Five Things About Books Make a Post
Jul. 20th, 2024 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherMy replacement ebook reader has arrived, huzzah! ...which then left me with the prospect of loading several hundred ebooks back onto it, and reconstructing the complicated system of tags I'd built to remind myself which series or fandom they were all in, and regretting that I kept putting off making the record of which ones I will never read again and was only keeping because I hate throwing things away.
I decided that in the circumstances it might be time to finally try out this Calibre ebook library management software I keep hearing about. I've spent several happy hours cleaning up metadata, and discovering that with Calibre as an intermediary I can once again read all the old ebooks I bought decades ago from now-defunct websites in formats that my current ebook reader doesn't know about, and reconstructing the complicated series of fandom tags for what will hopefully be the last time. I haven't quite got as far as actually putting everything back onto the ebook reader, though I have loaded a few test books to make sure that the tags work and so forth.
Part of the reason I'm not especially in a hurry with that is that it's likely going to be a while before I get to read any ebooks anyway. While I was reader-less I got roped into a community read of a chunky omnibus of old science fiction novels, which I'm currently running behind on because right after I signed up for that an interlibrary loan finally came in and I had to read it and the rest of the trilogy it's part of before it was due back.
The trilogy in question is the Tenabran trilogy by Dave Luckett, which I started reading when I was at university years ago, but by the time I got up to book 3 it was out of print and almost impossible to find. (In one of those moments that become significant with hindsight, I actually attended the event where book 3 was officially launched, but at the time it didn't seem to make sense to buy book 3 of a trilogy I hadn't yet read any of the earlier parts of.) More recently I managed to get hold of a secondhand copy of book 3, but by then I'd forgotten most of what happened in book 2, which I didn't have a copy of and which hadn't become any easier to get hold of with the passing of the years. I eventually discovered that the state library had a copy hidden away somewhere, requested it through interlibrary loan, and heard nothing for long enough that I'd begun to suspect nothing was going to happen, until suddenly I got a notification that it was waiting to be picked up at the local library branch. So now I've re-read the first two books (both just as good as I remembered) and finally found out how it all ends.
Another thing that happened while I was forced back on paper books is that I finished reading A.C. Grayling's The Good Book, which I've been working through bit by bit for the past couple of years. It's an anthology of non-religious writings on what it means to live a good life, covering a range from Classical times through to the 19th century, and bills itself in a subtitle as "A Secular Bible", which I have mixed opinions about. As a way of drawing a potential reader's attention, it certainly works; I might never have heard of it if it had been called something different, and I certainly wouldn't have been given this copy by the person who gave it in the circumstances in which it was given. But I don't feel like the conceit -- which extends to dividing the book up into sections with names like "Genesis" and "Acts" and splitting the texts into arbitrary chapters and verses -- achieves anything except to distance the reader, and to give the impression that Grayling is trying to hitch his solo effort onto the coattails of a major cultural artifact created by many hands over the course of centuries. Of course, while the compilation is the work of one man, the text isn't -- but another problem with aping the style of The Bible is that there's a distinct lack of attribution. Some of the larger chunks are fairly easy to identify -- "Histories" is mostly Herodotus, and "Consolations" is mostly Seneca, and "Acts" is mostly Plutarch, and "Epistles" is mostly Chesterfield -- and some of the smaller pieces manage to be distinctive, like Bai Juyi's poem about the parrot, but there are a lot of places where there's a particularly nice idea or turn of phrase that I would like to know who it belongs to, whether Grayling or someone else, and there's no way to tell.
I decided that in the circumstances it might be time to finally try out this Calibre ebook library management software I keep hearing about. I've spent several happy hours cleaning up metadata, and discovering that with Calibre as an intermediary I can once again read all the old ebooks I bought decades ago from now-defunct websites in formats that my current ebook reader doesn't know about, and reconstructing the complicated series of fandom tags for what will hopefully be the last time. I haven't quite got as far as actually putting everything back onto the ebook reader, though I have loaded a few test books to make sure that the tags work and so forth.
Part of the reason I'm not especially in a hurry with that is that it's likely going to be a while before I get to read any ebooks anyway. While I was reader-less I got roped into a community read of a chunky omnibus of old science fiction novels, which I'm currently running behind on because right after I signed up for that an interlibrary loan finally came in and I had to read it and the rest of the trilogy it's part of before it was due back.
The trilogy in question is the Tenabran trilogy by Dave Luckett, which I started reading when I was at university years ago, but by the time I got up to book 3 it was out of print and almost impossible to find. (In one of those moments that become significant with hindsight, I actually attended the event where book 3 was officially launched, but at the time it didn't seem to make sense to buy book 3 of a trilogy I hadn't yet read any of the earlier parts of.) More recently I managed to get hold of a secondhand copy of book 3, but by then I'd forgotten most of what happened in book 2, which I didn't have a copy of and which hadn't become any easier to get hold of with the passing of the years. I eventually discovered that the state library had a copy hidden away somewhere, requested it through interlibrary loan, and heard nothing for long enough that I'd begun to suspect nothing was going to happen, until suddenly I got a notification that it was waiting to be picked up at the local library branch. So now I've re-read the first two books (both just as good as I remembered) and finally found out how it all ends.
Another thing that happened while I was forced back on paper books is that I finished reading A.C. Grayling's The Good Book, which I've been working through bit by bit for the past couple of years. It's an anthology of non-religious writings on what it means to live a good life, covering a range from Classical times through to the 19th century, and bills itself in a subtitle as "A Secular Bible", which I have mixed opinions about. As a way of drawing a potential reader's attention, it certainly works; I might never have heard of it if it had been called something different, and I certainly wouldn't have been given this copy by the person who gave it in the circumstances in which it was given. But I don't feel like the conceit -- which extends to dividing the book up into sections with names like "Genesis" and "Acts" and splitting the texts into arbitrary chapters and verses -- achieves anything except to distance the reader, and to give the impression that Grayling is trying to hitch his solo effort onto the coattails of a major cultural artifact created by many hands over the course of centuries. Of course, while the compilation is the work of one man, the text isn't -- but another problem with aping the style of The Bible is that there's a distinct lack of attribution. Some of the larger chunks are fairly easy to identify -- "Histories" is mostly Herodotus, and "Consolations" is mostly Seneca, and "Acts" is mostly Plutarch, and "Epistles" is mostly Chesterfield -- and some of the smaller pieces manage to be distinctive, like Bai Juyi's poem about the parrot, but there are a lot of places where there's a particularly nice idea or turn of phrase that I would like to know who it belongs to, whether Grayling or someone else, and there's no way to tell.
