

Most of the recordings recommended are fine, though there is a limit on how many compact discs are suggested for any given opera (the maximum seems to be three each), and the authors have a strong prejudice in favor of older recordings. These have the advantage of being generally cheaper and often offer great singing, but the sound is usually far superior on more recent releases, and accurate chorus work is a rarity on many vintage sets. Bearing that in mind, this is a useful volume for someone building an opera collection or learning more about the art form. It might be useful to consult this volume, along with other guides, before investing a lot of money in opera CDs.

Opera has countless loyal fans for whom the Rough Guide will be a beacon for its modern, spirited coverage of the composers, artists, recordings, and the operas themselves. This is the definitive handbook on the subject, spanning nearly four centuries from Monteverdi to the avant-garde. Includes biographical sketches on composers, incisive accounts of hundreds of operas, and a who's who of the finest singers on record.

The combination of music and drama is a thrillingly potent mix, but opera remains off-putting for too many people. Partly this is due to incorrect attribution of social exclusivity, especially in the English-speaking world, but also the sheer diversity of the music. Thousands of operas have been written since Monteverdi and his colleagues pioneered the genre some four hundred years ago, and though many of these are no longer performed the repertoire can still seem daunting. Opera-house schedules place late-Renaissance pageants alongside Italian melodramas or modern psychodramas, and the situation is even more perplexing when you look at the CD catalogue, where you'll find more than two hundred complete recordings of Verdi's operas, for example, and around thirty of La Traviata alone. Whether you're new to opera or are already familiar with many of its masterpieces, THE ROUGH GUIDE TO OPERA is a good guide through this mass of music, providing concise biographies of all the significant composers, incisive discussions of their major works, and detailed surveys of the recordings.

The entire history of opera is covered here, from its beginnings in late-Renaissance Italy to the latest exciting work from contemporary names such as John Adams and Judith Weir. Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, and all the other greats are discussed in depth, as are lesser-known figures from Auber to Zimmerman. Of course, a completely comprehensive guide to opera, even one that restricted itself to opera on CD, would be impossibly unwieldy, so peripheral figures have been excluded, and they have been selective with the output of many composers, concentrating on the key operas. Gaetano Donizetti, for example, wrote more than seventy operas, but the focus is on the ones you're likeliest to encounter either on disc or on stage. Similarly, they pick up Strauss's career with Salome, because it's this opera, his third, that marks the beginning of the work that makes him one of the most successful opera composers of the first half of the twentieth century.