All About Books discussion

Talk about and recommend your favorite Journals and Letters here.

Has anyone read The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934? That's one of my favourite journals. Highly recommended.

The Diary of a Young Girlis pretty good. My English class had to read this book in the 8th grade. It was a pretty interesting account of anne frank.

I am reading an interesting book, 84 Charing Cross Road. Correspondence between a reader in US and a person employed in a book shop that specialises in second hand copies of pieces of literature in UK becomes a story in itself. A marvelous piece of letter writing....

I'm currently reading a huge compilation of Jessica Mitford's letters Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford she had a fascinating life and family and there are many hilarious letters.

Ooh, I've had that Decca book on my shelf for ages Pink, just not got to the front of the pile yet. Sounds like I should shift it forward.

Decca is a great book, it's huge, but can be easily dipped in and out of. I find myself reading big chunks at a time though as it's so fascinating.

I recently finished Dear Lumpy: Letters to a Disobedient Daughter and Dear Lupin...Letters to a Wayward Son which were okay, but became a bit repetitive. They were Christmas e-book bargains, which I've been trying to get through.

I’m currently slowly reading the complete journals of Pepys, Emerson, and Thoreau, the selected diaries of John Quincy Adams, and the selected letters of Robert Louis Stevenson.

I’m currently reading The Diary of John Quincy Adams: 1794-1845, a selected (but long) edition edited by Allan Nevins in 1951. JQA is an interesting case because he appeared to dislike politics and public life, frequently stating his preference for being a reader, writer, and scholar; yet when he had a chance to do that, after his Presidency and in his early 60s, he launched right back into a nine-term career as a US Representative that took him to his death at age 80. It is theorized that he suffered from depression, and he consistently seems to have sought out whatever conditions would make him most miserable. The family mantle always weighed heavily on him * , and although one might find his sense of public service admirable, he was privately quite cynical about political life and constantly frustrated by it. It is not just that he couldn’t achieve what he wanted through politics - that is common - but he took no pleasure in the process, as the more extroverted can. Meeting with supplicants, for example, was profoundly tedious for him.

So the effect of the diaries which he assiduously kept is sad, but also stimulating because he was a man of genuine cultivation and always “in the thick of things”.

* Not just on him. His oldest son committed suicide at 28, and his second son drank himself to death by 31.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a persistently sickly and convalescent individual who famously died young at age 44, but in reading his Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson one is struck by the fact that he simply could not stay in one place for long. He was constantly on the move at a time when travel was far more arduous than it is today. Some of that travel was to generate material for books, but a lot of it was intended for recuperation (spa towns, places with better weather, and so on).

It is hardly a deep insight to suggest that his chances of improving health would have been far better if he had just stayed somewhere, anywhere, instead of frenziedly pursuing well-being like a chimera. Yet this elementary point seems to have been ignored / resisted by both RLS and the people around him. Stevenson was obviously intelligent, a great writer, and heroic in his summoning of what little energy he had; but the need for novelty functioned in him self-destructively, like a substance abuse problem. One waits in the letters for a glimmer of realization: “Maybe I should just calm down.” It doesn’t come.