Reading, Reading....

I am buoyed up and wafted o'er the Ocean of Consciousness lately on a Raft of Books: Michel de Montaigne's Journal de Voyage (of a journey he made in 1580 -- '81 from France, through Switzerland, Germany [and I think Austria], northern Italy, and back to Gascony--basically going from spa to spa, looking for a cure for the [Kidney] Stone[s] which so tormented and "unwenched" him. It's a wonderful book to pick up and nibble at from time to time--and sometimes to sit for an hour or so and make a whole meal of); Daniel Heartz's Music in European Capitals (which I supplement by going online and downloading from YouTube examples of the music referred to--things as enchanting as symphonies of Sammartini, operas of Hasse and Graun, violin concertos of Tartini and LeClair, and even "choral" finales [such as Mozart and da Ponte are mistakenly thought to have invented] from operas by Galuppi and Goldoni); K blows top, by Peter Carlson (an eminently readable account of Krushchev's trips to America in 1959 and 1960, and a very good, concise history of Krushchev's rôle in Russian and international politics); Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential (a funny, exquisitely well-written, perfectly scandalous memoir of a contemporary chef de cuisine); and [last but by no means least] Art Without Borders by Ben-Ami Scharfenstein, which contains much of peculiar interest to me personally.