What attracts one to diaries? To get a sense of how they see life. What they note, what they register, what they mull about. They fall in the category of reading around the author. To get a better context of the author's books. But at times, the diaries are all I read from the author.
I recently spent a long afternoon browsing through Sylvia Plath's letters. And don't think I have the time and space to read them completely. But the volume of writing and work done in that short life is amazing. For a really good 5-minute summary of the letters/life, see this: "Whatever she set out to do, she did it."(This is by Summer Pierre at the New Yorker).
Then there is Virginia Woolf and her diaries. They have been always a source of random dipping pleasure. Read wherever you want and it holds you. Once in a while, on and off. When you are not sure what to read. How much life do people live! How much can they read and write and do and then write about it.
Most of the diaries or such books are of people not there any more. Of times and ages past.
However, one of my recent reads was Heidi Julavits' "A Folded Clock - A Diary" is of current times. She is a writer, a parent, lives in Maine, and Manhattan. It is a collection of entries from a year or two of the author's diaries. It is not really a diary as in they do not flow sequentially in time recording day after day, but a continuous series of Todays, mixed up from over a couple(?) of years. Todays of the current time and age. When people talk of internet and emails, and not telegrams and post. All the entries start with 'Today I..' prompt. And then get on to share something about the author's thinking, life or work. Often, prompting me to record the passing of the time.
I have not read anything by Heidi Julavits before, although I do often land up on Believer Mag pages, and then I looked her up, and read this essay by the author which I found interesting as well. The essay however is a different style than the diaries. May be, the diaries show you more of the person than a book or an essay?
Through the year, I read Doris Lessing and Simone De Beauvoir's memoirs and of course Elizabeth Von Arnim. Then there is Knausgaard with a memoir style of writing (what I've read of him). Or Orwell with Down and Out in Paris and London. Recent magazine issues - New Yorker December Archive issue had extracts from Dawn Powell's New York journals (link). And then read Jan Morris (she kept a 188 day journal at age 90), in the Paris Review. (link). All these artists and their journals!