I just finished reading a fairly recent biography of Oscar Wilde. Upon reflection, I’m surprised both by the fact that I finished it, and that I seem to have an previously unsuspected taste for biography at all.
I probably wouldn’t have finished it, it I’d had anything else around the apt to read that I haven’t read a sufficient number of times before. It’s not that it was a bad book, but it was very dry. It managed to communicate the details of Wilde’s life without really evoking it. If Wilde’s life was a work of art — a conceit that’s mentioned several times throughout the biography — then this book is the equivalent to a play-by-play coverage of the work’s creation… that only occasionally manages to step outside and comment on its aesthetic merits.
On the other hand, any book that includes a short note about the typeface used is all right by me.