Reading Diary

I notice that no matter how many books I have going at once, I always seem to finish a bunch of them within a week or ten days' flurry of activity. So this week I finished Doctor Dolittle's Post Office and the great Can You Forgive Her?, and I'm about to complete Herbert Lottman's biography Jules Verne.

As I've mentioned before, Verne was the first author I took an interest in as a particular object of study. Around the time of my starting third grade (I was precocious), my mother special ordered Jules Verne and His Work by I.O. Evans for me -- I had read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that summer, dense scientific language and all. So the outlines of Verne's life story are very familiar to me. Lottman's biography is well-done and energetic, although it is peculiar in two respects. One is the distance between biographer and subject -- always a matter of import. Some biographers are definite champions of their subjects, others come to hate them during the process of research (and in the finished results, that usually shows). Lottman doesn't fall into either of those camps, but is more puckish in tone; Verne seems to amuse him slightly, although I'd be hard pressed to say why. It does make for a jolly read.

The second unusual aspect of the book is related to the first. Verne was a prolific novelist, and Lottman might be expected to uncover hidden gems tucked away in the oeuvre; but he can't seem to be bothered about that. His critical commentary is scanty, and pretty much falls in line with received wisdom. This is where a reader wants the biographer to be a champion, and looks for the special insight that comes from reading an author whole; but such insight is lacking here.

Some other quick reading observations: It's fun when reading so many different books at once yields small synchronicities, such as the gambling scenes I recently encountered in Can You Forgive Her? and Richard Powell's Say It with Bullets...I'm making good headway in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, set in Sierra Leone during the World War II era of British colonial rule. The cockroach killing contest between bureaucrats Wilson and Harris is a great scene...Today I started two long novels I've been looking forward to, George Eliot's Middlemarch and Frank Norris's The Octopus, of which much more to follow.