recommendations - to read, to watch, to listen, etc.

i feel obliged to add in Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper by Sylvia Plath cos if i could write like that i'd likely never talk again. but all of her stuff is great. Other poems of hers I particularly like are Blackberrying, The Arrival of the Bee Box (ignoring that bit...), The Moon and the Yew Tree. Though I won't pretend to be some expert on her work, and I have a lot more reading to do...
Translation as Revitali[s]ation: Making Modern Versions of the Love Poems of Cécile Sauvage by Daria Chernysheva - I love the first translation example the writer gives. Not so sure about the second's use of space. But the ideas presented in this paper are quite useful - I ought to read more about translation!
As of December 2024, my 'favourites' shelf on Goodreads is, in no particular order: The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelmann, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, Bright Clouds by Hao Ran, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (obviously), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, the last one being my favourite book ever by quite a long way.

Messiaen, by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, pretty much the biography of Messiaen. Special in that it's one of only two biographies that have made me cry at some point...highly recommend
The set of poems titled L'Âme en bourgeon by Cécile Sauvage, mother of Olivier Messiaen, is found in the volume Olivier Messiaen: Music, Art and Literature, edited by Christopher Dingle and Nigel Simeone.
«Bien Cher Félix»: Letters from Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod to Felix Aprahamian is a nice collection of letters edited by Nigel Simeone (who is really lovely...he sent several of his books books, signed and for free, to me when I was about 13!!).
One of these is an interesting and very detailed catalogue of Messiaen's work titled Olivier Messiaen: A Bibliographical Catalogue of Messiaen's Works, which contains information about each of his compositions, when they were premiered, and images of their first editions.
Olivier Messiaen: Music and Colour by Claude Samuel is a book of conversations with Messiaen about his compositional methods, views and life. It does a pretty good job of humanising him.

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