Glendinning and Trollope

I only just discovered Victoria Glendinning who is a brilliant biographer. Her biography of Anthony Trollope is so good that it vindicates the existence of what more often than not is a very boring genre. Glendinning had a very difficult task ahead of her, given that Trollope’s life was quite boring and his very long novels are also not among the most exciting Victorian works. However, Glendinning is so good that she can make even Trollope sound fascinating. I had given up on this author a while ago after I read his The Warden. That novel was the best sleeping aid I could have imagined. One or two sentences were enough to make me fall asleep even when I tried reading them standing up.

After I read Glendinning’s biography of the writer, however, I decided to give Trollope another chance. So now I’m reading The Way We Live Now and it’s actually quite lovely. This is what a good biographer should be like. Most biographers, though, make you dislike the writer whose life they narrate so profoundly that you never want to hear that writer’s name again.

And, of course, one of the best things about Trollope’s books is that they are available for free in the Amazon’s Kindle store. Summer is always hard for me in terms of money (is it just me or is it everybody?), so I decided not to pay for any reading matter until the end of summer.