dollsome

Sorry, it's been a few weeks, but I have books to catch up on!

Homer's Daughter, Robert Graves. This continued to hold up well on reread -- though it does have the feature that you know there's going to be an absolute bloodbath at the end, just like in the Odyssey. I need to reread the Odyssey -- I'm sure there are references I missed, though at least I got the reference to the Iliad where after an important character died the plot stopped for his funeral games. The romance was a small part of the story, but surprisingly adorable. Trying to convince more people to read this so I have people to talk about it with!

Behind Frenemy Lines, Zen Cho. The second in Cho's series of contemporary romances set in London: this is in the same continuity as The Friend Zone Experiment, but there's only one very minor character overlap. Better than its title makes it sound -- it starts by quickly checking off the enemies-to-lovers and fake-dating trope bingo squares, but then goes on to become its own sweet workplace romance. Also super charmed by Charles's cousin who met her wife on Tumblr and their adorable cosplay wedding. I liked it better than The Friend Zone Experiment, though maybe it was that I hadn't read any genre romance in a while. If there's anything I didn't like it's that the characters and their situations felt stereotypical for their gender -- Kriya is dealing with workplace harassment, while Charles is a spectrum-coded workaholic.

Josephine Lang: her Life and Songs by Harald Krebs and Sharon Krebs. Josephine Lang is my newest forgotten woman composer obsession -- a respected contemporary of the Mendelssohns and Schumanns whose career was kickstarted when a Felix Mendelssohn heard her play her own songs. There aren't nearly enough recordings of her songs our there, which is a shame as they are delights: here's Fee'n-Reigen (Fairy Round Dance), one of the songs she composed as a teenager and played on her first meeting with Felix Mendelssohn, and the song of hers that first grabbed my attention -- an unaccompanied choral Ständchen (Lullaby, lyrics here ) from an unpublished manuscript.

Harald and Sharon Krebs are largely responsible for rehabilitating Lang's reputation as a composer, and this book was part of that: it was published in 2007 along with a companion CD, which is unavailable, but fortunately most of the songs discussed can be found to stream online, so I was able to listen along. This is a very readable book (though I skimmed the denser musical analysis) -- Lang's life story is fascinating, though at times depressing -- in her mid-twenties, she fell in love and married Christian Reinhold Köstlin, a law professor and poet, who comes off in the book as a bit of a Romantic failboat. This derailed her career as she took up her new position as a housewife in a small university town without a large musical scene and quickly had 6 children. She did find some time to compose, but had to deal with family health problems (she outlived not only her husband but three of her four sons), which makes for a rather depressing arc, though the book is able to point out the occasional moments of hilarity (link goes to my tumblr, where I've been posting more lately).