A Sort of Life

A Sort Of Life (1971) is the first volume of Graham Green's autobiography that takes the readers from his birth to the publication of Stamboul Train (aka The Orient Express) open of his biggest commercial success. Greene is one of my favorite authors and now that I've read all of his novels I've decided to embark on his autobiographies, so next up is Ways of Escape, and I might give A World of My Own: A Dream Diary a miss. I think I'll like the next installment more, since he doesn't spend much time talking about the inspirations or travels that inspired his greatest novels. The early life didn't much interest me, however, one does get a sense of what was important to the writer and reveals that one of his greatest problems in life was an aversion to boredom, something I can easily relate to. And this, in a sense was, one of his greatest inspirations since he claims that is what inspired him to create other worlds in his novels and to travel to places like Africa, Southeast Asia, Haiti, Mexico, and other locales often in times of crisis.

Comments

[Edward]

Haha. You are the busiest person I know Pat, or at least the person with the greatest combination of number and variety of pastimes. I also dislike boredom, but the particular brand of boredom I hate most is doing boring things (like being in the wrong job), rather than not having enough to do. I find relaxation entirely agreeable.

[MC]

Well, I have five months off a year to keep myself from getting bored. Sitting here on a Tuesday night after going to the gym, reading 30 pages of Deliverance, finishing up collecting the assigned readings for my Japanese Cinema in English course for next year, doing initial research on an article on revisionist samurai films, going to a party at local film editing company, and seeing the film Amour...I wonder if I should head out since I don't have to work tomorrow...