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Shanidar is reading...
Professional geek, crafter and shoemaker by day. Avid reader, Doctor Who fan and nerd all the time.
Currently reading
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
Sock Knitting Master Class: Innovative Techniques + Patterns from Top Designers
About Time 1: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who
Patternmaking for a Perfect Fit: Using the Rub-off Technique to Re-create and Redesign Your Favorite Fashions
The Darkroom Of Damocles
Van Gogh: The Life
The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting
Drums of Autumn
La fortuna de los Rougon
Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved
Taking as an excuse the analysis of a Beethoven's lock of hair, "Beethoven's hair" is the biography of the musician, but also of all these people who owned the lock and the History through which it traveled. It is a very emotive story, full of hypotheses and subjective novelization mixed with facts and data.
But in spite of all that, it is not a pleasant reading.
The text is full of exceedingly complex subordinate sentences (some of them 9 lines long with commas, dashes and additional comments,) furthermore the author repeats the same sentences, comments and stories once and again. In every chapter he sends us back and forth, and back again, retaking the tale from where he left us pages ago to talk about a friend of the brother of the neighbor of someone who passed by the current owner of the lock... Did he review his writing before sending it to the editor? Did the editor really read the book?
Very poor writing, really.
On the other hand, it's a lovely story to know and a good way to appreciate the little facts that make single lives special ones.
I really loved the story (all the different stories that compose this book), the idea to explain it through a lock of hair, the way to alternate Beethoven's biography with the ones who owned the lock and the progress of the investigation, the emotions, the music sensibility, and the serendipity of all that... and only based on this I would surely give a better rating (in fact, I'm giving a very high rating for my own standards). But I felt dizzy reading it, and if I weren't on holidays, I would have probably abandoned the reading.
The same data in other hands would have made a five stars book.