I have to admit that when I saw this book in the hands of some guy on the T for the first time, I was really interested in it. I’m a sound guy and avaricious book hoarder, so this seemed right up my alley. I had heard Oliver Sacks on a few podcasts, and he always had interesting brain anecdotes, and I’ve got some free time to kill, so why wait for the paperback version?

The book is divided roughly by type of musical brain abnormality, from people who can’t distinguish pitch, to people who have debilitatingly active perfect pitch, with a consistent pulse of people who were musicians losing their abilities and people who weren’t musicians gaining musical abilities.

And that’s it.

I eventually realized that Oliver Sacks’ nifty stories become rapidly less nifty when he groups them by symptom and relays them one after another. I felt sort of like I was reading from Borges’ infinite library, where every possible book exists, and adjacent copies are only distinguished by additional commas or minorly altered details. As examples taken individually, maybe in the context of an interesting podcast, the stories are great little case studies. Repeat them over and over again, and the people start to fade away, leaving just the bones of the story: the symptoms of whichever disorder the chapter is about.

But maybe that’s the point?

I missed not having any pithy gray text in this one. So here it is.