When you have a huge collection of books suddenly present on a DVD where do you start?

I started with  novels of  well known classic authors that I hadn’t got around to reading before – Dickens’  Tale of Two Cities,  some Henry James, George Eliot’s Romola. But I also couldn’t resist just browsing for odd stuff that might be interesting. The index on the DVD pulls in Wikipedia entries so even for something completely unknown at first sight you can glean a little bit about what is going on. And of course that’s without any re-reading – suddenly realising that you can read Bleak house or War & Peace in bed with one hand puts a whole new level of comfort into reading block busting, wrist busting novels.

Revisiting Dickens was a good thing – too many of my old Penguin editions or even older are musty 2nd hand versions that have dog eared yellowing pages that aren’t a pleasure to read through.   The opening paragraphs of Dickens are always good – take this from the Tale of Two cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

It just rolls along, battering you into to following it. It’s the same with Blaeak House:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Dickens piles it on, each metaphor toppling over the next one, one wave after another with Chancery at the bottom of it all, at the bottom of all this mud and fog and cold and misery.

I also discovered a great piece of e-book reading software for the PC, that lets me quickly preview any novel I want ot have a look at before loading it onto the reader.

- FB reader -  I have set it to automatically open a book whenever I click on the Epub link on my DVD of books, so you have a very swift gander inside to see if it’s what you really want to read! You can get it here:  http://www.fbreader.org/downloads.php – well worth it.

When my GP ( family doctor for those outside the UK) said, hmm, could be broken, better get it x-rayed, I was of course vindicated ( as I said to my wife, it does hurt , it is serious and I can’t wash up anymore – you try keeping your little finger out the washing up water). So off I went to the Poly clinic , that sounds as if it is some kind of plastic covered medical extension of a hydroponic farm, but is in fact quite a pleasant new building situated in the back of the beyond – well in Hove, not Brighton, the armpit of the universe as far as I am concerned. I took my ebook naturally because the great thing about an ebook is that you don’t have to choose what you want to read before hand, you are just packing a couple of hundred ( well nine hundred in my case) choices so that you can read to suit your mood. I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich in a hospital room, for the sake of myself and for others who might be glancing around to see what everyone is reading.  I got there in good time and decided to go for some Henry James – The Turn of the Screw – and then the battery went, and was reduced to looking round at what other people was reading.  And that wasn’t pretty – I nearly picked up an edition of Heat but my name was called and off to the x-ray room I went.  There is a simple moral to this tale that you can guess for yourself, with the technical advice that Sony readers charge much more quickly from mains chargers  than linking them to the PC ( you can pick ‘em up cheap on eBay dead cheap – never buy a rip-off Sony full price one – £24.99 for a charger!!!))

Not in any particular order or with any sense in yoking them together – it’s just that I finished re-reading John Updike’s Rabbit, Run the other day and yesterday I was walking thought the frenetic pre-Christmas rush in Borders, with big 20% off closing down signs everywhere ( but not on the ereaders, which has its own big signs – “This concession  is not part of the 20% off”, so none of the concessions are making concessions and we’re not going to be flooded with cheap e-readers any time soon).  I asked one of the staff if he had a copy of New Horizons, the BSF magazine, but he said he thought, no he distinctly remembered that was one of the magazine which the suppliers had come and pulled off the shelves once they knew Borders was in administration.

And Rabbit, Run – well I hadn’ t read it for many years, and having just recently read In the Beauty of the Lilies as well I was on a bit of an Updike jag.  I read Rabbit in a day courtesy of a faintly queasy illness that had me lying in bed ( and just a little worried that I was going to associate this unpleasant queasiness with Updike’s prose and for ever feel nauseous whenever I read him, but thankfully it hasn’t turned out like that – it was a great distraction).  There’s a real momentum that you get from motoring though a book in a day, even a stylist like John Updike,  but it was a slightly patchy affair. Rabbit, Run doesn’t have any of elegiac feeling of In the Beauty of the Lilies or , another of the earlier novels, The Centaur – Rabbit is just that, in the headlights of this prose scampering to and fro.  Re-reading it I think it was before John Updike really got under the skin of the beauty of the prosaic in , I don’t know, middle America. Maybe that’s why he went back to Rabbit every ten years, as he developed new layers to explore.  The novels seem to get richer as they go.

But then maybe that’s the point – nothing in Rabbit, Run was meant to be elegiac – intense maybe, but not elegiac.

The British version of Borders is in financial trouble, worrying that it hasn’t enough cash to get through Christmas says the Guardian here Maybe it’s all grist to the recession, but there’s a feeling that everything is Internet bound – every bookshop has its online ordering presence and it can’t attract that much new business, just means, maybe, less people in the shops, and Amazon is just synonymous with online books now .  A few months go Waterstones made a lot of people redundant as they merged all their ordering into one big distribution  hub.   So it looks like the cappuccino cafe mega bookstore is tottering in disarray, after being the butt of all those sneers at their frothy coffee.   Living in a small city you get used to big stores which almost always have the books you want, and the coffee too, and the small independent bookshops ( may two have survived here) feel dark and claustrophobic by comparison, as well as being right off the shiny major shopping mall track. It’s just the way it goes.

So will “real” books disappear, will it all go electronic, will we have flexible portable colour readers that will inevitably be viewers as well so that even the pure act of reading will be hyperlinked to video illustrations.  I once knew someone who said he made his way through an English degree with out reading a single classic text – he just watched films of the books.  There’s a certain effort in reading – as there is in watching a long film, but it is a different effort – so you could see someone  being seduced away from actual reading, just as children are more attracted to the incredible mult-media detail in video games rather than toy soldiers.

I am still looking for a decent set of contemporary ebooks  – yes I thought there are some that I would buy / read available like Ian Banks new book Transition) but then I find when I look it up that the downloadable version of the  book title refers to an mp3, so no you can’t get an etext.  In fact Amazon doesn’t even have a category for ebook.  Borders does, Waterstones does, even W H Smiths does – seems strange that Amazon are so far behind.

So I bought the hardback version of Transition
because I always buy Iain Banks and Iain M Banks ( apparently this book is sold under the M name in the US but with out here  – see interview in the Guardian, worth reading.  It’s good but not quite as good as some of the best Culture novels – but that’s OK , I mean it wouldn’t be possible to write all books equally as good as another, nor would it be possible ( though nice to think) that you always write a better book when you write the next one.  I like Ian Banks books, all of the, because

1) He’s written about the only utopia ( the Culture) that I would really lie to live in, and even then he’s got a critique – but my guess is that he likes it too really, and it’s an entertaining culture.

and

2) He’s got that comfortable ( or not comfortable – just how comfortable is it if you are humane) humane feel -about him and in his books – it all rings true .  Thats to say there isn’t the hint of violence, say, in the Wasp Factory or Consider Phlebas or any of the others but you can cope with it in context and not be Affronted.  The best? Excession of course.

.. and all the Jane Austen, all the George Eliot – the list goes on. Because why keep the battered yellowing old copies when you have your ebook version?  Especially the tomes like Middlemarch and War & Peace – you can now read them in bed with one hand without a wrist splint to help you hold them up.   What is the point in keeping them unless you think Books Do Furnish A Room.

Get down to your local Oxfam, a carrier bag at a time and donate them – probably the most beneficial route.  There’s a double benefit here – someone who really wants to read Emma gets it at a cheap price and  the money goes somewhere useful.

There is a great charity that donates books to Africa and other places: http://www.bookaid.org/site/our_work/what_we_do.htm and their approach is very sensible.  Rather than expect someone to ship your dog-eared paperbacks to the Thirld World try the Reverse Book Club – but three books for £6 and nver see them!

… which is every one’s first reaction when they see a reader. And it may be cliched as a reaction but it is a genuine one, even a horrified one.  It is different having a slightly cold metal slab of electronics in your hand instead of the warm feel of paper, or the friendly glossiness of a new book cover.   It could just be the shock of the new, or the dissonance between something that is metal and electronic bringing you stuff to read, old terrifying folk memories (or current memories if you are unlucky) of glaring flickering migraine inducing CRT screens that squatted on desks in a menacing way, challenging you to shift them without getting a hernia).  It could be though just a temperature thing – if you give someone a warm drink when you meet them they remember you more favourab;y than someone who gives you a cold drink ( it’s one of those elaborate psychology experiments that tells you things you don’t really need to know).   So a cold reader gives a worse impression than a warm paper one?

There is the smell – but there are very few books where the smell of the book lasts in a pleasant way ( the musty old leather binding of my childhood copy of Old Peter’s Russian Tales is an exception, where it used to be almost too overpowering it is now a fainter warmer smell, that rolls me back into the tales themselves) .

No I think it’s just auto-Ludditism, something that we are so utterly familiar with is changing utterly, and all the connotations are with computers and buzzing hard drives, unanswered email,  broken laptops and lost data – there’s quite a negative tag you can get into when you think about your computer.

There are lots more than I thought – and they are expensive enough to only be bought if you trust reviews or can get your hands on one for a suitable time. Now, the reviews first – some of them seem to me just to be plants to shout about the Amazon Kindle – it manifestly isn’t the best reader but in these seemingly independent blogs it always gets rated near the top, while the information on its competitors is sketchy and incomplete – one of the Sony reader PRS-5050 which omits to say that it can deal with ePub and open standard book formats. Suspect that viral marketing is in everybody’s marketing minds with the new readers just catching on, and you can’t expect to trust an advertiser.

Probably more than faint dislike – the thing is it has a keyboard. Who wants to be presented with a keyboard in front of them every time they are reading a book? It doesn’t seem right. When you start adding the lock-down DRM type content then it doesn’t seem as good at all as some of the alternatives. Except for that always on (always on?? train tunnels, underground car parks, caves, isolated country spots – the kind of place when you are going to want to buy a book quickly, fast without running the gauntlet of another cappuccino at Borders) and you can buy stuff NOW! I like that bit but that is probably too dangerous to It’s bad enough that Amazon is only a couple of have mouse clicks away at your PC

You remember how you could invest 1p back in your own time, then fast forward to the RATEOTU and the interest earnt over the last few billion years would pay your extortionate bill -  you do this in Mafia Wars, just leave it for a couple of months (given a few SBM*s before) and come back to fortune ($260 billion  for  me)

*SBM – Unit of Time known as a Sad Bastard Month, defined by more than half and hour in each day in a whole month spent amassing pointless points in pointless games