This week I had Accordion Crimes, by E. Annie Proux, in the player. It’s an interesting book, because it abandons the Aristotelian dramatic conventions — exposition, conflict, climax, demoument — and instead follows an accordion from its creation, through a series of owners, each with his own interesting (and usually tragic) story, and finally to its end. Unfortunately, there’s a reason than traditional drama is as successful as it is, and I completely failed to be drawn into the story. The individual episodes were moderately interesting, but without an overarching theme or goal holding the story together, breaking the novel into separate short stories would have been an improvement.