The John Lennon Letters
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John Lennon was a writer as well as a musician. It was entirely natural for him to put pen to paper whenever he had an idea, a thought, a reaction or a desire to communicate. He lived - and died - in an age before emails and texts. Pen and ink was what he turned to. John wrote letters and postcards all of his life; to his friends, family, strangers, newspapers, organisations, lawyers and the laundry - most of which were funny, informative, campaigning, wise, mad, poetic, anguished and sometimes heartbreaking. For the first time, John's widow, Yoko Ono, has given permission to publish a collection of his letters. The Editor is the Beatles' official biographer, Hunter Davies, who knew John well.
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OK it probably goes without saying that you should only read this if you are already a pretty big Beatles/Lennon fan. If you are, you will probably like this. Hunter Davies does a good job of providing context for the letters which vary wildly from short postcards to his aunt to letters to fans to diatribes about art to grocery lists. (He likes yogurt.) Sometimes John seems like a real dick in his letters, which by all reports he sometimes was in real life. You can understand why he would be that way, given all the insane amounts of celebrity & pressure surrounding the Beatles, but still–a dick. But sometimes he seems like a sweet, funny guy. Sometimes he seems like a true radical and I loved reading his thoughts about songs like Imagine and Revolution and their potential for being forces of change.
I will probably buy this book for my dad for Christmas and he will probably like it. Don't tell my dad. You might also want to get this book for your dad, if your dad like the Beatles. 97% of dads do.
PS I forgot to say that my favorite letter was one he wrote in reply to a letter to the editor someone wrote saying that TV was making kids dumb, and John wrote a really smart defense of Sesame Street <3
It's a really well made book, complete and thorough, however John Lennon is not one to wax lyrical in letters. It's a bunch of stream-of-consciousness piece of papers, filled with inside jokes between him and himself, with doodles. He talks about the influence of The Goon Show on him and Britain, and it feels like he always speaks in that voice. There are only a couple of genuine letters, one to Paul, one to Cynthia, and some to his cousin Liela, but mainly it feels like he's throwing random words on postcards and sending them to people all over the world.
Anyway, this book can be read as a John Lennon biography (as it was written by the writer of The Beatles' official biography, and a friend of John) it goes through all the phases of his life, with letters as documentation, and gives a lot of insight into the Beatles disintegration, his family life (in all its forms), and his (very brief phase of) activism.
I used to be obsessed with John Lennon (before I've even heard a Beatles album), I remember downloading a compilation of his work online, just to check him out, and having that album on loop for the next 6 months, and my love for his music just kept getting bigger and bigger. But, I'm glad I read this book, after I got a bit over him as a person, cause he's really so flawed, however good his intentions may be. I guess the book just shows how normal he was, however eccentric he might've seemed.
