Uncommon Measure

The themes and narrative of Hodge's life weave together in a lovely way in this memoir. Sometimes the physics metaphors feel a little tired, sometimes I felt a little lost in a too-long sentence, but even in the bits I can find to complain about there are links back to a larger understanding of the text.

A lot of memoirs are just anecdotes, stories, fun facts about a life. I appreciate that this one is so much more than that.

I enjoyed this overall, but perhaps not as intended. It's a vivid portrayal of a kind of person I've often known but never quite understood: the classically trained musician who seems imprisoned and tortured by music while professing to love it. It's several sad stories told well — of lifelong performance anxiety, of inhibiting perfectionism, of being an outsider — but perhaps the saddest story is that of the person who might be happy if they could understand just one thing, yet you know they never will. I never bought in to the "time" theme, and the attempts to weave physics in were strained, but I found much to learn from and admire here.