Archives for October 16, 2006

I spent most of last week deep in the woods of Connecticut, where I worked on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. When not clicking away at the laptop, I watched In Cold Blood (about which more later in the week), Journey into Fear, The Lady from Shanghai, and Our Man in Havana, read Simon Callow’s Orson Welles: Hello Americans, Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, Chester Himes’ Blind Man With a Pistol, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Patrick S

“One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books.”

Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt