In Contrast

I'd been half-intending to finish Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet - A Novel of the Plague before setting off for KL. But I didn't, allowing myself to be side-tracked by Robert Philip's A Little History of Music. It wasn't that I put Hamnet entirely to one side, but I deliberately spun out the last third of the story, the segment following the boy's death, slowly reading a few pages at a time to take in the rich detail offered. I suppose I was to some degree distancing myself from the inherent sadness of the text.

In contrast, Philip's survey of music through the centuries never rose to the level of the gripping, but was easy to manage. Briskly informative would be a fair description. 

I finished both today, gaining something from each in its way.