This week, for the 2019 Reading Challenge, we're getting stuck into May's theme of "Music and Art" with a tale of murder, a story of love lost, and positive plethora of impressionists.
Sharon reviewed yet another Phryne Fisher mystery (we do have quite a number of them). Brenda found a book that looks at both Manet and Monet (and a few more artists as well). Meanwhile, Special Guest Reviewer Theresa Petray has looked at a fictional song collector (but if you wanted to, you could look at some real folk song collectors and/or collections).
Speaking of "Special Guest Reviewers" - if you've read a book for our challenge, please send us a review - we love to hear about what you've been reading. Email reviews to library@jcu.edu.au.
Having just
returned from Europe and feeling inspired by the amazing art I saw in churches
and galleries, I decided to gain a better understanding of the artists and
their works by reading Impressionists and
Symbolists. Translated from the Italian, this book gives an overview of the
lives and work of Manet, Degas, Monet, Pissaro, Sisley, Renoir, Cezanne,
Seurat, Gaughin, Van Gogh and Tououse-Lautrec.
Naturally the chapters are best read with reference to the
works themselves, and plates are included at the back of the book. The author’s
style is perfect for the reader without any specialist knowledge of art. His
choice of works for discussion is based on what he perceives to be the artist’s
‘perfect works’ – those works that best align with “the artist’s consistency
with respect to himself and his own ideals” (p. 216). The bibliography has a
host of useful inclusions, including a timeline, lists of principal and other
works for each artist and articles about them from the time.
Theresa Petray read The Song Collector, by Natasha Solomons.
The Song Collector has two time lines, both telling the story of Fox, an English landed gentry with a passion for music. One story line begins in the year 2000, and we see Fox grieving the death of his wife. Due to his grief, he is unable to write music. This is a big change for him, because, as the young Fox says of himself, “I have to write down a song if I haven’t heard it before, otherwise it buzzes around like a mosquito in my brain. My problem isn’t remembering tunes, it’s trying to forget them.” But he’s pulled back into the world by discovering that his four-year old grandson (who is a bit of a difficult child) is a piano virtuoso.
The other story line follows Fox in the late 1940s and 1950s as he becomes a man, falls in love, and develops from a collector of folk songs into a composer in his own right. Both stories are mainly set at Fox’s family manor, the aged and slightly crumbling Hartgrove Hall, and the importance of place is central to the stories about music, family, love, ageing, and nostalgia: “I’ve created an elaborate song-map of Hartgrove, of her hills and barrows and dells and woods. I know that, in years to come, I can find my way here again by singing. Perhaps it’s the impending grief of losing our home, but I find myself retreating from the rational and into myth. I hoard songs and stories, visions of a better, older world. I don’t know whether they were ever true, those ballads of clear crystal streams and weeping birds, but I wish I could slide inside a song and escape there for the duration of the melody.”
It starts a bit slow but it sucked me in about halfway through. The characters are believable, all with depth that allows you to empathise with them - including their flaws. Occasionally the dialogue of the British upper class felt ridiculous and put-on, but for all I know that is fully accurate. Otherwise, the writing is compelling.
Fiction, 820 SOL 1C SON
Sharon reviewed yet another Phryne Fisher mystery (we do have quite a number of them). Brenda found a book that looks at both Manet and Monet (and a few more artists as well). Meanwhile, Special Guest Reviewer Theresa Petray has looked at a fictional song collector (but if you wanted to, you could look at some real folk song collectors and/or collections).
Speaking of "Special Guest Reviewers" - if you've read a book for our challenge, please send us a review - we love to hear about what you've been reading. Email reviews to library@jcu.edu.au.
We are beginning to suspect that we could read a Phryne Fisher mystery for every theme in this challenge. Dear old Phryne does get around. In this book, she’s trying to solve the murder of a conductor who was found with a music score stuffed down his throat. Of course, he was a bit of a jerk and nobody in the choir liked him – so Phryne isn’t short of potential killers.
Clearly, there’s nothing for it but to join the choir. That’s the most logical way Phryne could get a handle on all of the suspects and work out exactly who killed the odious man (and exactly how many killers there might have been). Fortunately, Phryne is a dab hand at choral singing. She has sung semi-professionally in choirs before, so she can fit right in with all the other choristers. This should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has read more than one Phryne Fisher mystery – the woman has done everything at least once, and been rather good at it, too.
Kerry Greenwood once said she intended Phryne to be a kind of female Bond – someone who is improbably awesome, and yet you want to believe that they really can abseil into a room for a party and land without a hair out of place. This book kind of borrows another literary detective while it’s at it. Let’s just say if you watched the recent British TV show Sherlock and wished they made more of the homoerotic overtones, this book has you covered.
Fiction, Australian author, 820A GREE 1C MURD
Brenda Carter read Impressionists and Symbolists, by Lionello Venturi.
Having just
returned from Europe and feeling inspired by the amazing art I saw in churches
and galleries, I decided to gain a better understanding of the artists and
their works by reading Impressionists and
Symbolists. Translated from the Italian, this book gives an overview of the
lives and work of Manet, Degas, Monet, Pissaro, Sisley, Renoir, Cezanne,
Seurat, Gaughin, Van Gogh and Tououse-Lautrec. |
| Saint Germain L Auxerrois, by Claude Monet |
Impressionists and
Symbolists is a
quick and easy way to learn some interesting facts and perspectives about this
period of modern art.
Non fiction, An author I haven’t read before,
759 VEN
Theresa Petray read The Song Collector, by Natasha Solomons.
The other story line follows Fox in the late 1940s and 1950s as he becomes a man, falls in love, and develops from a collector of folk songs into a composer in his own right. Both stories are mainly set at Fox’s family manor, the aged and slightly crumbling Hartgrove Hall, and the importance of place is central to the stories about music, family, love, ageing, and nostalgia: “I’ve created an elaborate song-map of Hartgrove, of her hills and barrows and dells and woods. I know that, in years to come, I can find my way here again by singing. Perhaps it’s the impending grief of losing our home, but I find myself retreating from the rational and into myth. I hoard songs and stories, visions of a better, older world. I don’t know whether they were ever true, those ballads of clear crystal streams and weeping birds, but I wish I could slide inside a song and escape there for the duration of the melody.”
It starts a bit slow but it sucked me in about halfway through. The characters are believable, all with depth that allows you to empathise with them - including their flaws. Occasionally the dialogue of the British upper class felt ridiculous and put-on, but for all I know that is fully accurate. Otherwise, the writing is compelling.
Fiction, 820 SOL 1C SON
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