Wanted: Recommendations

[thefourthvine]

Dear, dear people: REC ME SOMETHING, PLEASE. Two things, actually. One for the earthling, one for Best Beloved.

Classical Music

The earthling listens to classical music for about two to four hours each evening; it helps him go through his evening routine and get ready for bed. It has to have certain characteristics:

• It can't be super super slow (because he eats to it, and he tends to suck in time to the music, and evening feedings take long enough without something slowing him way down); kind of slow is fine and even welcome.
  
• It can't be too fast (because see above about eating, plus, this is night-time music).
  
• It can't be too varied (it needs to kind of all go together); no Surprise Symphony or anything.
  
• It needs to have, at minimum, several instruments (like, three or more is fine, but one is not - his attention is just not caught by, say, a piano without any other instruments).

For my sanity, it also needs to have these characteristics:

• It needs to be, overall, pretty long (many individual bits is fine, but they all need to add up to something fairly long).
  
• It needs not to be by Ravel or Rachmaninoff. I’m sorry. It just does.

As examples, here are the three things we listen to:

• Handel's Water Music
  
• Some Schubert
  
• Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (The earthling really likes the violin in this.)

I have heard these pieces so many times that I find myself walking in time to them when they aren’t even on. I hum them all day long. I wait patiently for the bits I still like, and think increasingly hostile thoughts about Handel and Vivaldi. I realize repetition is good for a baby, but it is making me crazy. And yet I do not know enough about classical music to know what else might interest a baby who likes these three pieces.

So, if you do know about classical music - can you rec me some stuff? Ideally, it will be available via Amazon’s mp3 service, because I can preview it for the earthling there and see his reaction before I buy it.

Romance Novels

I have presented Best Beloved with a challenge: I will pick romance novels based entirely on their titles (usually in themed sets around a certain word or concept - I am nothing if not theme-oriented), and she will read them and review them on GoodReads. This has provided many hours of entertainment in our household. Except. I have apparently done some terrible, terrible things to her with this. I’ve happened upon some good ones (Nalini Singh, for example, or Lisa Kleypas), but I’ve also managed to pick out some things that caused the blood to drain from her face as she stared at them. She’s starting to twitch when the books come in.

So: have you read any good romance novels lately? I just need a few recs, ones I can build a theme around, so that there’s a cookie or two waiting for her in the seas of badness, so her will doesn’t break. (I don’t want them all to be good - the bad ones provide the most entertainment on GoodReads! But, as has been proven, I can find the bad ones without trying at all; it’s the good ones I need help with.)

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what she likes in a romance novel (although I can link you to her GoodReads account). I can tell you that she does not like:

• Anything with a secret baby. She’s also made geechy by, for example, blackmailing a pregnant woman to get revenge on her dead husband. (The actual plot of one of the ones I found for her. No, really. I was not at all kidding when I said I had no trouble finding bad ones.)
  
• Anything that comes in trade paperack only. Apparently these are...special. One of the early ones she read featured a protagonist with two cocks. It scarred her. She now makes very sad noises when I buy her trade paperbacks, especially if they have warnings on the cover, or those covers that feature Sims-looking people. If you can recommend a good trade paperback one, I’ll get it for her, but I’ll need some help motivating her to read it.
  
• Anything that is really really short and has a title like The Basque Renegade’s Blackmailed Love Child’s Farmer Bride’s Cousin Georgina. I get wounded looks when I get these for her. I don’t know why.
  
• Anything where there’s lots of talk of God and devotion and someone dies at the end.
  
• Anything featuring rape or domination (like, the hero is the master of the heroine, kind of thing) - what she would term “old school” romance.

If you read romance, your input would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Foreword: I am not an authority on any of this, I've just played a lot of violin. Not even very well.

Just about any Vivaldi CD you go and pick up is going to sound much like the Four Seasons, especially violin concertos (of which he wrote zillions: he taught violin at an orphanage). So the Earthling will probably like them, but you may still be driven insane by them - attempt getting some out of the library before you purchase, perhaps, to test?

Something I can tell you (and if you know any of this, I'm terribly sorry for boring you): Vivaldi and Handel are both Baroque composers. What we refer to as "classical music" (orchestral music) is most likely to come from one of three periods: Baroque (Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, etc), Classical (yes, it's tricksy, it's a period within a genre as well as an actual genre; Mozart and Haydn fit in here, and some people put), and Romantic (Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and sometimes Schubert, who is also sometimes a Classicist depending on who's talking and what piece they're talking about.) Baroque music is supposedly decorated or ornamented music, with burgeoning complexity of melody and polyphony; I think one of the things the Earthling likes about it, from what you've said, is that Baroque music usually sustains the same energy level throughout a piece. Classical music was refined, less decorative, aimed for simplicity rather than complexity and often has changing energy levels (i.e. it builds to a dramatic climax and then resolves it); there is more emphasis on dynamics and variety. Romantic music is just what it sounds like, melodramatic. There was a lot of emphasis on moving, passionate melodies.

All of that being said: I think your best bet is probably to try more Baroque, but if you want some variety test out music from different periods. Bach is Baroque and insanely easy to find, very beautiful stuff, his minuets are lovely; the Brandenburg concerti are super-famous and lovely, I highly recommend those (You can hear some samples here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_concerto), although to be honest I find some of that a little fast and recordings might be slower). Also try finding some sonatas. Corelli is nice too. In the classical period, I would check out Mozart and Haydn (Mozart especially is supposed to be good for growing brains, although I have no idea if that's true.) Mozart-wise I recommend looking for his chamber music; quartets, quintets, that kind of thing. String quartets and quintets will sound enough like, say, the Four Seasons not to be startling, but still be very different.

I think Romantic music is probably tooo different, but if he likes Schubert, maybe try some! Tchaikovsky is my absolute faaaaavourite, although to be honest I don't think he's very calming.

[starfishchick]

What a great comment.

And, yes, Corelli is nice!