February reading

February is usually the worst month, but March is not off to a great start.

There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak

Shafak is a good writer, and there are some lovely sentences in this novel that links three lives--Arthur Smith, living in Victorian London; Narin, a Yazidi girl in Turkey in the 2010s; and Zaleeka, a hydrologist living in London in the 2010s who grew up in Iraq. Water is one link; Nineveh is another. All three characters have tough lives, albeit for very different reasons. The ending is not as depressing as I was expecting, but it's definitely not happy. Shafak does explain a lot of the book in the book, which is a little laborious, and the thread about whether water has memory is more fiction than science, but I still enjoyed it.

Richard Strauss: An Intimate Portrait, Kurt Wilhelm

Strauss is my favorite opera composer (I've liked all four I've seen--Ariadne auf Naxos, Capriccio, Elektra, and Salome), but I didn't know much about him. I picked up this in a used book store on a whim. There isn't much music analysis in this biography (apparently there are other books focused on his work); Wilhelm focuses more on Strauss' life and times. One thing that I found interesting is that he lived through several political transformations, from a king of Bavaria in childhood to seeing the Allies defeat the Nazis. Wilhelm seemed at his happiest when dishing about what other musicians and composers thought of one another, which was largely negative. He has a lot of anecdotes about Strauss being at the same party as, say, Berlioz, but the composers never spoke. So much tea! I also learned that "strauss" means "ostrich," and Strauss was frequently shown as an ostrich in caricatures of the time. Strauss wasn't a Nazi, but he did serve the Nazi government in a couple of ways, particularly overseeing the Bayreuth festival after Toscanini dropped out in protest. According to Wilhelm, after a year or so of appeasement, Goebbels showed up at Strauss' house, shouted at him for an hour, then issued a warrant for his arrest that was never executed.