Time for music?

I am reading with enthusiasm the Kindle edition of John Sutherland’s How To Be Well Read: A Guide to 500 Great Novels and a Handful of Literary Curiosities. In book form its 516 pages would be a slab best consulted on the kitchen table but the electronic version of this timely new book can be carried in the pocket, ready for browsing wherever you happen to be. 

Sutherland is a witty, stimulating, informative and interesting essayist (read him on Anna Karenina or Great Expectations) whose encyclopedia-style output already includes his invaluable Lives of the Novelists, delivered  in chronological order and published three years ago. In this latest pantheon,  the novels are treated alphabetically, which makes the constant jumps in time an arresting, surprising, even startling experience, like listening to a well-filled iPod Shuffle (where you might find Petrushka suddenly juxtaposed with Elvis Costello) or reading  David Thomson’s alphabetical study of 1000 films, entitled Have You Seen?.   In each case the author’s choices are not “the best,” or “the greatest,” or even “my favourite.” Nor are they the countless things to do “before you die.”  You don’t need to do them at all, but Sutherland certainly helps you to know whether you should or not.  His purpose is different, and guided partly, it would seem, by his moods of the moment. 

 Sutherland, a professor who is no dry academic but by no means unchallenging, puts it this way:  “literature is a library, not a curriculum or a canon.” His book is addressed to the common reader. Anything goes, or appears to.  But, though it starts with DH Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod and Anthony Burgess’s Abba Abba (just as David Thomson starts with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Ace in the Hole), it’s no trivial pursuit.  Buddenbrooks is there, complete with its endless array of Lubeck furniture.  So is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The aim of the book, as I see it, is not only to inform but to give you a good time. 

A similar music book is overdue, though Paul Griffiths’s New Penguin Dictionary of Music, with its sharp modern assessments of established composers, and plenty of mentions of key modern works, makes a good start.

20 May 2014