I had a local offline copy of wikipedia for many years due to bad internet and thanks to the kiwix project. It had a neat configurable random article option. Could be setup to return articles related to a subject (using wikidata). So I set it up to return Artists. And made the link my homescreen, so everytime I opened the browser I got a bio of someone famous from some random part of the world. Its was really quite interesting. Realized people are just people dealing with all kinds of never ending bullshit, yet somehow in the middle of it all, make time to create beauty. Reading all those life stories really helped me get through some tough times.
That's a nice takeaway. I was having a conversation with a friend about favorite book genres a while back, and mentioned that I liked reading biographies. The response I got was essentially "Why would you waste time reading about someone else's life?". Your comment would have been a good answer. Thanks for sharing and you've inspired me to do something similar with my home page.
I like it too. And not even famous people. I think for me, its about seeing different paths ppl take and get pushed into. How they handle things. How they breakdown etc. Lot of patterns repeat and then I see those patterns in me and the ppl around me...
I would recommend Samuel Johnson's "Lives of the Poets", a similar collection of biographies of English poets. Johnson points out good stuff from each of these poets works as well. His vigorous style of writing packed with wit as usual.
He mentions that reading Paradise Lost, is "more of a duty than a pleasure", for example.