Another Abandoned Book: The World In Six Songs – Daniel Levitin

Daniel J. Levitin – The World In Six Songs

This was in the new books section at the library. The title sounded intriguing and then I recognized the author’s name. This is the guy that wrote “This Is Your Brain On Music,” a book that I thought I might really like, but eventually abandoned after the first two chapters. I really enjoyed the chapter that explained music construction and theory to people with no music background, it was very well done. However, I was not too interested in the rest of the book and just flipped through the rest and didn’t really read most of it, but I might go back to it. I just don’t have a lot of patience these days for a lot of words unless I find them truly engaging.

I wasn’t sure exactly what the premise of the book was, I gathered that he was going to try characterize all of human history in six songs, which is impossible, but I would be interested to see what someone’s take on that would be. Each chapter has a song subject and a song line associated with it, but the chapter titles are not otherwise informative. The author groups the songs of the world into six distinct groups and each chapter is about that subject– I think. I haven’t actually read the book.

The book is pretty long, and I have other books at home that I would like to read, so I do a bit of pre-reading and skimming to determine how much time I want to devote to a book. It helps if there’s a chapter breakdown, or a table of contents that lists actual contents, rather than just chapter titles. There is an index, and I looked up some of my favorite artists and they were not in the index, so I was a bit disappointed. Then I flipped through the chapters a bit and didn’t find much delineation in terms of content grouping. That bugged me. Then I read snippets and found myself pretty bored overall. And then I decided that I did not want to read this book. There are a couple reasons:

• I might learn something, but I probably won’t enjoy reading it. I know how I feel about music, and I am interested in seeing how other people feel about music, but the way that he writes, or at least the bits that I chose to skim were not very inviting. Those Chuck Klosterman books that I abandoned were much more entertaining reading on music, though the purpose and content of those books is not the same Levitin’s so they probably shouldn’t be compared directly, but who cares. I don’t even know or like some of the musicians that CK writes about, but it’s entertaining reading and it made me more interested in listening to some of those artists.
• I don’t like the layout. I want more of a breakdown of the chapter content. I don’t really seem to like his writing style or the topics that I came across while skimming, but I’m sure there’s some stuff in there that I would very much enjoy reading. However, I couldn’t find it, because I had no help- there were no subject markers besides the chapter titles. Sure, there’s an index, but now that’s too specific and long. And the topics I searched for weren’t even indexed, so I was forced to flip blindly with no guidance. But I don’t want to have to sift haphazardly through 500 pages to find stuff I’m interested in. I want things to be itemized, so I can skip to what I perceive to be the good parts, kind of like how I read magazines or textbooks or cookbooks. In order to draw in readers they have to like the book. If I pre-select the parts I think I will like the best, AND it turns out I actually do like them, then I’m much more likely to go back and read the whole thing.

I determined all of that while sitting on the toilet, so perhaps it’s a bit of a snap judgement. But I knew after skimming only a few pages that I would like CK’s “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs”. Now that I think about it, that CK book didn’t have much more table of content information than “The World In Six Songs”, but the layout was more defined. If you flip through it you’ll see that there are two different fonts used for the two different types of writing inside. And the chapters were shorter, and there were more of them, so it was nicely packaged reading material, perfect for the bathroom.

The book got some good reviews, so there are people out there who like it. I’m just not one of them. Of course, those people who gave it good reviews actually read the book, whereas I did not. :)

UPDATE: 09.21.08

This morning I was thinking about this book again, and I realized that a while back I had come to the conclusion that all songs can be put on the love-hate continuum, so really there is just one subject that songs are about, if hate is a form of love. I don’t think hate can really exist without love, or at least I thought that at one point in time. I remember having those thoughts. That is all.