Browsed through in bookstores and returned to the shelf

A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All. Magazine editor decides to undertake reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. This makes at least as much sense as undertaking to climb some mountain. I was reminded that Isaac Asimov undertook the same task in youth, having to stop half-way through when (as I recall) he was drafted. As he left his parents' house he pointed to the set and said, "Now I'll never know how it comes out." But Asimov was a polymath even before he read any encyclopedias, and Jacobs is no polymath. I found it depressing how this guy - educated, has a good job requiring broad knowledge - takes a perverse pride in his ignorance, and is so surprised and startled at discovering facts I knew offhand, like the difference between assault and battery. Damn it, I'm more learned than he, and I didn't even have to read an encyclopedia to get that way, yet he has a job like that and I don't.

Kitty Kelley, The Family. Who said that this family history of the Bushes is supposed to be a demolition job, just because Kelley wrote it? Actually it looks quite sympathetic.

Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World. Critical biography of Shakespeare. Well-written, juggles knowledge adroidly, yet I couldn't help feeling uneasy with it. It's the way Greenblatt piles supposition on supposition until he's created giant castles built on air, and even more his dogged New Historical assumptions of one-to-one relationships between Shakespeare's life and his works. Robert Greene was fat and witty, and Shakespeare knew him; Falstaff is fat and witty, and Shakespeare wrote him; therefore Greene was the model for Falstaff, Q.E.D. In any given case it's always possible, but in the absence of actual evidence, like statements by the author as to what he was thinking of (and even then they could be misremembers, rationalizations, half-truths, or outright lies) conclusions like these are very dangerous to make. And in quantity they amount to an argument that authors can't invent: they can only copy mindlessly from life. Perhaps literary biographers should be required to keep a quote from Tolkien on their desks; the quote is this:

An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempt to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous. It is also false, though naturally attractive, when the lives of an author and critic have overlapped, to suppose that the movements of thought or the events of time common to both were necessarily the most powerful influences.

And to the latter sentence I'd add, "and also when they do not overlap, when the critic has studied the author's life and times and thinks he knows what most affected the author." Strangely, no-one has yet proposed an argument that the four questing hobbits of The Lord of the Rings were inspired by the four friends of the T.C.B.S., Tolkien's tight friendship circle of his youth, and I can't think of any way to make them fit: but it'll happen eventually. The reductionist biographical critics are on the march, ta-runda runda runda rom.