In the Mood: Books and Place

It has been a few weeks since I last posted due to another mini holiday break and some minor health problems.

I am a great believer that reading books or listening to music in the correct location puts you in the right mood to enjoy the experience.

I remember back in 1993 rushing into a book shop in Occoquan VA to purchase In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead by James Lee Burke [and other books] as we drove to the Jefferson Davis Highway [Is that Highway One still named for the Confederate President?] and travelled south to Fredericksburg avoiding the busy Interstate 95. A couple of years before we had listened to Sibelius in Alvar Aalto’s beautiful Finlandia Hall in Helsinki with it -15 outside and thick snow, it wouldn’t have sounded as good in the Royal Festival Hall in London on a summer day. 

I had struggled with the Arctic setting of Olivier Truc’s Forty Days Without Shadow  during a warm spell, and I decided that although the current book I was reading was brilliant [more on that later] it was a 600 page hardback doorstop, and I was not going to carry it to Wiltshire and Oxfordshire. There was an obvious solution I took a shortish 301 page Colin Dexter, The Secret of Annexe 3, and although it is set in a snowy Oxford at New Year, the quintessential dated English setting meant I was in the mood and whizzed through this one, returning home a few days later to lap up the hardback.