Lynness: Odds and ends and October and November reads

I really opened a can of worms with my post about how I read. Someone asked if Nathan still speed-reads and he doesn't really. This is mostly because he doesn't have time (make time) to read for pleasure. He reads computer instruction/reference books for work and for working on his hobbies, and he reads the scriptures. Neither lends itself to speed-reading well. I have noticed that when I pay too much attention to how I'm reading that I slow down and start to subvocalize, and when I am trying to read my scriptures at 10:30 at night and falling asleep as I do so, I intentionally slow down and subvocalize so I get SOMETHING out of it. (Let's face it- Leviticus and Numbers are extremely repetitious and sometimes quite dull).
As for October, I picked out a book right after I joined the book blog on the 23rd called Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment by James R. Gaines. It's a history of the two men, of music forms, and of European history as well as the challenge that culminated in the creation of Bach's A Musical Offering. I got through close to half of it, and was interested and still plan to finish it, but there were several other books I wanted to read that I had gotten at the same time. This books doesn't really pull you along, so I wanted a break from it and I wanted to read Musicophilia, which I did. Books like that make me want to go back to school and take up neuroscience (or whatever the book I've reading happens to be about). There are so many things about ourselves that we don't know and even scratching the surface yields astounding results and even more questions. I remember Freeman saying something about how we only use 10% of our brains and (him) wondering what it will be like when we get beyond the veil and remember all that we once knew. Perhaps those artistic and musical and savant-like abilities are latent in all of us and will be brought to the fore, along with many other things.
In Musicophilia a footnote referenced Italian author Umberto Eco's "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" and I looked him up and have put that book on hold. That may be my November read, if I think it will be rewarding. If not, I'm considering something from the Polish section of the list Rae provided a link to (since Nathan went to Poland on his mission) or something from the Far East.