I thoroughly enjoyed this book by Thomas Mallon. I found it in my daughter's Goodwill while I was visiting her last Spring. I just finished it!! I know. That's bad, but I had other books to read as well, the summer job and I finally picked it back up this past weekend from the table by my couch. I had been stung by a virulent yellow jacket and needed book sustenance of a lighter kind where I didn't have to figure out a mystery, a murder, etc...
This book was published in 1984. I love the cover. The funny thing was this: when I grabbed this book off the shelf I also grabbed two more and what do you think they all ended up being about? Diaries. So I took it as a nod to "Hello! You may want to start one!" So I did. It may not prove to be as fascinating as the diaries that Mallon discusses in his book.
Mallon says he had read "hundreds of diaries" and that he came "to feel sure of three things":
-writing books is too good an idea to be left to authors
-almost no one has had an easy life
-no one ever kept a diary for just himself
You really do want to read the diaries he has picked to discuss and go back in time to experience the daily life of a downstairs servant, or what the gossip was at court during the reign of this or that King or Queen, or what it was like to be a grave robber. Famous diarists such as Sylvia Plath, Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Queen Victoria, Thoreau, C.S. Lewis, Anne Frank, Mary Shelley and so forth. To get into their minds is to get into their daily thoughts whether uplifting or downtrodden. To look through the window of their soul.
Mallon explains that a diary keeps a person alive and some if not all of the diarists within his book carry this wish when they are writing. That they may live on eternally.
I get it!!
So if you can find this little gem then grab it. It'll be a good read.
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