I think that I am the only person I know who has read ‘The Red House Mystery’ by A A Milne. A detective story by the author of 'Winnie-the-Pooh.'
When you are as mean as I am when it comes to paying for e-books then you must be satisfied with the less frequented pathways of out of copyright literature. Some of the books which I have now read in electronic form by P G Wodehouse I have never heard of. ‘The Politeness of Princes’ and ‘The Pothunters’ read like hack works by an author who had been impressed by ‘Stalky and Co’ by Kipling – but they remain interesting as forerunners of Wodehouse’s mature style. At least that is what I am telling myself as I read through more obscure examples of Great Writers’ work!
I now have over three hundred books (varying in length from single short stories to the entire Bible) lurking in the memory of my e-book and I still haven’t got over the sheer magic of the thing: a single slim book containing an entire library!
If only the grasping publishers would moderate their extortionate prices for copyright books I would be truly satisfied. I find it astonishing to think that there are some instances where the electronic form of the book is MORE expensive than the paper copy! The economics behind that sort of greed has more in keeping with the grasping avariciousness of the venomous Sheriff of Nottingham than the Venerable Bede.
Whatever the effectiveness (or indeed the appropriateness) of that bitter comparison, it is perhaps significant that my e-book probably holds roughly the same number of volumes that Bede had in the library in the Monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow when he produced his books. It is also worth pointing out that the library at Wearmouth-Jarrow was probably one of the biggest in England at the time. If I push the historical point even more then I could say that all the books that Bede was able to consult are probably available free from websites around the globe as electronic downloads. Never has the literary knowledge of the world been so freely available to so many people . . . and I’m not sure of where I am going in this digression. Though it is noticeable that the number of Ecclesiastical Histories of the English Peoples (or equivalent) coming out of Northumbria has been a little thin on the ground during the last millennium despite the availability of books and the access to them!
Talking of Northumbria we actually had a mild hailstorm today. We also had sunshine and rain and cloud. Taken together it could be said to be more reminiscent of a British day during which you get a selection of the seasons rather than the steady expectation of consistent weather that we generally get in Catalonia.
As always with slightly rougher weather, the appearance of the sea becomes much more interesting with our stunted domestic waves actually acquiring some height and the wind whipping off the foam to make the curving waves beautiful to look at but devilishly difficult to photograph.
Ian, the professional photographer living diagonally above us, showed me a fine photo of a breaking wave taken from our very own seashore and in reply to my plaintive moan that I have never managed to take a picture like that, he patiently explained that what I was looking at was a cunningly composed composite of five separate photographs including one photo reversed to form the end of the beautifully curling wave! I have now sent off for a truncated version of the program that he used to produce such results and I hope soon to start dabbling in the forbidden arts of twisting photographic reality to my own dark ends.
I will end with my invaluable e-book and recommend (for those who have not yet read it) a delight of a book called ‘The Young Visiters’ by Daisy Ashford.
This is a book written by a nine year old which lay undiscovered for years and then was published with Daisy Ashford’s own punctuation and spelling. It is an artlessly cunning construction which uses the authentic naivety of Daisy with what now reads as a clever illumination and critique of society in the late nineteenth century. It is very funny. I was first given a copy of this wonderful book by Aunt Betty and read it with delight and disbelief. It is the story of a Mr Salteena and his attempts to become a gentleman. When the book was first published with a foreword by J M Barrie it was an astonishing success and was later alleged to have been a sort of literary joke produced by an adult author pretending to write down to a child’s level. Indeed some of the observations in the book seem a little arch and knowing to be those of a young girl, but the authenticity of Daisy Ashford’s work has never been in doubt.
If you have read and enjoyed ‘The Diary of a Nobody’ or ‘Three Men on a Boat’ then you will appreciate ‘The Young Visiters’ although it is nothing like the first two books mentioned. Everyone has their own favourite quotations from the book, starting with the opening, “Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking people to stay with him.” This opening leads to more piquant extracts like, “Then he sat down and eat the egg which Ethel had so kindly laid for him” and this revealing extract from Mr Salteena’s letter to Bernard Clark (“a rarther presumshious man”), “I am fond of digging in the garden and I am parshial to ladies if they are nice I suppose it is in my nature.” Or perhaps Ethel’s conversational observation to her host, “I shall put some red ruge on my face said Ethel because I am very pale owing to the drains in this house.” Each of Daisy’s chapters was written in one continuous paragraph and there were no speech marks, but every page has gems of expression and delights in spelling.
And you can download it for free. It is worth doing so for no other reason than it drives Microsoft Word wild trying to make sense of it all!
Ah joy!
When you are as mean as I am when it comes to paying for e-books then you must be satisfied with the less frequented pathways of out of copyright literature. Some of the books which I have now read in electronic form by P G Wodehouse I have never heard of. ‘The Politeness of Princes’ and ‘The Pothunters’ read like hack works by an author who had been impressed by ‘Stalky and Co’ by Kipling – but they remain interesting as forerunners of Wodehouse’s mature style. At least that is what I am telling myself as I read through more obscure examples of Great Writers’ work!
I now have over three hundred books (varying in length from single short stories to the entire Bible) lurking in the memory of my e-book and I still haven’t got over the sheer magic of the thing: a single slim book containing an entire library!
If only the grasping publishers would moderate their extortionate prices for copyright books I would be truly satisfied. I find it astonishing to think that there are some instances where the electronic form of the book is MORE expensive than the paper copy! The economics behind that sort of greed has more in keeping with the grasping avariciousness of the venomous Sheriff of Nottingham than the Venerable Bede.
Whatever the effectiveness (or indeed the appropriateness) of that bitter comparison, it is perhaps significant that my e-book probably holds roughly the same number of volumes that Bede had in the library in the Monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow when he produced his books. It is also worth pointing out that the library at Wearmouth-Jarrow was probably one of the biggest in England at the time. If I push the historical point even more then I could say that all the books that Bede was able to consult are probably available free from websites around the globe as electronic downloads. Never has the literary knowledge of the world been so freely available to so many people . . . and I’m not sure of where I am going in this digression. Though it is noticeable that the number of Ecclesiastical Histories of the English Peoples (or equivalent) coming out of Northumbria has been a little thin on the ground during the last millennium despite the availability of books and the access to them!
Talking of Northumbria we actually had a mild hailstorm today. We also had sunshine and rain and cloud. Taken together it could be said to be more reminiscent of a British day during which you get a selection of the seasons rather than the steady expectation of consistent weather that we generally get in Catalonia.
As always with slightly rougher weather, the appearance of the sea becomes much more interesting with our stunted domestic waves actually acquiring some height and the wind whipping off the foam to make the curving waves beautiful to look at but devilishly difficult to photograph.
Ian, the professional photographer living diagonally above us, showed me a fine photo of a breaking wave taken from our very own seashore and in reply to my plaintive moan that I have never managed to take a picture like that, he patiently explained that what I was looking at was a cunningly composed composite of five separate photographs including one photo reversed to form the end of the beautifully curling wave! I have now sent off for a truncated version of the program that he used to produce such results and I hope soon to start dabbling in the forbidden arts of twisting photographic reality to my own dark ends.
I will end with my invaluable e-book and recommend (for those who have not yet read it) a delight of a book called ‘The Young Visiters’ by Daisy Ashford.
This is a book written by a nine year old which lay undiscovered for years and then was published with Daisy Ashford’s own punctuation and spelling. It is an artlessly cunning construction which uses the authentic naivety of Daisy with what now reads as a clever illumination and critique of society in the late nineteenth century. It is very funny. I was first given a copy of this wonderful book by Aunt Betty and read it with delight and disbelief. It is the story of a Mr Salteena and his attempts to become a gentleman. When the book was first published with a foreword by J M Barrie it was an astonishing success and was later alleged to have been a sort of literary joke produced by an adult author pretending to write down to a child’s level. Indeed some of the observations in the book seem a little arch and knowing to be those of a young girl, but the authenticity of Daisy Ashford’s work has never been in doubt.If you have read and enjoyed ‘The Diary of a Nobody’ or ‘Three Men on a Boat’ then you will appreciate ‘The Young Visiters’ although it is nothing like the first two books mentioned. Everyone has their own favourite quotations from the book, starting with the opening, “Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking people to stay with him.” This opening leads to more piquant extracts like, “Then he sat down and eat the egg which Ethel had so kindly laid for him” and this revealing extract from Mr Salteena’s letter to Bernard Clark (“a rarther presumshious man”), “I am fond of digging in the garden and I am parshial to ladies if they are nice I suppose it is in my nature.” Or perhaps Ethel’s conversational observation to her host, “I shall put some red ruge on my face said Ethel because I am very pale owing to the drains in this house.” Each of Daisy’s chapters was written in one continuous paragraph and there were no speech marks, but every page has gems of expression and delights in spelling.
And you can download it for free. It is worth doing so for no other reason than it drives Microsoft Word wild trying to make sense of it all!
Ah joy!
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