WHAT are you reading? Um. I just finished a book and haven’t gotten into anything just yet. Well, I’m still technically reading The Anxious Generation but I’m overwhelmed with schoolwork at the moment and can’t take anything too serious. This is the absolute randomness that is my Kindle bookshelf at the moment:

WHAT have you finished recently? The Dead Beat, a tribute to obituaries and obituary writers.

WHAT are you reading next? Really should be All Power to the Councils! or Germany 1923, for my planned Germany Between the Wars series of reviews, but as mentioned I’m crazy busy with school and reading about Communists and Nazis hijacking Germany’s first democracy is not an ideal counterpoint to all of the articles I’m having to read and digest and turn into a paper.

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is: What has improved since you were a kid? and I can only answer: MY ACCESS TO MUSIC. Before the internet, my music experience consisted of listening to terrestrial radio with a cassette tape at the ready so I could hit record when I heard a song I liked, and buying $10 cassette tapes and $15 CDs at Walmart. (My first cassette: Best of Beethoven. First CD….Charttoppers of the 1950s.) Once the internet became a thing, not only was it a lot easier to explore new music — like hypothetically typing in an artist’s name into Limewire and then listening to different tracks, not that I ever did such a thing. Someone who did might realize that a lot of people are quite stupid and will label a track as being by Frank Sinatra or Perry Como when they’re actually by Tony Bennett. I don’t speak from direct experience, of course. Then Pandora came along and could create playlists based on songs you liked, using their ‘musical genome’, and then Youtube and Spotify and all that came into being as well. Youtube has become the main way I find new music via the ‘related’ section.

And here are five artists I found via YouTube.