Books and more

Well my last week in the Beehive is off to a predictably slow start so im working my way through some of the books I got for Christmas.

On the present front this was a great Christmas - without even asking I got stuff I wanted.

Today I am not reading a present, but rather a book that was lent to me - Nick Bollinger's How to Listen to Pop Music. Bollinger is a New Zealand music reviewer and this tells his story of how he got into music - its like a cross between High Fidelity and 32 Songs by Nick Hornby. Bollinger makes some great points - Everyone has an opinion on pop or rock music - you know whether you love or hate Robbie Williams etc, but most people wouldnt say whether they loved or hated say a Johnny Coltrane jazz track or a Bach symphony. Primarily because we think you have to have some sort of extra informed knowldge of those forms to comment, yet pop music is no less important or sophisticated but we still all back our opinions on this. Which I think is true - pop is safe and is viewed as unsophisticated, but just like wine - being expensive or held in high regard doesnt mean you have to like it, or that your palate is somehow poorer. I'll fully review the book at some point.

I was also given a book of compiled interviews with Noam Chomsky, which I began reading in Levin at Christmas. Admittedly Levin didnt provide a particularly suitable environment or headspace for reading Chomsky, but I still found it incredibly fascinating.

And finally still on the political front - two books by Barack Obama - Dreams of My Father, and The Audactity of Hope. Dreams is basically the story of his life growing up Black with a funny name in America, and Audacity is his positioning book as he sets himself up to run for the White House in 2008.

So what better way to finish than a quote from Obama -

..... there is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an "awesome God" in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people.