It's a little odd to suddenly discover a sense of deep kinship with someone who died two hundred years ago, but so it is with me and Samuel Johnson. You know that question people are often asked about what historic figures they would invite to dinner? I could happily sit and have dinner with no one else but him and simply talk the night away.

Finished. Cried. Took a few deep breaths, then interviewed the author: http://www.bibliobuffet.com/content/view/999/193/

I made it to page 34 and had to set this one down for a day or so. I think I was nearly crying from pp 30-34, which is when the author reprints a short letter he discovered by his mother--the only account he has of her experiences surviving the Holocaust. Really, I don't know how he had the strength to go on writing the book. If I discovered a letter like that in my mother's papers I would have been paralyzed with horror.

My Germany is Lev Raphael's account of how he, the son of Holocaust survivors, came to terms with the haunted past of his family (rarely spoken of but always felt) and how he made his own kind of peace with Germany, reclaimed it, in effect, from the specter of the Nazis and also the dreadful memories of his own parents.

I am discovering that my tolerance for miscellanea, minutiae and extraneous detail is apparently inexhaustible when it comes to Shakespeare, Elizabethan and Jacobean England. I love these "street-level" histories that focus on recreating a specific place at a specific time right down to the most mundane of details.

A quiet and compelling novella about a waiter/bartender in a run down Parisian cafe, commenting and speculating on the people who come through the door each day. The ones he knows, like his boss, and the strangers. They all seem a little like strangers, actually. Our bartender is aloof, on the sidelines of life. This is the kind of book that would be dismissed as "literary, no plot" by anyone for whom plot is the backbone of the story. But every new person to come through the door is a plot unto himself. And anyone who has ever whiled away a couple hours making up stories about the people at the next table (and who hasn't?) will find something easy and familiar in this barman's wandering, speculative eye.

A scientific detective story of the first order, with uncomfortably vivid portrayals of Victorian London. Thankfully, words don't come with a sense of smell. And the included description by Fanny Burney of getting a mastectomy without benefit of anesthesia is the first time in twenty five years of reading and reviewing books that something made me feel physically faint.

A book that has had the welcome effect of shoving all my reading hard into the eighteenth century. This isn't the dry, rational man I've always associated with Enlightenment philosophy, but a driven one. Endlessly fascinating, always questing and questioning. If my summer was spent with DH Lawrence, I think my fall will be spent with Johnson and Boswell.

Random definitions that have charmed me from Johnson's Dictionary:

INJURY: 1. Hurt without justice.

To QUOB [a low word] To move as the embrio does in the womb; to move as the heart does when throbbing.

HOMER: A measure of about three pints.

FATAL: 3. Appointed by destiny

I picked this up after hearing an interview between Baldwin and Studs Terkel on Terkel's "Voices of Our Time" collection. The entire collection is fascinating, but Baldwin, in particular, riveted me. It wasn't just that he spoke so beautifully (although he does-in a low, measured, musical and even hypnotic voice), it was his precise and compelling language. The interview is about the issue of identity--specifically what it means to be black in white America. This is in 1961, but Baldwin's conception of identity, of "forcing the world to deal with you, and not this idea of you" is one of those universal truths. It is a truth he says he came to understand while trying to write black dialogue by listening to Bessie Smith records.

This is a re-read, actually. Part of what I'm calling my "summer of Lawrence." I'm re-reading his Italian travel books now, and they are just as maddening as I remembered them!--beautifully vivid, evocative writing, razor-sharp observation and intuition, punctuated, FREQUENTLY, by long, long meandering expostulations on the nature of man and soul. Even when he's waxing eloquent about Blake I'm finding it a little much.