Every now and then, a friend who knows that I enjoy classical music asks me where they should start. There’s so much of it, they say, that it’s overwhelming and intimidating. And it’s true; there are hundreds of years of symphonies and operas and string quartets to choose from.

On December 25, 1924, Rod Serling was born. Serling was a television writer, one of the major figures in early television.

On December 16, 1928, Philip K. Dick was born. Dick was a science fiction writer whose work centered on the unreliability of reality and of personal identity; his stories of paranoia, shifting personas, and an unstable world made him one of the genre’s most popular writers of the 1960s and 1970s.

On December 7, 1948, Mark Kurlansky was born. Mark Kurlansky is a journalist and historian, and the author of several best-selling nonfiction books.