[See Update 2 below.]
I’ve said I read a lot, and I do, but I’ve still not read all the books I consider it’d take to become really literate, some of the old–and even “new”–classics, in particular. Oh, I got a set of The Great Books in high school and found them thoroughly engaging (I even “neglected” to purchase the lit–and most of the historical “source” books for a sophomore Western Civ course in college… since I already had ’em in my dorm room in my GB collection). But TGB doesn’t encompass all the useful classic literature*, and a few really powerful works have been authored in the last century or so that are worth including as “new” classics, so…
I’ve been trying to flesh out my library of readings over the past couple of decades, especially. Some barriers:
- Local libraries are often a little thin on really significant works, and the county library here in America’s Third World County is particularly thin in that regard. Besides, libraries want the books returned, generally disapprove of notes written in the books in their collection and often have editions that are not well-formatted, especially when considering PD works, for some reason.
- Book budget and space. Face it, I don’t have room to properly store the books I already have, and books are expensive–even used books. Often, the books I’ve been looking for have been a bit hard to find, especially in editions that are within my budget.
Enter eBooks. For several years now I’ve been collecting an eBook library I can read in text or html format on my computers. That has worked quite well, and the 1,000s of PD books available at Project Gutenberg have provided me a great selection. Storing the books has been no problem, and sorting through my electronic library is easy-peasy.
Recently, with the Kindle Fire given to me by Son&Heir as a Xmas gift, I’ve been re-downloading almost all (it’s a work in progress) the eBooks I had already downloaded in text or html as Kindle-formatted books… then uploading them to my Amazon Cloud storage. I’ve also been duplicating the Great Books collection in Kindle format so that I can eventually–hopefully–have all my library that it’s possible to have in electronic format, even, where possible (and it has proven to be possible in more cases than I had thought it would be), old sci-fi books I’ve had for 40 or more years.
Here’s one, of many, places I’ve been using to obtain PD books in Kindle format recently:
freekindlebooks.org Searches for free eBooks or free Kindle books can result in more than you’ll have time for. A lot of free eBooks are self-published, and, of course, many are dreck. Still, some new self-published eBooks are quite good.
Go ahead. Make a list of all the books you always thought you ought to read and hunt ’em down. There may well be a free eBook version available.
*For example, I had not in earlier years read Mark Twain’s “1601: Conversation, as it was the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors” but have since repaired that unfortunate lacuna in my literary education. *heh*
Update: I had scheduled some car work for this A.M., so I downloaded a couple of lightweight novels to read while keeping an eye out on the work being done. I wasn’t expecting much, but I expected that the $0.99 book would at least have had a lil better proofing than the freebie.
Oh, boy, was I wrong!
Lousy plotting. Jejune characters. And not a page without glaring grammar, punctuation and spelling errors, combined with the occasional nonsensical sentence structure, loads of misused words, misplaced apostrophes and capitalizations. Was this written when the author was in seventh grade or something and then self-published without the benefit of any proofreading at all?
And then there’s the worthless ending.
A waste of $0.99.
The freebie has at least been better edited. Oh, it’s still just a “skim once” (if that) book, but although it has some idiosyncratic word uses and lousy punctuation, at least the grammar is better* (although that’s almost damning with faint praise) and the spelling is less atrocious–almost as though this book had been exposed to a spell checker.
Update 2: OTOH, another freebie (well, I could swear it was free when I downloaded it the other day–no, really!), The Truth About Sharks and Pigeons by Matt Phillips, is as much fun as reading a Douglas Adams book, maybe more. Consider,
Dully he wondered if his whole life was about to flash before his eyes, and he wondered if it would be okay to skip that bit as it really wasn’t going to be very interesting.
Strangely, the book’s well-written enough that chuckles like that one don’t seem to get stale.
At one time, in an another age perhaps, you could walk into a person’s home, more specifically the library, and learn a good deal about that person from the collection of books. There are other ways to size up a person; but a working knowledge of the “classics” permits folks to understand each other based on common ground on a variety of subjects. Without this common ground it is difficult, even impossible to exchange ideas which require these shared thoughts, building blocks if you will.
I got a late start, not learning to enjoy reading as I considered it something that was forced on me just to get through school. It wasn’t until I was long gone from a structured environment that I started to enjoy books as a way of sharing thoughts. I still don’t have much of a “classical” background as compared with many of the folks I’ve come to call “friends”; but that’s the beauty of growing and learning, there is never an end to opportunity.
” that’s the beauty of growing and learning, there is never an end to opportunity”
When one stops learning, may as well pull the covers over one’s head and take a long dirt nap…