A defense of something or other

Lately my reading has been even more frivolous than usual: a lot of science fiction, YA fantasy, fanfiction.

I  remember going to Barnes & Noble with my parents before I left for camp one summer, stocking up on books for the two months I was going to be away. I was probably twelve, or thereabouts. I was in the children’s section, picking out something by…maybe Tamora Pierce. Anyway, a twelve-year-old kind of book. My parents wanted me to get something else instead. I think it was David Copperfield. Whatever. I wanted to read kids’ books; they wanted me to read the classics.

And I love Dickens. I’ve read  David Copperfield–I don’t actually know how many times. Or whether I should count the thirteen times I read an abridged version when I was in elementary school. But I think the way my reading habits have developed since then is, in several ways, a rebellion against the feeling that my parents thought the reading I did just for fun was a waste.

The books I seek out now, and write about here, were mostly considered pretty trashy in their own time, and are only legitimized–if they are legitimized–by age. I’ve read a bunch of books that are part of the canon, but I hate the idea of the canon. I don’t think anyone should take books that seriously. We should love our books, but we should love them irreverently.

No book speaks to everyone. I may think Middlemarch is the most amazing and perfect thing ever written, but not everyone is going to feel the same deep and enduring love for Nicholas Bulstrode that I do. But I can laugh at it, too–and that I also love every single character in Tracy Park, which is pretty mediocre.

I’ve just been thinking a lot lately about how I’m kind of a snob. And when I try not to be a snob I go about it in the snobbiest way possible. But I hope I’m over being a snob about books, because…there’s really nothing wrong with a bad book. The person pretentiously reading Proust on the subway is no better than the person reading a romance novel or a self help book. I may read Twilight and laugh at how bad it is, but I’m still getting enjoyment out of it. And I may read Thomas Mann and have it make me unhappy and uncomfortable, but I’m getting something else out of it. The idea of getting nothing out of a book at all is faintly disturbing to me.

So it’s all just words on pages, put there because a book–that particular book–was an ideal someone aspired to. And I think that’s kind of impossibly cool.

The Amateur Cracksman

It occurs to me that I have never written about Raffles. Lots of people have heard of Raffles, I think, but not many people have read any of the stories. Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t either, except for an attempt to listen to the audiobook of The Amateur Cracksman (no matter how hard I try, I will never have enough patience for audiobooks).

Anyway, Raffles. He’s an excellent cricket player! He has dark, curly hair! He leads his old friend Bunny into a life of crime!

The History of Mr. Polly

So, I finished my first book for the Gaurdian challenge.

 

The History of Mr. Polly was a pretty quick read, and maybe I went through it a little too fast. While I was reading it I really enjoyed it, but looking back I find it kind of dissatisfying.

Alfred Polly is educated poorly and apprenticed at a men’s clothing store. He moves to progressively worse jobs, but manages to retain an interest in his surroundings. He unwisely — and sort of unintentionally — marries a cousin and opens up a shop in a town called Fishbourne.

He gradually alienates the other local shopkeepers through is lack of social skills and habit of making up unflattering nicknames. His relationship with his wife, Miriam, deteriorates, and the shop becomes less and less profitable.In his late thirties, miserable and on the verge of bankruptcy, Mr. Polly decides to kill himself. H.G. Wells makes a point of telling us that this is as much a result of his chronic indigestion as his actual circumstances.

Guardian Challenge

So, I’m starting this late, but Jennie at Biblio File is hosting a challenge based on The Guardian’s list of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read Before They Die.(Yeah, like anyone actually will)

The challenge is to read and review 10 books off the list (that’s 1%) between February 1st of 2009 and February 1st of 2010.

Of these 10, you must read 1 from each category and, if possible, 1 should be a book you have never heard of until you saw it on this list.

These are the books I’ve picked:

Kindle’s ebook formats

I don’t know how many Kindle owners drop by here, but more should, because reading public domain books has just gotten even easier.

Amazon keeps pretty quiet about what formats the Kindle does and doesn’t support. Here’s what you need to know: the proprietary Amazon format, .azw, is exactly the same thing as a Mobipocket book, (.mobi). The Kindle also natively supports plain text files.

Project Gutenberg has always had all of its books avalable as .txt files, and you can move those straight to your Kindle via USB. Recently, though, they’ve been making their books available in the .mobi and .epub (for Sony Reader) formats, which means that you can get the books with more formatting and, sometimes, illustrations. Mobipocket files, like text files, can be transferred straight to your Kindle with no reformatting.

The Kindle DX, which is available for preorder now, will natively support .pdf documents as well, which means that you will be able to transfer any book from the Internet Archive or Google Books straight to your Kindle without reformatting. I’ve been trying to come up with ways to justify ordering one, but my Kindle is less than a year old, so I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Books I have neglected to post about since finishing The Girl From Hollywood

I keep wanting to do a post about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book The Girl from Hollywood, and how an absolutely appalling series of coincidences gets three different women involved with an evil movie director named, if I recall correctly, Wilson Crumb. One gets addicted to cocaine and becomes a drug dealer (although he cannot get her to sleep with him);another gets addicted to cocaine, becomes his mistress, and dies of pnuemonia after he hits her; and one, after semi-successfully fending off his advances, shoots herself. The two drug-addicted ones are in love with the same young man, who lives on a ranch modeled after Burroughs’ own, and the attempted suicide is his sister. His name is Custer, and he spends a while in jail for murder. It’s all pretty miserable. If I had no interest in reading the Tarzan books before, I really don’t now.

Anyway: things I have read since The Girl From Hollywood, and liked better:

Somehow Good

I haven’t finished Somehow Good yet, but — well, as absorbing as I’m finding it, I’ve been reading it on and off for a couple of weeks now, and I’m still less than halfway through. I’m not convinced that I ever will finish it.

Until I came across this book in the Project Gutenberg catalog, my main associations with the name “William De Morgan” were ceramics and this painting by his wife Evelyn, which I loathe. I had no idea that, around the turn of the century, he began a successful career as a novelist.

Somehow Good is a difficult book to define. The plot, in almost anyone else’s hands, would be unforgivably melodramatic — the New York Times reviewer (PDF) says “the plot of it might well in other hands have served to furnish forth all the thrills that melodrama is made of.”

Uh-oh.

Project Gutenberg has just released a new, better formatted version of Who Cares?

I might have to reread it. Again.

Alger books

This is a document I created for myself when I was writing a high school research paper on Horatio Alger and had trouble keeping his books straight. I think it’s pretty clear that I wasn’t taking the paper very seriously.

It’s been a while since I read anything by Alger, but he was sort of my first love in the world of trashy 19th century fiction, and I feel a warm glow when I look at my bookshelf and realize for the hundredth time that yes, I own a  copy of Walter Sherwood’s Probation.

I kind of thought I’d posted this last week, but apparently not: Red-Robin

After finding Keineth so wonderful, I immediately started two more Jane Abbott books: Larkspur on my computer and Red-Robin on my Kindle. Red-Robin is the one I finished first — I don’t know whether that was because I was reading it on the more portable machine or because it was kind of awesome.

Somehow, Red-Robin seemed a lot older than it was, which I think might be because the storyline reminded me a lot of a Mary Jane Holmes novel. But even though Jane Abbott uses the same plotlines so many other people use, she brings a sort of freshness to them. Things that you expect to happen because you know how the story goes do happen, but they happen more naturally and spontaneously than you would believe possible.