The Book of the Dead: Lives of the Justly Famous and the Undeservedly Obscure by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson
My rating: 4/5 cats
THIS DBR IS DEDICATED TO EH!!! WHO IS THE BEST AT SO MANY THINGS, BUT MOSTLY AT STUFFING BOXES. AND BEING AWESOME IN GENERAL. THIS DBR IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY WINE AND GIRL SCOUT COOKIES: DO-SI-DOS ARE PAIRED WITH A DELIGHTFUL BORDEAUX BECAUSE I AM SUPER-CLASSY.
i have a very small brain. well, maybe it is regular-sized, but it doesn’t hold a lot of information. which is i think why my book reviews of late have been so dull—i am reading more quickly than i can review, and by the time i am getting around to writing a review, weeks have passed and many books have jostled in between myself and my memory of the book i am reviewing and there is just too much clutter. stupid brain.
but that is why a book like this is just great for me. snippets!! brief biographical sketches!! information i can digest without getting all bogged down in facts and dates. (dates are worse than directions to me—the brain doesn’t even bother trying to absorb them)
i have read plenty of books like this before—where there is a lotta information about people i never cared about enough to read an entire biography about, but a paragraph or two is fine. this book just does it better than most of them. i think part of it is the way the people are grouped. one chapter covers “famous people who kept monkeys as pets.” this is not how oliver cromwell is usually remembered, so i was more interested than if the chapter had been called “lord protectors of england” or zzzzz…(however, and spoiler alert—it wasn’t actually his pet monkey, but the pet monkey of his grandfather that almost murrrrderrred him when he was an infant. “people nearly murdered by other people’s pet monkeys” would probably not have enough (famous) people to fill a chapter. alas.)
the best thing about books like these are that they lead you to other books. i now own a copy of cassandra by florence nightingale, which virginia woolf called (as i have already shared with elizabeth) “a shriek of nervous agony.” phoar—can’t wait to get into that one!! and also, i am going to learn all i can about mary kingsley, who was this badass explorer and adventurer, one of the few victorian explorers to live in africa and not be a total racist. and definitely the only woman to do so.
plus, i love any book that has a section on byron (he is included in the “dead, absent, or impossible fathers” chapter along with isaac newton, hans christian andersen, and—ironically—ada lovelace.)
i read this book very slowly over the course of several months, and i think that’s the best way to read a book like this—to just dip into it occasionally and try to let the (verysmall) brain absorb the details and find new avenues of interest. for example, i may just read a richard feynman book because even though he writes about zzzzzzzzz, i might have fallen in love with him a little because of this book, and maybe i would make the effort to keep the brain receptive while i was reading. and that’s not just the girl scout cookies talking!
so—yeah—thumbs up to this book—i will probably browse through it again on nights when i am too drowsy to actually read, but just want something to do with my eyes.
okay—gotta go watch top chef and yell at the teevee now.
because i am a classy broad.
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