I had a hard time finishing this book, because the ending was so good that I couldn't stop crying. Not because it was sad, but because it was so unbelievably good, and because I'd never before read a long book with an ending that lived up to its heft.

Seriously, it took me like half an hour to read the last few pages, because I kept flinging down the book and pacing around my apartment, sobbing hysterically.

Don't get me wrong, this book is not perfect, and it definitely falters in places. However More...

Every once in a while you'll get into one of those conversations with an acquaintance who thinks he or she is smarter than you in which you list a string of books you've read recently and authors you particularly enjoy. Invariably Michael Chabon's last name (shay-bawn) is mispronounced in these conversations.

If you want to win the next conversation like this you have, I highly recommend delving quickly and deeply into the urvruh of Richard Powers, who, despite never fully penetrating the upper e More...

Important Service Announcement:

I read the first 100 or something pags of this yesterday and decided not to continue.
*does not panic*
*breathes*

Yes, I can start a book and not finish it! It hasn't happened very often, in fact, I can't remember that it ever happened, but I'm convinced I can do it. It also helps that this is my mothers book, so I can give it back to her and not be tempted.

Why don't I finish it?

Well, it's a very very long book. And in the first 100 pages, the important ones where al More...

The Time of Our Singing follows the musical career of one brother as told by another. It's a family drama spread over many decades from the marriage of the boy's parents (a German Jew and a black women who met while singing) and goes up to present day.

I liked the premise of the story and Richard Powers has a masterful control over his prose. Unfortunately, his chosen motif, music, is drawn out as an all-encompassing metaphor for all the problems and triumphs of the characters in the book. As the More...

La cosa buffa di romanzi come questo è che, a prima vista, non fanno nulla per ingraziarsi il lettore: elevata lunghezza, approfondimento psicologico dei personaggi quasi maniacale, tecnicismi di vario genere (in questo caso scientifici e musicali), linee temporali divise e frammentate lungo tutto il libro, e continue digressioni su ogni genere di argomento. Eppure il risultato, come anche nel caso di altri autori come DeLillo, è anche qui un piccolo gioiello: un affresco di vita, esplorato in o More...

Phew! I finally completed it! :)

'The Time of Our Singing' tells the story of the two sons of Delia and David Strom.

Delia and David might have been your everyday 1950s couple, had Delia not been an aspiring African American singer from Philadelphia's middle class, and David a white Jewish engineer who had just lost his family in the Holocaust.

The author has juxtaposed many of the Stroms' milestones with the broader American milestones of the 20th century especially with regards to Black-White re More...

I've had this book for a good few years now and I've never before been able to get into it. I've picked it up, read a few pages, put it down again and found something else. And now I wish I'd stayed with it, now I wish I'd read it years ago so I could have read it again and again by now, because...what a book. What a book.

On a purely surface level it's about two mixed-race brothers born in the late 1940s, children to a German Jewish father and a black mother. But it's so much more than that. It' More...

"The Time of our Singing" is a magnificent book and I am grateful for one of my most rewarding reading experiences ever. The story starts with a flourish and one marvels at the author's supreme skill, throughout the book's 630 pages, in keeping up the pace, widening the emotional resonances and deepening the narrative's cogency, eventually to let it flower into a profoundly moving and intellectually satisfying finale. It is heartwarming to see that our age - so worn down at times by the pressure More...

Was für ein geschriebenes Epos. Mir fällt kaum vergleichbares ein, in dem Worte wie Musik komponiert werden und in ihrer Einmaligkeit und Komplexität eine Sprache entfalten, die seinesgleichen sucht. Es gelingt Richard Powers in seinem Werk den Bogen von 1939 bis in die 80er Jahre zu spannen und in dessen Mittelpunkt eine Familie zu stellen, deren Lebensgrundlage immer wieder die Frage zu beantworten sucht: 'Der Fisch und der Vogel können sich verlieben. Doch wo bauen sie ihr Nest?'

Die Geschicht More...

I feel a bit guilty giving this book only three stars.
Yes, it's a highly acclaimed novel, it's relevant and praiseworthy and it tackles huge universal and specifically American themes through the individual stories of the Strom family members, music lovers all. It's almost perfectly constructed, the main narrator Joseph is full of solemn sensitivity and insight, and the author's reflection on (and use of) time and space is mind-grabbing.
The problem is the novel's relentlessnes; not just the ove More...

My 'best read' of 2008 - and in my top ten of all time. The writing is wonderful, capturing something that is very difficult to write about well, namely the beauty of the human voice when singing classical music. Powers does this not once but many times in the book.

I thought I was well informed about race relations in the USA but this book brought it home to me in a way that was unexpected and painfully informative. We see the action of the story through the eyes of a young man who is of mixed More...

Dit boek is een absoluut meesterwerk! Het is één van de beste boeken die ik ooit heb gelezen. Het is eigenlijk onmogelijk om een reactie te geven die recht doet aan dit boek. Ik wil wel proberen een indicatie te geven waar dit boek o.a. over gaat: gezin, familiebanden, trouw, liefde, moederliefde, broederliefde, hoop, segregatie, discriminatie, interpretatie Amerikaanse geschiedenis twintigste eeuw vanuit gezichtspunt van zowel zwarte en blanke mensen, idealen nastreven, onvermogen en onwil tot More...

This book was unlike any I'd ever read, and has left me unsure of how to discuss it! I picked it up off someone's stoop because I'd heard of the author, then read that it involved a family over generations (something I love), as well as the family's relationship to music (one of my main loves). The main characters are brothers who live for singing classical music. I have a long classical singing background, so I found the pages and pages of description about those very pieces I studied, and the More...

This book tackles family, race, music, the sense of belonging, the tumultous issue of race in the middle of the century - and has some of the most beautiful language I've ever read. It's long but it's worth it.

Un long, long, long voyage au coeur de la musique, du chant, de la famille, de l'intégration, de la compréhension, de l'acceptation.
Une écriture lumineuse, précise. Un vocabulaire époustouflant pour décrire en mots l'effet de la musique, du chant sur l'âme humaine.
Mais encore, Richard Powers, plus que jamais orfèvre de la langue, nous taille un diamant brut; celui des luttes raciales, en une pure merveille.
Avec lui, non seulement on comprend l'exclusion ressentie par ceux qui sont différents, ma More...

I have mixed feelings about this book. This is the first Richard Powers book I have read. On the one hand, I thought Mr. Powers' use of language, descriptions, characterizations were great. I thought his portrayals of historical events such as the Emmett Till murder were incredibly well done and deeply moving, and I felt the same way about his descriptions of music. I did, however, start feeling a bit bogged down about 3/4 of the way through the book; I felt it could have used a bit of tightenin More...

This book is about a racially mixed family growing up during the civil rights era. The parents share a love of music which becomes the foundation of this family of extraordinarily (musically) gifted children. Despite their talents, they face discrimination throughout their lives and struggle to make sense of the world they live in. The book is profound and enlightening and not one I will forget. It was a bit difficult to concentrate in places when the descriptions of the music and its effects ar More...

Secondo Pamuk il potere nell'arte del romanzo è basato sulla particolarità di generare negli essere umani sentimenti che possono anche contraddirsi. E' esattamente quello che ho provato io durante la lettura di questo romanzo; la cosa strana è che non trovo neppure un commento adeguato, tante sono le sensazioni contrastanti: lo stupore per la costruzione e l'armonia, l'irritazione per i personaggi che sembrano inseguirsi senza raggiungersi, l'inevitabile uggia di fronte a un romanzo così "massim More...

It would be a mistake to let the length of time it took me to read this book cause you to question my rating of it. This is one of those books that is definitely worth reading, but is too dense to speed right through it. I picked it up during a period when I thought I was going to have plenty of time to myself for reading. When this did not turn out to be the case, I had to return it to the library to keep my fine under the cost of purchasing my own copy.

Richard Powers is an incredibly talented More...

This book was just so good. Moving, fascinating, complex...manages to weave a compelling family story together with an eerily accurate picture of 20th century U.S. history and race relations. I found myself wishing that this book had been written just after Obama's election, so that Inauguration Day could factored into the framing device of huge, defining moments in Washington (would have preferred that to the Million Man March, which closes the novel). The characters felt real enough that I wan More...

To me fiction tells a story, and literature creates a world, I'd consider this the latter.

The book was pleasant. My biggest problem with the book was the long, detailed accounts of song. Even when something is central to a story it can be over done. I get it- Jonah is divine when he opens up his mouth. It's other-worldly, it's a journey, and music itself requires lots of words to convey its actual profound simplicity. Or at least, Richard needed a lot of words to do it. It just got repetitive an More...

I cannot begin to describe the effect this book has had on me. I experienced it as a rush of music. A chamber chorale piece. The keys to which I do not have, because of lack of musical training, but whose effect and emotion even the lowliest of musical consumer can grasp. All you need to read this book is a pair of ears.

What is it about? Viscerally? It's about music. And musical talent. The struggle of two half-black brothers in post Civil Rights America to realize their gifts. They were trained More...

This was my second go at this book. I orginally bought it on recommendation from someone who worked at Maple Street Book Shope in New Orleans. It took me several months to get through it and I'm glad took this one off the "haven't read" shelf.

The first couple hundred pages tend to drag despite the author's exceptional writing. The first third of the book is primarily to develop characters and plot, which is done tremendously well...in hindsight. Unfortunately, the characters and the plot are rat More...

EDITED

How gorgeous can a thing be? is my first question. Powers has this elegance, this way of caring and knowing about his subjects (I've read a third of his catalog and so far his subjects have been: artificial intelligence, photography, WWI, WWII, every single thing in a hospital, myths, neuroscience, music, physics and probably a few others) that goes so far beyond what I'm used to in fiction it leaves me breathless. The only reference point I really have is when my DFW makes me tear up. I m More...

Je zou het misschien niet zeggen op basis van wat ik de voorbije periode gelezen heb, maar ik hou ook van schrijvers met bagage en ambitie, van schrijvers die op de proppen kunnen én durven komen met fictieve werelden die alles op z’n kop zetten, en dat in provocerende, wervelende of uitputtende taalbraaksels. Thomas Pynchon, William Vollmann, William Gaddis, Josef Skvorecky, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, dat soort kerels (jaja, bijna allemaal Amerikanen, inderdaad). Het zijn boeken die een extra in More...

anyone who loves music will appreciate this book. I found it a little difficult to get into at first, but really enjoyed it. it starts with the unlikely love story between a priviledged young black woman (whose father expects her to be a doctor) and a german inventor who meet at the washington monument the night marian anderson sang. they marry and have children, born in the 60s, who constantly struggle for acceptance. one has an incredibly beautiful voice, and would be the darling of any profes More...

The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers is an amazing novel, an ambitious generational tale of an American family with a mixed heritage of African-American and German Jew, and covers the travails, triumphs and tragedies of this family.

There are three children, one with a beautiful singing voice who opts for a classical music career, a daughter who becomes involved with the civil rights struggle,and a second brother who, though gifted as well, buries his ambition to bridge the gap between his More...

the story of race through the lives of a mixed race family who attempted to rise above the realities of discrimination and more through music was beautifully written. At times the main narrator, the younger of the two brothers, gets stuck in his life and those parts of the book are difficult because it feels like the book is stuck. Music doesn't completely allow them to transcend the realities on the ground, and it is only as they deal with these realities that they grow and become part of the t More...