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I've received many inquiries from Website visitors about my favorite authors, composers, and filmmakers. Below are ten titles in each of three categories – books, music and film – which continue to enrich my life. Works are listed in chronological order. I hope these recommendations are more interesting than self-indulgent! A study like Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception took months to read, but it taught me how to see in a new and richer way, much as Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Joyce revealed the immense flexibility of language, as J.S. Bach, Haydn (the most underrated of all great composers), and Beethoven did for music, and as Eisenstein, Dreyer, and Kubrick did for cinema.
I've included specific editions because of their excellence, respectively for annotations (books), performance (music), and image/sound quality (film on DVD). For instance, the profound vision of Dickinson's poetry, unpublished in her lifetime, is fully revealed only in the pricey Variorum Edition, which includes all of her evolving drafts. In a few instances, when an artist revolutionized an entire form, I include box sets, such as Haydn's limitlessly-varied symphonies (all 104 of them), Mozart's and Beethoven's complete works, Kubrick's masterpieces. For public domain books, in addition to Amazon.com, I also provide links – via titles – to free, unabridged online editions. Purchasing any items through my Amazon.com links helps support this Website at no additional cost to you: Thanks! I hope you enjoy these 30 recommendations.
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