If you have been following this column for a while, you know I am an obsessive reader and accumulator of books. Some of you may recall my account of my discovery, decades ago, of “forthcoming books.” I used to pore over bound volumes listing forthcoming books in the reference section of the library (these were compiled by the same outfit that gave us Books In Print, a bibliographic database); believe it or not, I would do that for hours at a time, entering in a notebook the publication data for titles that sounded interesting. And of course there were the special biannual issues of Publishers Weekly, deliciously stuffed with info on titles coming in the spring and fall.
In the digital era, these lists have proliferated to such an extent that we are bombarded with them virtually year-round. Even for the besotted, like me, it’s hard not to feel a certain weariness of spirit at the prospect of yet another list. (“The Best Books of August,” say; I just saw one such the other day, from the New York Times Book Review, I think, so woke as to invite parody.) Nevertheless, now and then I can’t resist the impulse to tell you about a few books, just out or coming down the road a bit.
For instance, in mid-September, Princeton University Press will publish Broadcasting Fidelity: German Radio and the Rise of Early Electronic Music, by Myles W. Jackson. “Oh, dear,” you may be thinking. “This sounds like a book that at least twenty or thirty people in the United States will be interested in.” You’re quite mistaken:
In the early days of radio, acoustical distortions made it hard for even the most discerning musical ears to differentiate instruments and voices. The physicists and engineers of interwar Germany, with the assistance of leading composers and musicians, tackled this daunting technical challenge. Research led to the invention in 1930 of the trautonium, an early electronic instrument capable of imitating the timbres of numerous acoustical instruments and generating novel sounds for many musical genres. Myles Jackson charts the broader political and artistic trajectories of this instrument, tracing how it was embraced by the Nazis and subsequently used to subvert Nazi aesthetics after the war and describing how Alfred Hitchcock commissioned a later version of the trautonium to provide the sounds of birds squawking and flapping their wings in his 1963 thriller The Birds.
Delicious! (You could put together a wonderful special issue of a magazine focusing on recent scholarly books that explore the world of radio from different angles—books that tend to be noticed only by academics specializing in this or that subfield but that could be juxtaposed for the enterprising “general reader.”)
Another book, entirely different, just out from Harvard University Press, will interest any reader who is, like me, besotted with the passionate contrarian Simone Weil, whose life and writings have inspired me while also, now and then, driving me nuts. Its admirably unpretentious title will give you the gist: A Life in Letters, edited by Robert Chenavier and André A. Devaux. When Publishers Weekly reviewed the (then-forthcoming) book several months ago, the reviewer began thus: “This inessential collection traces the personal life of French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) through the letters she sent to her mother, father, and brother.” It was fascinating to me, when I read that mini-review, to compare it to others that appeared on the same page. No other books featured were deemed “inessential.” It would be tacky of me to list the titles of these, and you can make up your own mind as to whether you want to check this one out. For me, it was a no-brainer. (I hope it will be reviewed in the pages of First Things!)
If you have a minute to let me know about a forthcoming book or two that you are particularly anticipating, please do so. Despite all the countervailing forces, there are still more interesting books being published than any reader (or august assembly of readers) can keep up with. I look for “intelligence reports” wherever I can find them (including the much-maligned X, formerly known as Twitter, where I have first learned about many books that I’ve gone on to read with profit). Happy reading!
John Wilson is a contributing editor for the Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at the Marginalia Review of Books.
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Image by Shiba Kōkan, from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain. Image cropped.
