Not Reading Report

Sometimes I decide not to finish reading a book.  Today was one of those days.  This book (all right:  it’s two books, containing four volumes of one work) is The Life of George Washington by Washington Irving.  It has been on my shelf for years and for as long as I can remember it was on my parents’ bookshelf before that.  I assume it was there because the bindings are pretty; some of the pages are still uncut.

I made it about forty pages into the first volume.  The actual prose is pleasant.  Irving tells a good story, which is not surprising from the man who gave us “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  (Incidentally, he also first associated the name Gotham with New York and the Knickerbocker for whom the Knicks are named was his creation.)

 

The tone is more hagiography than biography.  I was willing to deal with that for a while, but then there was a totally uncritical comment about a manager of a property living only with such negros as necessary to run the place and then I gave up somewhere in the middle of a bunch of bad faith negotiations with various Native American peoples as a way of promoting English colonization instead of French colonization.  I just can’t stomach the basic racism and genocide at the core of our national history.

 

Wikipedia informs me that Irving’s style of biography (he also wrote biographys of Mohammed and Christopher Columbus) is now called “romantic history,” a mixture of fact and fictional elements to give the story more punch.  He is the source of the mistaken idea that Europeans before Columbus believed the earth to be flat, so I’d say he was pretty darn influential.  In spite of this, the factual parts of his work seem to have held up to modern scrutiny, more or less.  To me, it reads like the kind of biography of heroes given to fourth graders but with better writing:  no warts here!

 

I expect I could learn something if I plowed through the rest of the pages, but life is short and I’d rather read something better, something that did not gloss over the difficult parts.