The last time the Olympics came around, we focused our reading suggestions on sport, with some great suggestions from our sport teachers. Here's the link to that list again, if you are interested. Since we wrote that list, The Boys in the Boat has been turned into a Hollywood film.
So, this summer's list is loosely inspired by the BBC Proms - another fixture in the nation's summer calendar - with thanks to Mr Murray, Mr Stamp and the music department for a number of these suggestions.
Quartet: How Four Women Challenged the Musical World - Leah Broad
When do four soloists become a quartet? When they are female composers collected together in creative tension by Leah Broad in this captivating group biography. Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clark, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen were all trailblazers in a musical world largely dominated by the works of dead white men, and Broad’s study of these remarkable composers, while full of amusing anecdotes, is quietly devastating in its portrayal of their treatment by the male establishment, then and now.
Grace Notes - Bernard MacLaverty
'I love this book - it has the best descriptions of music that I've read as the central figure, Catherine McKenna, tries to write her symphony on a Scottish island' - Mr Murray
Returning to Belfast, Catherine McKenna - a young composer - remembers exactly why she left: the claustrophobia, her nagging mother, and the tensions of a city at war with itself. She remembers a more innocent time, when the Loyalists drums sounded mysterious and exciting. This is a novel, about coming to terms with the past and the healing power of music.
Musicophilia - Oliver Sacks
Recommended by Mr Stamp
Oliver Sacks’ compassionate tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own minds. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians and everyday people – those struck by affliction, unusual talent and even, in one case, by lightning – to show not only that music occupies more areas of our brain than language does, but also that it can torment, calm, organize and heal.
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
Recommended by Mr Stamp
Do you know your desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups? Rob does. He keeps a list, in fact. But Laura isn't on it - even though she's just become his latest ex. He's got his life back, you see. He can just do what he wants when he wants: like listen to whatever music he likes, look up the girls that are on his list, and generally behave as if Laura never mattered. But Rob finds he can't move on. He's stuck in a really deep groove - and it's called Laura. Soon, he's asking himself some big questions: about love, about life - and about why we choose to share ours with the people we do.
Soul Music - Terry Pratchett
Recommended by Mr Stamp
Being sixteen is always difficult, even more so when there’s a Death in the family. After all, it's hard to grow up normally when Grandfather rides a white horse and wields a scythe. Especially if he decides to take a well-earned moment to uncover the meaning of life and discover himself in the process, so that you have to take over the family business, and everyone mistakes you for the Tooth Fairy. And especially when you have to face the new and addictive music that has entered Discworld. It's lawless. It changes people. It's got a beat and you can dance to it.
The Noise of Time - Julian Barnes
'This is a novel about Dmitri Shostakovich and his vexed relationship with the Soviet state. Barnes does a brilliant job of giving us a pen portrait of his central character while bringing to life the ordinary indignities of life in Russia under Stalin' - Mr Murray
The Music Shop - Rachel Joyce
1988. Frank owns a music shop. It is jam-packed with records of every speed, size and genre. Classical, jazz, punk – as long as it’s vinyl he sells it. Day after day Frank finds his customers the music they need. Then into his life walks Ilse Brauchmann. Ilse asks Frank to teach her about music. His instinct is to turn and run. And yet he is drawn to this mysterious woman with her pea-green coat and her eyes as black as vinyl. But Ilse is not what she seems, and Frank has old wounds that threaten to re-open, along with a past he will never leave behind. Can a man who is so in tune with other people’s needs be incapable of connecting with the one person who might save him? The journey that these two quirky, wonderful characters make in order to overcome their emotional baggage speaks to the healing power of music—and love—in this poignant, ultimately joyful work of fiction.
Take Nothing With You - Patrick Gale
An evocative exploration of the joy and pain playing an instrument can bring that echoes the author’s musical youth
Freedom - Jonathan Franzen
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbour who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world.
But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outré rocker and Walter's old college friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to poor Patty?
Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbour", an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?
Music and the Mind - Anthony Storr
Recommended by Mr Stamp
Why does music have such a powerful effect on our minds and bodies? It is the most mysterious and most tangible of all forms of art. Yet, Anthony Storr believes, music today is a deeply significant experience for a greater number of people than ever before. In this book, he explores why this should be so. Drawing on a wide variety of opinions, Storr argues t hat the patterns of music make sense of our inner experience, giving both structure and coherence to our feelings and emotions. It is because music possesses this capacity to restore our sense of personal wholeness in a culture which requires us to separate rational thought from feelings that many people find it so life-enhancing that it justifies existence. The author also wrote "Churchill's Black Dog".
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro
Recommended by Mr Stamp
In Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood Hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to café musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning.
Gentle, intimate and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme - the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older, relationships founder and youthful hopes recede.
Evening in the Palace of Reason - James Gaines
(Recommended by a parent)
In one corner, a godless young warrior, Voltaire's heralded 'philosopher-king', the It Boy of the Enlightenment. In the other, a devout if bad-tempered old composer of 'outdated' music, a scorned genius in his last years. The sparks from their brief conflict illuminate a turbulent age. Behind the pomp and flash, Prussia's Frederick the Great was a tormented man, son of an abusive king who forced him to watch as his best friend (probably his lover) was beheaded. In what may have been one of history's crueler practical jokes, Frederick challenged 'old Bach' to a musical duel, asking him to improvise a six-part fugue based on an impossibly intricate theme (possibly devised for him by Bach's own son). Bach left the court fuming, but in a fever of composition, he used the coded, alchemical language of counterpoint to write 'A Musical Offering' in response. A stirring declaration of faith, it represented 'as stark a rebuke of his beliefs and world view as an absolute monarch has ever received,' Gaines writes. It is also one of the great works of art in the history of music. Set at the tipping point between the ancient and the modern world, the triumphant story of Bach's victory expands to take in the tumult of the eighteenth century: the legacy of the Reformation, wars and conquest, the birth of the Enlightenment. Brimming with originality and wit, 'Evening in the Palace of Reason' is history of the best kind - intimate in scale and broad in its vision.
Read magazines for free!
The Pressreader app / website is a good, free way to encounter magazines and newspapers. A pupil will require a Norfolk library card, enabled for online services (the library will be happy to enable this, and to provide a PIN).
Pupils then visit www.pressreader.com on a device, select ‘Library or Group’, start typing ‘Norfolk’, and then select Norfolk County Council from the list. Data fields for library card and PIN then appear. Once logged in, the page can be bookmarked, and library card number and PIN stored. The apps for tablets and mobile devices are nice to use.
(Pupils can also access foreign language titles.)