Wicked King, Mozart: performance and posterity, Women detectives, Midwinter wood, Henry V, Venture Capital, Annihilation, Neverwhere, Enchanted Glass

Recent reading (and skimming)

Wicked King

I didn’t read all of this book (the genre isn’t my thing) but it’s very well written and has a cult-classic quality. Here’s the opening.

Their right arms came off with a radial saw. It had taken two nights, the abductions and the dismemberments. The boys spent twenty-four hours bound and drugged. The girls were captive only a couple hours before the tables were ready. Two months later, the ritual site was scheduled for incineration. Mr. Mouse set the timer on the fuse that would burn his former home to carbonized spears and arrows. Then he drove his Aston Martin away from Dick Fenster’s guest house for the very last time.

The publisher, a small press, is on Substack, too.

Mozart: performance and posterity

I spent some time reading about Mozart last year. Not as much as I would have liked. Two books that I found interesting were Mozart the Performer by Dorian Bandy and Mozart & Posterity by Gernot Gruber. Mozart the Performer is beyond me at a technical level, so I worked slowly, listed to the music, asked a talent friend, asked llms, etc. It was a slow (and incomplete) read. But I learned that Mozart really does seem to have developed his compositional talent by improvising in performance, and that this can be seen in his scores. A very interesting book for the right person.