Josh, I have not read any of the three books you mentioned, but I have read The Reformation by Diarmaid McCulloch at your  recommendaion, and I loved it.  What a tour de force!  What a tome, at 700-plus pages!  This is serious history that moves along at a fast clip.  The author, scholar that he is, writes with style, verve, and wit.

In the field of religious history, I rank it along with God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson as the two best I have read recently.  The Nicolson book is an account of the translation - writing of the King James Bible by a committee, no less.  The miracle here is that a literary masterpiece came out of a committee.

I like this cafe idea, and I hope it catches on.

I'm very glad the arts will be discussed here--that's my love.

My favorite political novels and recent reads:

The Comedians by Graham Greene (about Haiti), a great nonfiction work that is related is Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder about Dr. Paul Farmer's work in that country.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (about the Spanish Civil War and the mixed loyalties and atrocities on both sides). I read this book as a teenager and only saw the love story. I read it recently, several decades later, and was profoundly impressed by the depth of Hemingway's portrayal of the difficulties of political allegiance.

I'm now in the middle of Philip Caputo's Acts of Faith, a wonderful novel about Sudan.

I'm sure when I'm done moving to the Left Coast :-)  that this will be one of my favorite visiting points, since I love TPM (you're my first or second blog stop every day).  The site looks great, and congratulations. Your hard work is paying off.

... which book I definitely found worthwhile. Hope you can find time to read his metabiography ... and thanks again for bringing up this site, & congratulations!

... I would prefer it if people more generally read more new editions of literary classics, or rediscovered works from the past, and fewer biographies. Yet what Sisman's story of the genesis of Boswell's Life has helped me to see is that modern literary biography has a generic integrity all its own. In a nutshell: I have come to see how writing a biography, and contemplating a great person of letters, as Johnson was, can in its own right be a most worthwhile kind of spiritual exercise, one that draws on aesthetic, moral, and social faculties in a way indistinguishable, finally, from imaginative literature itself.

This is so because Sisman shows us how Boswell himself found nothing less that personal redemption in his relationship to Dr. Johnson, who stood for him as more than a literary role model, but also as a foster father, and as a spiritual teacher.

*** 

Boswell's misspent youth, and his father's rage; but Johnson says to him: "Sir! Your father is trying to make of you at 20 the man you should be at 30!

Boswell's grandiosity and propensity to overpublish trivia; Johnson's example as a meticulous scholar.

Boswell's immorality and flightiness; Johnson both weighty moralist, and dispenser of practical advice: e.g. keep a journal.

Then, the second and larger part of his book, Sisman shows us Boswell's methodical investment in writing and pubishing his great book, and his descent into despairing alcholism once he has published it, despite the great acclaim it received.

What we learn, is, just how sustaining a lifelong engagement with the life of another can be; particularly if that life is understood in novelistic detail.

Turn from Johnsonian biography to Boswellian was instigated by Johnson himself. Johnson all about decorum; Boswell about "scenes" of wit in daily life.  But the former authorized the latter ...