Books and Music

[Jorkens]

Okay, we've had quite a few threads about books and music recently, so here's one about both.

Have you ever listened to a particular album / piece / band / genre a lot at the same time as reading a particular book, and had the two really fit together and complement each other, maybe so much that you develop an association between the two?

I can think of about three times that this has happened.
1) I first read the Gormenghast trilogy at the same time as listening to a copy of Cream's Disraeli Gears I'd nicked from my dad. Something about the epicness and weirdness of both really meshed.
2) I discovered drum and bass at about the same time I started reading William Gibson. In particular, I read Neuromancer at the same time as listening almost constantly to a tape of New Forms by Roni Size and everything in the music - the beats that sounded like nothing else I'd heard, the pace and energy, the soulful female vocals over the top - seemed tailor made to mirror the book.
3) I'm currently reading The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse at the same time as listening to a bunch of Hindustani ragas. Since the book focusses on a society devoted to a reverent, meditative study of music, mathematics, philology, philosophy and so on, the traditional approach to ragas sits almost perfectly with the atmosphere.

[LCR]

I listened to some Caruso operas while reading Der Zauberberg by Mann. I think, it really fit the last scene in the book.


Off topic: Do you really like The Glass Bead Game? While I enjoyed other books by Hesse, the Glass Bead Game bored me to tears ...

[Chunklets]

Purely by chance, the first time I read The Watchmen, I was listening to Hole's Live Through This. For some reason it worked really well, and I still can't pick up that comic without hearing Courtney Love's voice. Weird.

[Ted_Stryker]

I have a few of these that I can think of off the top of my head. I can't speak as to how appropriately the albums or songs fit the books, but they are associated in my head.

Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos <--> The Hobbit, Tolkien
Sea Change, Beck <--> Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, Tad Williams
Whitechocolatespaceegg, Liz Phair & Uranus, the Magician, Holst <--> The Harrowing of Gwynedd, Katherine Kurtz

Also, this isn't a book-to-album association as such, but I find when I put on Radiohead's OK Computer there's a mental connection with certain Toreador NPCs that I designed for a V:tM chronicle back when OKC first came out.

[Dragonrider]

Funny--I was listening to the climax of the "Fellowship of the Ring" soundtrack as I was reading the last few chapters of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It fit weirdly. "The Breaking of the Fellowship" played at Dumbledore's death.

A lot of times, I'll hear a song and associate it ever after with what was going on at that time. Cat Stevens' "Tea for the Tillerman" album will always make me think of driving home at the end of a long car trip, watching the sun set as we came into town.

"Raining in Baltimore" by Counting Crows (my cousin's playing it right now, I can hear it) will always remind me of sitting in our living room at 4 years old, listening to my dad playing it on the guitar. We didn't live in Baltimore, and never had. But it was raining.

[Jorkens]

Off topic: Do you really like The Glass Bead Game? While I enjoyed other books by Hesse, the Glass Bead Game bored me to tears ...
Well, I'm certainly enjoying it. I'd file it next to Love in the Time of Cholera under 'books that are boring in a good way.'

I think it also helps that I'm actually in academia myself - as a pure maths grad student - so a lot of the themes in the book are kind of close to my heart...

[caolle]

asked the missus if things like this ever happened to her and got a weird look :p but i always remember (ok not abook) playing Final fantasy 9 while listening to Pablo Honey when i was younger , these days the chances of reading a series of boks (or playing a long game) without trisha or jeremy kyle appearing on TV instead of being allowed to listen to music are non exsitant :p