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laurelkane's review against another edition
4.0
Read for my Roots of Modern Disciplines course taught by Mary Poovey @ NYU. This book is ridiculous is so many ways... but mostly good ones. I laughed out loud plenty of times. It is also fascinating to realize that these things were said by Johnson (and others) almost 250 years ago - kind of made you feel like you stepped into a time machine.
jayshay's review against another edition
5.0
Life of Johnson (Unabridged)
by James Boswell
My goodreads account says I added this book in 2009, and I'm pretty sure I've had it on my 'currently reading' tab ever since then. Even with 1,402 pages I'm not that slow of a reader. There was probably a space of five or six years in there where I read maybe a page or two every six months or so, but for whatever reason I never did the usual thing I do with this sprawling, sometimes obscure and tedious brick, which was to put it in the giant pile in the back of my library where worthy unreadable masterpieces go to moulder.
Which is odd. That is how books like this usually defeat me. Defeat me with their lack of narrative drive, with their bloatedness, with their religiosity and their burning concern for petty controverseries of the 1700s. You know, that type of book. Yet I always came back to the Life of J. Mostly for what amount to the diary selections of Boswell chatting with Johnson, and the odd snippets of other told conversations from aquaintances. Boswell's genius is for capturing the character and conversational mode of his friend, for preserving for posterity Johnson's common sense as well as his prejudice and temper tantrums. The quickness of his mind sitting in the ruined castle of his body! Texture is added to this portrait with Boswell jousting with others over Johnson's memory - man, he HATES Mrs. Thrace (wife of the dude who housed Johnson through much of his later years, and who came out with her own book on Johnson) so much and never passes an oportunity to do her down. It's delicious that all his protestations and defenses actually colour and give a wonderful shade to Johnson's character.
The Life of Johnson also demonstrates just how crazily religious people were back in the day. I mean crazy, obsessively religious. At least from my very secular point of view. While I can engage with both Johnson and Boswell on moral and literary questions, I admit I quickly found my eyes rolling into the back of my head as the questions of religious worthiness were worked over and over again. There are moral questions that I did enjoy but there was also just a lot of stuff that didn't interest, except in the way that I noted just how much seemed to fill up their head space. Probably like internet porn and ecological armagedeon do today. (That's a 98-2 percent split by the way).
So THE LIFE OF J sat on my goodreads currently-reading shelf poking at me not really being currently read until I did the very mod thing of downloading the fourth and final section of it onto my phone for free. I just couldn't let the think go so I decided, fuck it, I'll just put it on my phone and try and fill in those little nooks and crannies of my life with Boswell going on and on about his buddy.
And I found a funny thing, suddenly I was good and proper actually reading the damn thing again. Read it in bed in the morning, read it while in the vet waiting room, read it on my breaks at work, read and read and read and suddenly I was getting 50 to 75 pages a day - which is very respectable for a slow reader like myself. And then, suddenly, about a month later, I'm done, just nine years after starting it.
There were a couple of strategies that I decided on when starting again:
1) Skim the letters, there isn't too terribly much in them and part of my hiatus was brought on by so many of the fucking things dropped into this book. So many goddamned 'thank you cards' and repetitions of the same god-damned story being told to person after person. Fuuuuucckk. Skip/Skim.
2) Don't stress the footnotes. Maybe an 1/8 of the book is footnotes in very, very tiny type where Boswell really goes into the minuta. There is enough stuff that was burningly important in the main text which is now utterly irrelevant that the footnotes by definition are even more IRRELEVANT. Unless you are a scholar I don't see the use of them. Except for the funny bits, like Boswell hotly defending Johnson for not returning books that he borrowed. Actually take a drink and laugh each time Boswell brings up some terrible falsehood to deny without realizing that he's immortalizing said charge for all time. Johnson was a fucking book thief and also treated books terribly while devouring them like a hungry hungry mutt, so there.
3) Pay attention when Boswell comes down from Scotland to visit Johnson, these are the best parts of the book!!! Treasure them.
4) Don't stress about all the unknown controversies, politicians and general stuff that time has obscured. The main meat of this book is the erasable, twitching, bad tempered, sweet, sensible, rascist, prejudice, pious, fearful, roaring lion that is Samuel Johnson. Okay, yeah, sometimes the editor footnotes can give you a brief line to figure out what is going on, but if they can't don't stress it.
5) Don't worry if you can't actually read Johnson himself. This is a book about a writer who I can't really stand the subject's work. Or at least I've bounced off anything I've tried of his. It is clotted and verbose and fucking inpentrable in syntax and style. I can't read Johnson. Some people love his prose, but wow, it is like the opposite of Hemmingway or anyone in modern literature (that is actually read). There is a reason that Johnson is still cheifly going to be remembered by most as the subject of this biography. Boswell's own prose is an oasis of clear concise language in comparison. Near the end of the book, just after Johnson's death, Boswell in a bizarre choice decides to put examples of others who adopted the Johnsonian writing style and they are terrible to read too.
6) It's the first example of the modern biography. This is the cradle to the grave portrait of a human being. A big baggy, odd, perplexing, genre creating book. (Ha, this is the LORD OF THE RINGS of biographies.) While yes, it is in some ways just Boswell's recollections of Johnson with the rest of his life decorating it. (The book is HEAVILY weighted to his later years, past even the creation of his dictionary which was his cheif claim to fame (before the dominance of Boswell's portrait of him). But in that obsessive way of the age Boswell does his best to encompass all of the man and while he santizes and obsessively protests every slight, at the same time he manages to include a lot of the man and yes, actually give you a feel of the man.
There are so many biographies that you read that you come away with never really feeling you know the subject. THE LIFE OF JOHNSON's enduring greatness comes down to the fact that Samual Johnson comes alives in these many pages. He's more alive here than in his own work which might be part of the disappointment I feel when trying to read him. Johnson was perhaps a better conversationalist than writer - at least to my admittedly narrow modern tastes.
There is a blizzard of dross in THE LIFE OF JOHNSON but it combines with the rest to give you a picture of the man and the age. It's the reason I took this book up again - other than my sentimental ties to both Scotland and England by my parents, especially my father, who while not a brilliant man, I seem to mix in my mind with the more tortured parts of Johnson's own character.
Experiences with books like this are why I am lucky to be a reader. This book is in my favourites folder in goodreads and gets five stars. (Yes authors that's all you have to do to get five stars, write a genre creating book that ALSO plugs deeply into my personal life AND succeeds in helping me grow as a human being. This means that, while I understand the sales impetus, I will probably be giving your cool, copentent, fun book three to four stars, if I'm not in a bad mood that day from an unhappy love affair.)
There, my review reflects the book - bloated, with odd tangents and side vendetas - though we shall have to wait (2017-1791) 226 years to see if it echoes down the years as this great book has for me.
by James Boswell
My goodreads account says I added this book in 2009, and I'm pretty sure I've had it on my 'currently reading' tab ever since then. Even with 1,402 pages I'm not that slow of a reader. There was probably a space of five or six years in there where I read maybe a page or two every six months or so, but for whatever reason I never did the usual thing I do with this sprawling, sometimes obscure and tedious brick, which was to put it in the giant pile in the back of my library where worthy unreadable masterpieces go to moulder.
Which is odd. That is how books like this usually defeat me. Defeat me with their lack of narrative drive, with their bloatedness, with their religiosity and their burning concern for petty controverseries of the 1700s. You know, that type of book. Yet I always came back to the Life of J. Mostly for what amount to the diary selections of Boswell chatting with Johnson, and the odd snippets of other told conversations from aquaintances. Boswell's genius is for capturing the character and conversational mode of his friend, for preserving for posterity Johnson's common sense as well as his prejudice and temper tantrums. The quickness of his mind sitting in the ruined castle of his body! Texture is added to this portrait with Boswell jousting with others over Johnson's memory - man, he HATES Mrs. Thrace (wife of the dude who housed Johnson through much of his later years, and who came out with her own book on Johnson) so much and never passes an oportunity to do her down. It's delicious that all his protestations and defenses actually colour and give a wonderful shade to Johnson's character.
The Life of Johnson also demonstrates just how crazily religious people were back in the day. I mean crazy, obsessively religious. At least from my very secular point of view. While I can engage with both Johnson and Boswell on moral and literary questions, I admit I quickly found my eyes rolling into the back of my head as the questions of religious worthiness were worked over and over again. There are moral questions that I did enjoy but there was also just a lot of stuff that didn't interest, except in the way that I noted just how much seemed to fill up their head space. Probably like internet porn and ecological armagedeon do today. (That's a 98-2 percent split by the way).
So THE LIFE OF J sat on my goodreads currently-reading shelf poking at me not really being currently read until I did the very mod thing of downloading the fourth and final section of it onto my phone for free. I just couldn't let the think go so I decided, fuck it, I'll just put it on my phone and try and fill in those little nooks and crannies of my life with Boswell going on and on about his buddy.
And I found a funny thing, suddenly I was good and proper actually reading the damn thing again. Read it in bed in the morning, read it while in the vet waiting room, read it on my breaks at work, read and read and read and suddenly I was getting 50 to 75 pages a day - which is very respectable for a slow reader like myself. And then, suddenly, about a month later, I'm done, just nine years after starting it.
There were a couple of strategies that I decided on when starting again:
1) Skim the letters, there isn't too terribly much in them and part of my hiatus was brought on by so many of the fucking things dropped into this book. So many goddamned 'thank you cards' and repetitions of the same god-damned story being told to person after person. Fuuuuucckk. Skip/Skim.
2) Don't stress the footnotes. Maybe an 1/8 of the book is footnotes in very, very tiny type where Boswell really goes into the minuta. There is enough stuff that was burningly important in the main text which is now utterly irrelevant that the footnotes by definition are even more IRRELEVANT. Unless you are a scholar I don't see the use of them. Except for the funny bits, like Boswell hotly defending Johnson for not returning books that he borrowed. Actually take a drink and laugh each time Boswell brings up some terrible falsehood to deny without realizing that he's immortalizing said charge for all time. Johnson was a fucking book thief and also treated books terribly while devouring them like a hungry hungry mutt, so there.
3) Pay attention when Boswell comes down from Scotland to visit Johnson, these are the best parts of the book!!! Treasure them.
4) Don't stress about all the unknown controversies, politicians and general stuff that time has obscured. The main meat of this book is the erasable, twitching, bad tempered, sweet, sensible, rascist, prejudice, pious, fearful, roaring lion that is Samuel Johnson. Okay, yeah, sometimes the editor footnotes can give you a brief line to figure out what is going on, but if they can't don't stress it.
5) Don't worry if you can't actually read Johnson himself. This is a book about a writer who I can't really stand the subject's work. Or at least I've bounced off anything I've tried of his. It is clotted and verbose and fucking inpentrable in syntax and style. I can't read Johnson. Some people love his prose, but wow, it is like the opposite of Hemmingway or anyone in modern literature (that is actually read). There is a reason that Johnson is still cheifly going to be remembered by most as the subject of this biography. Boswell's own prose is an oasis of clear concise language in comparison. Near the end of the book, just after Johnson's death, Boswell in a bizarre choice decides to put examples of others who adopted the Johnsonian writing style and they are terrible to read too.
6) It's the first example of the modern biography. This is the cradle to the grave portrait of a human being. A big baggy, odd, perplexing, genre creating book. (Ha, this is the LORD OF THE RINGS of biographies.) While yes, it is in some ways just Boswell's recollections of Johnson with the rest of his life decorating it. (The book is HEAVILY weighted to his later years, past even the creation of his dictionary which was his cheif claim to fame (before the dominance of Boswell's portrait of him). But in that obsessive way of the age Boswell does his best to encompass all of the man and while he santizes and obsessively protests every slight, at the same time he manages to include a lot of the man and yes, actually give you a feel of the man.
There are so many biographies that you read that you come away with never really feeling you know the subject. THE LIFE OF JOHNSON's enduring greatness comes down to the fact that Samual Johnson comes alives in these many pages. He's more alive here than in his own work which might be part of the disappointment I feel when trying to read him. Johnson was perhaps a better conversationalist than writer - at least to my admittedly narrow modern tastes.
There is a blizzard of dross in THE LIFE OF JOHNSON but it combines with the rest to give you a picture of the man and the age. It's the reason I took this book up again - other than my sentimental ties to both Scotland and England by my parents, especially my father, who while not a brilliant man, I seem to mix in my mind with the more tortured parts of Johnson's own character.
Experiences with books like this are why I am lucky to be a reader. This book is in my favourites folder in goodreads and gets five stars. (Yes authors that's all you have to do to get five stars, write a genre creating book that ALSO plugs deeply into my personal life AND succeeds in helping me grow as a human being. This means that, while I understand the sales impetus, I will probably be giving your cool, copentent, fun book three to four stars, if I'm not in a bad mood that day from an unhappy love affair.)
There, my review reflects the book - bloated, with odd tangents and side vendetas - though we shall have to wait (2017-1791) 226 years to see if it echoes down the years as this great book has for me.
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