Urlaubslektüre

Noch vor dem Urlaub habe ich zur Einstimmung dieses Buch gelesen, bzw. die vielen schönen Fotos bewundert:

William WARREN

PHUKET

Pearl of the Orient

Kurzbeschreibung:This volume depicts the island of Phuket, situated off the western coast of the Malay Peninsula, in more that 140 colour photographs, including views of Phang Nga Bay, beaches, historical sites and more.

Im Urlaub selbst habe ich folgende Bücher gelesen, wobei mir der Aaronovitch wieder besonders gefallen hat und ich mich schon sehr auf den dritten Teil dieser Serie freue. Und obwohl mir Stephen Fry's ironischer, englischer Humor sehr gefällt, bin ich mit diesem Buch nicht so richtig vorwärts gekommen - ich bin immer eingeschlafen. Aber das liegt vielleicht auch an den langen Whiskynächten...

Ben AARONOVITCH
Moon Over Soho

Kurzbeschreibung: I was my dad's vinyl-wallah: I changed his records while he lounged around drinking tea, and that's how I know my Argo from my Tempo. And it's why, when Dr Walid called me to the morgue to listen to a corpse, I recognised the tune it was playing. Something violently supernatural had happened to the victim, strong enough to leave its imprint like a wax cylinder recording. Cyrus Wilkinson, part-time jazz saxophonist and full-time accountant, had apparently dropped dead of a heart attack just after finishing a gig in a Soho jazz club. He wasn't the first. No one was going to let me exhume corpses to see if they were playing my tune, so it was back to old-fashioned legwork, starting in Soho, the heart of the scene. I didn't trust the lovely Simone, Cyrus' ex-lover, professional jazz kitten and as inviting as a Rubens' portrait, but I needed her help: there were monsters stalking Soho, creatures feeding off that special gift that separates the great musician from someone who can raise a decent tune. What they take is beauty. What they leave behind is sickness, failure and broken lives. And as I hunted them, my investigation got tangled up in another story: a brilliant trumpet player, Richard 'Lord' Grant - my father - who managed to destroy his own career, twice. That's the thing about policing: most of the time you're doing it to maintain public order. Occasionally you're doing it for justice. And maybe once in a career, you're doing it for revenge.

Stephen FRY
Stephen Fry's InComplete & Utter History

of Classical Music

Synopsis: 'Hello, I'm Stephen Fry. Now time for the first outing of a brand, spanking new feature here on "The Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music"...putting some unsuspecting figure in music under the spotlight.' In his "Incomplete & Utter History of Classical Music", Stephen Fry presents a potted and brilliantly rambling 700-year history of classical music and the world as we know it. Along this musical journey he casually throws in references to pretty much whatever takes his fancy, from the Mongol invasion of Russia and Mr Khan (Genghis to his friends), the founding of the MCC, the Black Death (which once again became the new black in England), to the heady revolutionary atmosphere of Mozart's Don Giovanni and the deep doo-doo that Louis XVI got into (or 'du-du' as the French would say). It's all here - Ambrose and early English plainsong, Bach, Mozart (beloved of mobile phones everywhere), Beethoven, Debussy, Wagner (the old romantic), right up to the present day. Entertaining and brilliantly written, this is a pretty reckless romp of a history through classical music and much much more.

Zu den Büchern, die mir mein Mann noch vor dem Urlaub von der Post geholt hat, bzw. zu den Lieferungen von Amazon, die während meines Urlaubs gekommen sind, gibt es dann morgen einen ausführlichen Post.