La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith

★★★★

"That was the extraordinary thing about what the war achieved: it transformed lives, made heroes ou of the mildest of people, out of the most timid, showed the bravery that must always have been there but merely lacked the occasion to manifest itself."

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

★★★★★

"It makes you wondering.  All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how."

"Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it...It's a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are a spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano.  Not everyone can be an artist.  There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see."

Music in Terezin 1941-1945 by Joza Karas

★★★★★

The Pianist by Wladslaw Szpilman

★★★★

"And now I was lonelier, I suppose, than anyone else in the world.  Even Defoe's creation, Robinson Crusoe, the prototype of the ideal solitary, could hope to meet another human being.  Crusoe cheered himself by thinking that such a thing could happen any day, and it kept him going.  But if any of the people now around me came near I would need to run for it and hide in mortal terror.  I had to be alone, entirely alone, if I wanted to live."

Alma Rose: Vienna to Auschwitz by Richard Newman

★★★★

The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany by Martin Goldsmith

★★★★★

"Such hope.  It breaks your heart."

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

★★★★★

"I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages.  To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same."

"In the end we had changed the position of the hands so many times that we had no idea what the time really was."

Broken Chords by Barbara Snow Gilbert

★★★★