バロックの森で夏の読書

土曜日のお楽しみになっているＮＨＫＦＭのエアチェック。今朝はちょいと早めに開始したのですが、おかげで大塚直哉さんの「バロックの森」が聴けました。
番組の最後に流れた「そう信じてしまうおバカさん」という曲（メールラ作曲）。タイトルもなかなかですが、その清々しいバロックハープの音色にうっとり。西山まりえさんという方の演奏でした。
http://www.nhk.or.jp/classic/baroque/

バロック・ハープとの出会い

本日付けの英ガーディアン紙の記事、この夏のお薦めの読書 Let's get together: summer reading recommendations 。
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/17/summer-reading-coalition-books
Margaret Drabble 女史がＧＡ コーエンの本を薦めています。
I recommend Why Not Socialism? by GA Cohen (Princeton), who died last year. This tiny book will fit in any pocket, and it gives a neat summary of the arguments against private greed and for the communal interest. It may lead you to his brilliant work If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Harvard). He has answers to both his questions.

Why Not Socialism?

あなたが平等主義者なら、どうしてそんなにお金持ちなのですか (こぶしフォーラム)

お姉さんの AS Byatt 女史の2冊は次のとおり。
The two books I'd take on holiday are Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction by Rowan Williams (Continuum), and The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (Chatto & Windus).

Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Jackie Kay はオバマ大統領の伝記とアラバマ物語の2冊。なるほどです。
I'm planning to pack David Remnick's The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Picador), a meaty and fascinating biography that you need a whole holiday to pore over. Remnick is compulsive reading because he combines a fiction writer's pace with a biographer's psychological depth. He shows how Chicago's complex racial legacy shaped the young Obama, how he crossed the personal to the political to become who he is today, and how his journey illuminates the journey of our whole society.

Certainly Harper Lee would never have imagined, when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (Arrow), that 50 years later Obama would be president. I'm packing that too, because I want to reread it, to revisit the small town of Maycomb, to remember the words of Tom, the accused black man: "If you was a nigger like me, you'd be scared too." I like to think of the conversation that Lee would have with Obama, or, even better, that Atticus Finch would have with Obama, and to think what can happen in the long and short time of half a century.

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)