books being read // music appreciated

​    I’m going to ask a question here. How many books have you read so far this year? What are you reading? If you are reading, where do you get your books? As a student, I am constantly reading my textbooks, and I’m also pretty constantly (sometimes to my own detriment) “monitoring the situation”. So I read quite a bit of non-fiction. I also try to throw fiction or historical fiction in there just to keep my brain active and my imagination running. This is what I’ve been reading lately:

• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway - about an American who volunteers to fight for the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. This book was declared "non-mailable" (censored...) by the US Post Office in 1940 and is considered one of the best war novels of all time. Hemingway does not disappoint...
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber - A pretty hefty read of sociological theory that people haven't stopped talking about since it was published. It theorizes on the links between Protestantism (mostly Calvinism) and industrial capitalism in society during the Industrial Revolution and the early Gilded Age. I will just leave the link for the SparkNotes here if you are at all interested.

EDIT:

    Alright...

    So I started working on this post on 3/25/26. Since then, I have been taking online classes at a community college, majoring in Sociology. I have since finished the semester, taking a Sociology 1010 for my major and a Music Appreciation course to satisfy a Humanities credit. I admittedly enrolled in the music course because I thought it would just be "an easy A". (Narrator: It was not.) I figured, how hard can it be? I love music. I grew up singing hymns in church, have played guitar or some other instrument since I was a teenager, and have owned so many records and CDs that I have scoured the booklets and covers of. I knew this stuff already, or so I thought.

    Although it was difficult, and I am now indisputable hater of the tyranny of McGraw Hill's textbooks, I do have a new appreciation for music as a whole, and understand why symphonies are split up into parts. I know why people hated and still hate Wagner and Stravinsky, and also have a new appreciation for fugues, Impressionism, and Expressionism, as well as Minimalism and the avant-garde.

I wanted to share a few pieces of music here that really stuck out to me this semester.

J.S. Bach - "Little" Fugue in G minor:

Pachelbel - Canon in D major:

José Pablo Moncayo - Huapango:

Milton Babbit - Three Compositions:

Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring (1913):

    I hope you listen to these and find something crazy and interesting that you like. I never in a million years thought that I would find myself looking for symphony orchestra LPs or reading about Stravinsky ballets. But hey, life is long, and every day is new, right?

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism