Maybe that's What Falling in Love Means

“I realize we can never predict when these few special moments occur, she says, how if we hadn't met, I wouldn't be standing on a bridge watching a fire, and how there are certain people – not that many – who enter one’s life with the power to make these moments happen. Maybe that’s what falling in love means, the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.”

- Stewart Dybek, from the excellent “Paper Lantern,” collected in The Best American Short Stories 1996.
I listened to it via an excellent New Yorker fiction podcast, as read by ZZ Packer.

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Review: The New Yorker Fiction Podcasts

The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942

The Starship Sofa's August podcast featured "The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942" a Kim Stanley Robinson story about a performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. It's a great story, filled with very nuanced (and dramatic) observations about the music. KSR incorporated a lot of interesting observations about music into 2312 so he obviously spends a lot of time thinking about music. And while I can't say that I understood everything that he wrote about, it was a lot of fun to listen to. And the reader was excellent as well. Highly recommended.