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I enjoy reading all kinds of books. Perhaps surprisingly, I do not tend to read contemporary novels; although I do sometimes read novels from the past, such as those by Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope. I read history books too, on different topics and periods.
My favourite reading is published letters, diaries, essays, autobiographies, memoirs, and biographies. Often, these are of famous people. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) wrote many letters in her lifetime, and kept a diary for most of her life. This has all been published, and you can read her letters to people as well as some of their replies.
Biography is a very popular genre in Britain, and people are eager to know the details about someone elses's life! Usually, the subject of the biography is a person from the past, such as the poet, Siegfried Sassoon, or the scientist, Charles Darwin.
It is certainly true that biographies and autobiographies do not need to be by, or about, famous people to be interesting. Some of the most fascinating autobiographies are accounts by ordinary people of their own lives, perhaps a hundred years ago, or more. People may have worked as servants in houses or hotels, or on the land, doing farm work, as craftsmen, or in industry. By reading their autobiographies, we get a sense, not only of the people who wrote them, but of whole ways of life which have now changed.
What sort of books are your favourites to read?
Vocabulary:
Autobiography is the story of your own life, told by you.
Biography is the story of someone's life, told by a different person to the subject of the biography.
Memoir is a piece of writing which someone writes based on their memories; it may be their own experiences, although not necessarily their whole life, but it could also be their memories of the times which they lived through, or of the places and people which they saw.
Genre is a type of literature, or a category of any of the other arts.
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