Hello, lovelies! August is almost over but I still owe you a blog post about my favorite July book, movie, and song:

I Read…

Confession time: I didn’t do much reading in July. At the beginning of the month, I put all my energies into organizing a massive summer concert for my orchestra, then I attended Adrienne Young’s Query Camp, and by the end of the month, I got on a plane for a two-week vacation with six of my friends and their families. All the while, my brain was processing work things and life stuff.

Hopefully, my brain will calm down soon, so I can claw myself out of this horrid reading slump and go back to sharing my favorite books with you!

I Watched…

OPPENHEIMER, Christopher Nolan’s movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project during the Second World War and created the atomic bomb.

The movie is a must-see, not just because of the actors’ brilliant performance or the insanely awesome storytelling, but also because it lingers in your mind long after you’ve exited the theater.

The movie is not just about the Manhattan Project and the end of the War, it’s also about flawed humanity, wavering principles, and skewed morality. It’s about how grand ideals and “the good of the country” clash with personal quests for power and revenge. The tension that arises when science, ambition, and political power mix, make you question everything you thought you knew about the way WWII ended.

I Listened to…

The third movement of the PLANET EARTH symphony by Dutch composer Johan de Meij! The movement is based on a classic Greek text that praises the Earth’s life energies: “I will sing praise of the Earth, mother of all!”

The music is beautiful, stunning, and majestic. It’s also quite cinematic and brassy, with nods to Gustav Holst that invoke a real wonder at the formation of our Earth and the beginning of life.