This morning I finished reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson — all twelve hundred pages of it, which I’ve consumed in chunks between other books. The last five hundred pages I read in a long push. I have a nice old hardback Modern Library edition, bought in a used book store in Gold Beach last summer and now covered with my notes in blue pen. It has no index, so I’ve been tagging important pages with the relevant information, phrases and names running along the book’s upper margin. If the paper weren’t so thin you could read those notes like a flip-book: the scribbled stick-figure version of the Life.

Now I’m trying to imagine what a stick figure with a dropsy would look like. Bah.

Next I have about three half-finished Woolf-related books awaiting me; I went on something of a binge at Powell’s. And I still haven’t decided what to do with Louise’s memoir; or, rather, how to plan what to do with it, so I don’t end up with an even greater mess. I did manage to edit one academic paper into shape for submission as a conference paper. Two others — longer, of course, but in better condition — need the same treatment.

I feel as though I’ve swallowed down summer in a gulp, and now fall comes racing closer. I’m not ready yet.

Yesterday afternoon, still post-migraine-hazy, I finished reading Robinson Crusoe — I liked and admired it much more on this read, though I still think it falls apart as soon as Friday appears (and not just because of the embarrassing broken English). Now I’m onto Boswell again, reading straight through rather than in fits for a class. My copy is an old Modern Library hardback, bought last summer in a used bookstore in Gold Beach, Oregon, and I’m marking it up something fierce. I’m annotating things related to my potential dissertation topic; things related to the reason novel idea; things related to other books I’ve read (lots of connections to Charlotte Lennox and The Female Quixote, unsurprisingly); and things that are just damned interesting. I happen to think that most things relating to Johnson are damned interesting, but that’s because I’m a geek.

Here you can witness some photographic evidence of my geekiness, from our March trip to London. This is the Gough Street house, which is light-filled and creaky and wonderful and full of weird little memorabilia, like the portrait of the Infant Johnson, and the unremarkable-looking chest with a sign announcing that it should not be touched because “IT ONCE BELONGED TO DAVID GARRICK!” (T. took a great picture of this sign.)
We only spent about forty-five minutes there (followed by fish & chips at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese), but I loved it. It made me want to write. And live there, but, hey. The writing I can do.

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And now, back to my synopsis. Yargh.