Music Find: Slavic Soul Party!

I never thought of National Geographic as a source of music discoveries, but yesterday I read about a group on their site that sounds really neat. Here's what NG has to say:

Slavic Soul Party! —one of several GeoRemixed tracks with Balkan and Mediterranean influences—are known for their acoustic mash ups. "Teknochek," a remix of a track to be released on their forthcoming Spring release, Teknochek Collision, adds an electronic layer to their already funkified big brass sound.

The name is great and the site has samples of their music. I'm definitely interested in Teknochek now!

Regional Reading

I'm interested in the idea of consciously choosing reading based on what part of the world it's from. It's an idea I've run into in two different ways recently.

One was here with the Reading Across Borders Challenge. The idea is to look at your reading and see what regions you tend to stick to in your books. Then, pick some other parts of the world and start exploring.

The other was somewhere else that I've forgotten now. That person was making a list of books to read by authors from her state (in the U.S.) and bordering states - to see her part of the world through others' eyes.

I think both ideas could be interesting projects. I probably am not going to do either one right now, but I still like the concepts.

Owly

I can't say enough good things about Owly.

A friend gave me a signed copy of the first book in the Owly series a couple years ago and it was love at first owl. It's a series of graphic novels that tells stories through pictures only - no text. The stories are sweet, sad, and hopeful. Friendship features prominently. These would be good for any age, I think. They're fantastic.

Here's the first one: Owly: The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer by Andy Runton.

this picture speaks for itself

Originally uploaded by vfm4.

The End of Mr Y: An Attempted Review

I recently finished reading The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas, which is really quite good. My enjoyment of it was somewhat uneven, though, because I found some parts of the book very interesting and others...not un-interesting, but scannable. There's a major mystery in the book and details about this mystery are revealed more and more as the story progresses. The thing is - the details about the mystery were probably the least engaging parts for me. I'd have preferred to just read about the narrator's thoughts and life. That's still a positive review. (It's a hard book to talk about, because I think it's really a novel with surprises/suspense that a review could deflate a bit. It is suspenseful in a smart and interesting way.)

Somehow, Scarlett Thomas manages to mix a complex, suspensful story with the narrator's thoughts and conversations about topics in the fields of (strange) science, religion, philosophy, and linguistics without those two elements feeling disjointed.

Oh, and I want the job Scarlett has at the start of the book - writing a column for a magazine where she picks one topic, thoroughly researches it, writes about it, and then uses some link from that topic to find the topic for the next issue. Whatever she's interested in - that's her subject. Pretty great.

But anyway - all that to say...I enjoyed it!

Welcome!

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. -Abraham Lincoln