A Couple of Asides

Still reading somewhat diligently, but have to do a reassessment of what I am writing in the posts and why I am reading these books to begin with.

So I have two rationales to share. The first is germane to last year's resolution: to read a biography for each letter of the alphabet. But since some of our selected "state" books are life stories, I thought it should be posted. (Soon to be followed by my reasons for selecting this year's resolution to do the fifty states.)

That rationale will become my new yardstick for writing comments on the books. I have had some complaints about the write ups being really only plot reprises and not anything insightful. Time permitting, might revisit the posted books and comment on how well they line up with these goals.

But first, from last year, the reasons:


Why I Read Biographies

It started out as a New Year's resolution that seemed attainable: read about 26 people whose last names began with a different letter of the alphabet.

The first time I challenged myself to do this, I wanted to get away from murder mysteries (which I read to improve my logic and ability to discover patterns in the insignificant) and to add to my pile of historical trivia, should I ever have to run the famous names category in Jeopardy. Although I jumped between letters randomly in that first cycle, I finished all 26 by the end of May.

My regret was not writing up what I read. I did keep a check-off list to show that I had made a selection for each letter, but once the alphabet was done, that got thrown out. Now I can remember only a few of them: Josephine Baker, St. Exupery, Niehbur, Olmstead, Piux X, Cole Porter, Orville Faubus. This time around (2008), I not only stayed in strict alphabetical order, but also wrote a commentary after finishing each one.

I continued my hard and fast rule of selection: stand in front of the biographies for a particular letter, disregarding any publicity-seeking celebrities (Madonna, Doris Day) as well as any historical figure who everyone instantly recognizes (John Adams, James Monroe, Napoleon). If in reading the inside flap I discovered that the person was just writing about one life-defining event, and was nowhere near being an honest retrospective of assembling all the pieces of experience into a "life," I reshelved the book. I picked a mix of professions, nationalities, and men and women, zeroed in on anyone I heard of but knew nothing or very little about.

But I discovered there were much more repressed reasons for reading about these people. I was looking for a connection, a six degrees of separation, between them. I did not necessarily pick a time or a place to force fit contemporaries; rather, I was delight in having them unexpectedly cross paths, either in fact or in inspiration. Of course I recognized that anyone "meritorious" enough for a biography is in that elite class of special notables who are more likely to have traveled in the same orbits or have influenced each others' behaviors and styles. Yet it continues to surprise me when a chef serves a writer, a writer models his garden after an architect, an architect used to be a pilot.

More recently, I realized my reading biographies is like playing dress up in the attic -- with old clothes from passe fashions and relocated relatives. What vicarious adventures I live in these books. I can be daring, celebrated, trend-setting. Yet the grandeur of these people does not make me think of my life as diminished. The famous have roots that they outgrew, repudiated or "re-potted." They all deal with unusual family members and define resonating moments; they all have to end their lives assessing whether they are the same person they were at their peaks. And very few have a peak of Mount Everest proportions.

So, I have discovered I am not reading an alphabetical, yet random sequence, but moving over the links in a man-made chain.