Samuel Johnson

As I write this, I am listening via the internet to the classical station at DR Netradio, out of Denmark. It is the best classical station I've ever listened to.

In other matters, I finally found my Everyman Library edition of Johnson's Rambler essays. I've been wanting to read these because, having finished Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson a couple months ago, and wanting more biographical detail (Boswell is unparallelled on Johnson's "character" but short on events) my evening read lately has been Bates's Samuel Johnson, a paragon of the biographical genre, rightly praised by Dirda as one of the best written biographies in the English language. In any case, I've reached the part in which Bates is discussing Johnson's moral writings and praising the Rambler essays as the masterpiece of the form. So, I'd like to put Bates aside for a few evenings and go directly to Johnson.

I know full well that this is a dangerous strategy. A few months ago, I left off in the middle of Hans Kung's memoirs in order to read his published dissertation on Karl Barth's theology of justification. Reaching the middle of that work, fascinating though it was, I left off to "quickly" get though Dennett's Breaking the spell, and have not gotten back to it. The same thing happened with Kierkegaard. I started reading the new biography biography by Joakim Garff, broke off to peruse Either/Or before Garff left the topic, got into the middle of it, and then got distracted with...who knows what? Maybe Kung.

So you can see, there is a pattern here...and not a healthy one. There was lately an essay in the NYT by a popular writer who wrote about the fact that he reads dozens of books simultaneously. That's me.