I saw his name for the first time in an article or an introduction about the history of Shakespeare’s editions if I remember correctly. Another possibility is that I had listened to Harold Bloom talking about him in one of his interviews. Whatever the case might be I wasn’t that much interested at the time. It wasn’t until later that I got a little bit interested after seeing different writers talk about the biography James Boswell had written of his life, regarding the book as a great piece of literature and in some cases as one of that writer’s favorite books, as it was the case of Mark Twain. After that some more time passed and it was just last week that I finally decided to give the book a try.

First thing that caught my attention was the immense amount of work that Boswell put into writing this biography. At the beginning of the book he briefly talks about all the years of taking notes of his conversations with Johnson while he was still alive, and about the other several years he dedicated to gathering more information about him and organizing the different pieces into the final form of the biography. A truly good example of a lifetime's work. Another fact to be mentioned is that not just Boswell but also later the editors of his work were quite like that, which is something I find very inspiring, since I think it would be nice to have something one is so passionate about that it would just be natural to dedicate oneself to work on it.

Now, entering the subject of the biography itself, I was kind of happy to read that Johnson had a very disorganized approach to reading. It is stated that he read a lot, but he seldomly got through a book from beginning to end, instead he seemed to have the ability to identify the most relevant aspects of a piece of writing without the necessity of reading the whole of it. It is mentioned that he tried in different occasions to systematize his way of reading, and also seemed to have failed all of them, so I want to believe that he gave more priority to his interests of the moment than to any possible external opinion about the importance of a certain text and of the “necessity’ of reading it to its entirety. That reminded me of Borges, who said he had “interrogated” thousands of books but that he had few times finished any. I myself feel more at ease reading in this way, I think I started enjoying literature more now that I don’t care about dropping a book after I start feeling a little bit bored than when I forced myself to finish things just because they were classics and I had to read them.

There are many other things I could say and would want to say about the Life of Ben Johnson but this is starting to get a little bit long and I’m already smelling the steam coming out of my head for having tried to write about a topic unfitting for someone who isn’t used to writing, I’ll go for something simpler next time. Anyways, thanks for reading and I hope I didn’t bore you too much. And also, I’d greatly appreciate any corrections.