Samuel Hsiao
I am not someone who reads a lot of nonfiction, at least for leisure. It’s not that I don’t enjoy nonfiction, or think that it can’t be interesting. In fact, some of the most interesting things in the world exist, well, in the world and is thus documented in nonfiction. This is not limited to stories as can be found with history either, I bet everyone has a part of the natural world that they find fascinating, and they would be interesting in reading about (provided the text is sufficiently well written).
So I think my aversion to reading nonfiction for leisure is mostly due to the fact I have to read a lot of nonfiction for classes and not a personal problem with the genre. Although one genre of nonfiction that I haven’t been able to get back into recently are the biographies, which is odd as I used to read a fair bit of it. I guess my current view can be summed up as that biographies don’t necessarily offer the narrative and thematic cohesion which I want to see in fictional works; also, for a nonfiction work I don’t tend to find the summary approach that some biographies take to be very interesting or informative, other than for writing your own summary on a person’s life. That is not to say that all biographies are uninteresting though, in fact, today I am going to recommend a biography that I found an enjoyable read. That is Beethoven by Marion Scott.
Marion Scott was a musician and music critic that lived around the late 19th and early 20th century. While perhaps not well known today, she was very influential in the world of music in her time. While she was a prolific writer, she only ever published one full length book: Beethoven, a comprehensive biography of Beethoven and his works.
While Scott’s work contains all of the hallmark of any other biography, that is the recounting of a person’s life interspersed with minute details, what makes it interesting is that the author is able to tie the events of Beethoven’s life with the music that he was composing at the time. So, if you are even somewhat familiar with the work that Beethoven composed, then Scott’s work can do a lot to contextualize the music. However, even for those unfamiliar with the music, Scott strikes a good enough balance with her description of various works that such readers are able to get a good understanding of the nature of each work while avoiding being bogged down in technical detail; in fact, I would argue that Scott does a great job of introducing some of the lesser known works of Beethoven by presenting them as works that are as interesting in their own right as the more famous works. And Scott is able to present all this in an enjoyable writing style that avoids being a dry, categorical recounting of events while remaining an accurate record of a person’s life. I would highly recommend checking out the book, which is available at the Rutgers Library, if you are interested in musical history or just a well-written biography.
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