BOOKS BOUGHT:

• None

BOOKS READ:

• Charles Dickens: A Life—Claire Tomalin

If I were walking home down a dark alley, and I got jumped by a gang of literary hooligans who held me up against a wall and threatened me with a beating unless I told them who my favorite writer was… Well, I wouldn’t tell them. I’d take the beating, rather than crudify my long and sophisticated relationship with great books in that way. The older I get, the less sense it makes, that kind of definitive answer, to this or any other question. But let’s say the thugs then revealed that they knew where I lived, and made it clear that they were going to work over my children unless I gave them what they wanted. (This scenario probably sounds very unlikely to American readers, but you have to understand the violent passions that literature excites here in the U.K. After all, we more or less invented the stuff.) First, I would do a quick head count: My seven-year-old can look after himself in most situations, and I would certainly fancy his chances against people who express any kind of interest, even a violent one, in the arts. If, however, there were simply too many of them, I would eventually, and reluctantly, cough up the name of Charles Dickens.

And yet up until a couple of weeks ago, I had never read a Dickens biography. I have read a biography of Thomas Hardy, even though I haven’t looked at him since I was in my teens, when I was better able to withstand the relentless misery; I have read biographies of Dodie Smith and Richard Yates, even though much of their work is unfamiliar to me; I’ve read biographies of Laurie Lee and B. S. Johnson, even though I’ve never even opened one of their books, as far as I know. Every time, I was drawn to the biographer, rather than the subject. (The great Jonathan Coe wrote the B. S. Johnson book, for example.) Last year I devoured Sarah Bakewell’s brilliant book about Montaigne, How to Live, even though I can hardly make it through a sentence of Montaigne’s essays without falling into a deep sleep. Expecting a biography to be good simply because you have an interest in the life it describes is exactly like expecting a novel to be good simply because it’s set in Italy, or during World War II, or some other place and time you have an interest in. The only Dickens biography I have ever wanted to read until now was Peter Ackroyd’s, but it is over a thousand pages long and made me wonder...