This is really monotonous and a bit boring, but it has some interesting things. I started listening to the LibriVox narration, but that narrator had a very drab voice. So, I switched to the "read-aloud" option on Windows and went to Project Gutenberg. It is a much better voice even though it is digitized. I could also follow along if there was something I didn't understand in the text. (I also skipped all the Latin portions for obvious reasons.)
The most famous people in this were Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and George Herbert. The rest were pretty dull.
I am looking forward to Volume II where I get to hear what Aubrey has to say about Shakespeare.
Stay Tuned! (After I take a break!)
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Thanks to the jumbled manuscripts that are now known as Brief Lives, John Aubrey deserves to be considered Britain’s first genuine biographer. He is also one of the liveliest, most colorful, and most likable presences in all of English literature. Hopeless with his tangled finances, incorrigibly convivial, interested in everything and everyone, Aubrey led a rackety life as an “antiquary,” which might be defined as a cross between historian, archaeologist, and gossip columnist. The Lives, like his other writings, were composed haphazardly: Hodgepodges of picturesque anecdote and deftly concise portraiture, they were “tumultuarily stitched up” by Aubrey for the benefit of a fellow scholar. For centuries, the chaos of Aubrey’s papers awaited an inspired editor. He finally arrived in 1949: Oliver Lawson Dick selected, or, more accurately, assembled, 134 Lives, and introduced them along with a superb ninety-page essay on Aubrey’s own life and times. The result was published as Aubrey’s Brief Lives, and it opened both a new window on the past and a perspective on human nature nonetheless fresh for being timeless.
