This book consists on roughly 30 rather short chapters “on music, sound and us”. Some really are about music, but most try to get a grasp at the difference between music and sound, and all of them are focused on the impact that this music/these sounds have on us. By “us”, the author means sometimes us, sometimes animals, and often himself, in a kind of self-referential anthropology. (Is there such a genre as auto-nonfiction?) There is also a reflection on what makes some artists famous, and on how famous artists eventually went into oblivion, from Beatrice Harrison to Nana Mouskouri. Or why we keep some records we don't even listen.

Although I could read the first part very rapidly, with pretty good focus, I got stuck at some point, perhaps because I didn't feel enough engagement with some chapters. The end of the book gets into quite personal matters, and that was more interesting to me.

The author, Michel Faber, has published a dozen of novels, some got prizes, which shows that he can write, obviously, and he's done his researcgh, but I felt that the book lacked some unity, or rather some directing force. There is no apparent reason for the succession of chapters, and I was sorry to observe that a few of them end with stereotyped, if not bland, remarks.

But I love music, I listen to music almost all of the time (except that tinnitus bothers me too much, but the author also has it and discusses it a little bit), CD-buyers nerds would say that I own not so many recordings but that is already too much for my wife's taste (and the size of our shelves), I have a slightly complicated relation with the one I listen live, for example, which, when not free enough bores me, and when too free may just bring more fatigue, so that this personal reflection of the author on a significant part of his life resonated in me and I'm glad to have found it on a table during one of my excursions into London bookstores.