When I saw it in Barnes & Noble, the book I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music As Medicine struck me as a perfect example of my kind of nonfiction. I like reading about the weird functioning of the brain (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks was an early enthusiasm) and about medicine (Being Mortal by Atul Gawande is my favorite one and I should re-read it again), but I also like learning about something new (The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman introduced me to design, for instance, and I often quote it).

One topic outside my normal range of interests is music.

My mother played the piano, and my sister too, and my brother played trumpet and then switched to guitar; I, however, lasted through only about two weeks of piano lessons at the age of 12, and only got a B in my lecture class on Music in college because I BS’d at length on the final exam. The disillusioned and overwhelmed instructor must have been grading on quantity of writing.

Oh, I like music, especially after I got over the belief that there was such a thing as the correct genre. My Apple Music app contains dozens of playlists, some organized by decade and others by my own set of categories (“Skippydoodle” is one, and “Growf Bounce” is another). Unlike many people, I also never got stuck believing that only the music of my teenage years was good. So I like music. But I don’t love it. And I don’t really feel it.

I had hopes for the book. Maybe this book would be a way in. A way for me to understand music in terms of my other interests.

Then The Secret Chord began, with a description of Levitin being utterly transported into many different vivid memories of times and places, all while he was listening to a live jazz set. And in that passage, he made it clear that in addition to being a neurologist and a deeply musical person, he was personally acquainted with Billy Pierce, Art Blakey, and Wynton and Branford Marsalis, and that he was a talented instrumentalist himself.

I had a sinking feeling it wasn’t going to work out between me and this book.

See, I am not fond of improvisational jazz. I do not get transported by music. And I basically didn’t care about most of the people he was friends with. Besides, the text was in a small font.

I suspected the book was going to keep on going in that mode, and I was right. Yes, it is a name-dropping survey of various neurological conditions, with music proposed as a universal panacea.

I purely hate forking out $20 for a book I’m not going to finish, though it happens from time to time. So I spent even more money, and bought the audiobook, and I have been listening to it while I try to sleep at night.

I have a nerve issue with the outside of my right leg, and restless calves. I’m getting older, and it’s hard for me to sleep even when my leg isn’t acting up. I do get sleepy in the afternoon, so I take a nap whether I want to or not, and the nap interferes with my nighttime sleep. And my brain has a way of suddenly thinking about things I have no control over, like politics, when it’s two o’clock in the morning.

I have tried to play “sleep music” at times like that, but it doesn’t seem to stop the mental chatter. As I said, music doesn’t transport me. In fact, I often find music irritating when I’m trying to nod off.

However, it seems The Secret Chord is absolutely the perfect thing to fall asleep to, and a great thing to listen to in the small hours when I awaken from a paranoid dream.

I lie there in the dark, listening to him talk about how Joni Mitchell gave him feedback on a song he was writing, and about what percentage of older adults fall prey to Alzheimer’s, and gradually it stops making sense, and I’m asleep in spite of myself. And if I’m not asleep, at least I’m learning something new.