Booknotes 5.22

John Aubrey: My Own Life, by Ruth Scurr, published 2015, biography, 430 pages. My goodness, I loved this so, so much. It’s an experimental biography written as if it were an autobiography, of an antiquarian in the 1600s who wrote a book of short biographies (Brief Lives). I didn’t realize until after I picked it up that this was by Scurr, who also wrote Fatal Purity, which I read not long ago. (I usually try not to read the same author again too soon, but in this case I’m very glad I did!) Aubrey had drawings of ruins made so they could be preserved, made an early case for megalithic stone circles (specifically Avebury and Stonehenge) being built by druids (which wasn’t an idea in vogue at the time), was friends with Thomas Hobbes and was in the Royal Society with Isaac Newton, Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren, and others, and seemed to be making experiments (blood transfusions, for example) when he wasn’t writing biographies. The book features cameos from John Fell (of the Fell types), Elias Ashmole (of the Ashmolean at Oxford), Edmund Halley, John Dryden, and more. Loved it. I’m finding myself more and more drawn to this part of history — both the Royal Society (history of science) and the fascinating political events in England at the time (the execution of Charles I, the Interregnum, Charles II and the Restoration). The book also includes this bit:

At St John’s College there is a servitor named Shakston, a tall, thin, pale fellow, who eats spiders with as much greediness as nuts, saying they comfort his stomach.

You’re, uh, welcome.

The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny, by Daisy Dunn, published 2019, biography, 295 pages. A compelling account of Pliny the Elder, who died after Vesuvius erupted, and Pliny the Younger, who later became a senator and wrote a lot of letters. Quite liked it, lots of interesting things. In reading this I realized my Italian ancestors probably lived within 100 miles of Vesuvius. (I say probably because I’ve only traced those lines back to the 1700s; I don’t actually know where they were living 1,700 years before that. Maybe nowhere near.) It includes a quote from John Aubrey about the death of Francis Bacon, which was fun since I didn’t expect to see Aubrey again so soon.

Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, by Phyllis Rose, published 1983, biography, 280 pages. Compelling short biographical portraits of the marriages of Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Carlyle. The author is fairly anti-marriage (and I am not), but in spite of that I really liked the book and the stories of these five writers. I’ve read books by four of them, by the way, which may have something to do with my level of interest; I don’t know whether this book would still be interesting to someone unfamiliar with them.

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion, published 2011, memoir, 140 pages. Alas, while I’ve really liked Didion’s essays, this memoir of grief after the loss of her daughter didn’t resonate with me as I was hoping it would.