Sunday - What I'm Reading...

It is time to catch up a bit on my music therapy reading. I set a goal for myself of getting through 13 music therapy texts in this year. I have finished two books - well, three if you count the book on American folk songs that I read the first part of and then realized that is was mainly descriptions of song origins and how the American versions differed from the other versions. I may never finish that one. So, I guess I am only two books into my stack. With the next 10 days of break ahead of me, I can probably make some inroads into that stack!

I am currently working on reaching my Goodreads goal of 250 books this year by reading cozy mysteries on my Kindle. I am not where I want to be on that goal either, but I am confident that I can catch up pretty well.

See, the simple fact is that I love reading. It has always been my leisure activity of choice - to sit down with a book and see what types of things I can glean from the pages. While I love to read, I have less motivation when it comes to music therapy reading, so one of my "Deepen" goals was to read the new books that I bought in a Barcelona publications sale. Off I go to the bookshelf to pull out a new book to explore...

I pulled three from the stack: Emotional Processes in Music Therapy by John Pellitteri, Music Therapy in Child Welfare: Bridging Provision, Protection, and Participation by Viggo Kruger, and Sounding the Self by Henk Smeijsters. (Oooh, my spell-check did not like those names AT ALL!) I think I will start with the Pellitteri book first.

When I was in graduate school, finding reading material was easy - I just found things that supported ideas for research or for the topics I was assigned to explore. It was easy to find a thread and track it. Now that I have no other direction but my own, I have a bit more difficulty with finding topics that interest me. I took advantage of the sale last year to expand my knowledge about music therapy from the Barcelona perspective - it tends to be more psychodynamic in focus than my training ever was - and I have struggled through one of the books that I read and thoroughly enjoyed the second book. I am not someone who totally buys into the theoretical foundations of the psychoanalytical world, but I am someone who can acknowledge my biases and can attempt to work through them. I admit to analyzing everything through my humanistic lens, but learning to transfer information from one source to another is a function of critical thought, so it is a good exercise to complete.

I am going to spend some time reading about emotional processes in music therapy today. I think this will be a good topic for me at the moment since my clients have been VERY emotional, and I have also, to be completely honest. I will make a reading nest somewhere in my home to focus on professional reading, and I will take it slowly. There is little rush to my reading - I have set a goal, but any books read indicate progress on deepening my knowledge of music therapy in realms that I have not explored or been exposed to in the past. 

So, it is time to arrange my reading materials. You may not know what I am talking about, but I do have a system for reading music therapy books. It involves (what else?) post-it notes, a good pen, and a reading journal. I will assign different types of post-its for different functions - definitions, quotations, concepts, references, and theories. (And, yes, I have enough post-its that I can cover ALL of those topics, AND MORE!) Each idea will be put onto the post-it and then I will move the post-its into the book at a different time. I tend to read until my brain is full, and then I work in my journal to write down what I learned and a brief synthesis of what I think about things. I then go do something else.

I hope to turn this into a weekly post - some of the information that I am reading.  This may help me reach my goal, it may not. We will see. 

Thanks for being here! See you soon!!