The British art critic Laura Cumming mesmerized me this summer with her recent book The Vanishing Velazquez, which is an elegantly written cultural history, a whodunit, a meditation on portraiture, and a hymn to two of her favorite painters — Velazquez and her own late father.

Lately I have been listening to John Cage's strangely delightful and thoughtful sonatas as performed by Boris Berman. They are very short, running between two to four minutes. There are sixteen sonatas and four interludes, so even after some twenty-five listens I still don’t feel like I can encompass the scope of the music.