Music is a portal to reading

A special feature blog post by Senior Service Guide Zak.

Reading and noise: not two things you’d think would go well together (unless you’re enjoying an audiobook, many of which are available right now through the library on Libby or BorrowBox)… But a good book paired with the right album, I find, is like cheese and wine.

My favourite pairing recently has been Robert Jackson Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy with the eponymous first album of Finnish prog-folk band Auri.

Divine Cities is what you get when you cross a spy thriller with the sprawling, reality-shattering antics of our favourite fantasy worlds – the gods are dead, the miracles that made life livable no longer work, the people live in squalor, and as they try to eke out a life without the deities that defined their society a series of bizzare murders are making the best and brightest think: maybe magic isn’t completely gone from the world after all.

Wonder, possibility and myth are the name of the game in this series, which makes folk music – with its traditional instruments speaking of days past and cultures kept alive – a perfect fit.

Auri brings to mind everything from isolated Northern-Irish hamlets to sweeping steampunk skylines, to mysterious coastlines begging to be explored. There’s something about the music that really gets the imagination going, the sound drawing crisp pictures of what you’re reading out of the page – dancing pennywhistles, soaring strings, some of the cleanest choir vocals you’ve ever heard, all accompanied by a rock drumbeat that reminds you not to fall too comfortably into your chair – the story you’re reading has stakes, perhaps apocalyptic ones.

I’ve never found an album that goes so well with a book it relaxes you into the world and gets your heart racing at the same time… but that’s exactly what happened here. I’d recommend either of these two things alone any day, but truly: do yourself a favour and try them together.

The Divine Cities trilogy – City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles – by Robert Jackson Bennett is available at the City Library in paperback, and Auri can be streamed wherever you get your music. [Editor: Auri’s second album Those We Don’t Speak Of has just been ordered for the City Library.]