Good word

I was doing a crossword puzzle this morning. The clue was "speak evil of" for a seven letter word. The answer was "traduce". I can't remember the last time I heard or read traduce. It brought to mind the vocabulary workbook Wordwealth, aka WW, that we used in high school. I think it was meant to boost our SAT scores. Traduce is definitely a WW word and obviously a crossword word too.

Of recent book and music discoveries, I have no cause to traduce. Thanks to family members of good taste and who also know me pretty well, I have enjoyed some fine reading. I just finished the novel "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss. In the middle I wasn't quite sure just where she was headed with the story. All the threads were unraveling and it was a bit confusing, but it ended wonderfully, reminding me that love comes in many forms and it is often in disguise.

"The Uncommon Reader" was a delightful welcome diversion from work. It's about the queen of England who late in life becomes an avid reader. She wants to read a good book instead of cutting one more ribbon or attending one more royal function. I found myself remembering when young Amy Carter was criticized by the press corps for having her nose in a book at a White House dinner. I'm sure whatever she was reading was a lot more interesting to a kid her age than the adult conversation going on around her. Hmm, not unlike a preacher's kid.

Now I am reading "Little Heathens" by Mildred Armstrong Kalish which is the story of her childhood growing up in the depression in a small town in Iowa. I find it has tapped wisps of memories from my own childhood of great aunts and uncles who I met on rare occasion who still lived on the farms and small towns of rural Ohio. She referred to her family members as "hearty-handshakes Methodists". I knew exactly what she was talking about only mine were hearty-handshakes Presbyterians. To this day I feel awkward hugging my own brother. I bet he'd feel a lot more comfortable with a hearty handshake, don't you know.

My music choices gone to something old and something new. The something old is the first violin concerto by Max Bruch. I turned on the radio recently and came in on the middle of the second movement of the work. I was simply transfixed. I knew the work but couldn't place it. The announcer said Isaac Stern was the soloist and I had indeed heard him play that exact work in concert a jillion years ago. I went to iTunes and (thank you son) downloaded Shlomo Mintz playing the Bruch with the Chicago Symphony. It is a wonderful work.

Something new is the husband-wife duo "Over the Rhine". I'm going to use the new blogger music gizmo to share some information on their album "Snow Angels" :

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Now playing: Over the Rhine - Snowed In With You
via FoxyTunes

I've been wanting to try this out, so now I have it out of my system.