More holiday reading
August 16, 2011
Still having lots of fun reading in a leisurely way, without thought of immediate utility. As an end-of-term reward for exam results (hurray!) I treated myself to Theophrastus’ Characters, which is extremely entertaining, and each sketch is a nice length to practise a little Greek. I’m sure I’ve met half the people he describes, plus or minus a toga.
I’ve also devoured Mary Beard’s The Parthenon, particularly interesting as I’m hoping to visit Athens next year. I had no idea that there were so many levels of development and destruction overlaying the ‘original’ Parthenon, and that the current monument is to such an extent a reconstruction.
But the book that’s really kept me busy is Scribes and Scholars, which should be required reading for first-year undergraduates. Finally I understand something of the process by which texts have ended up on the shelves at Blackwells, and the techniques and pitfalls of textual criticism. The subject-matter is quite dense but the book is beautifully written, with occasional touches of dry humour such as:
‘Boniface heard one [priest] carrying out a baptism of dubious efficacy in nomine patria et filia et spiritus sancti‘
and
‘[Lovato] also tried his hand at archaeology, and identified a skeleton which some workmen had turned up as the remains of the legendary founder of Padua, the Trojan Antenor, a gorgeous error.’
There is definitely a new chapter to be written though, about ‘electronic’ texts and the impact they may have on transmission. Amazon is full of comments that texts are badly scanned and illegible, or badly transcribed and unintelligible. I don’t think we would be in a good state if we were suddenly reliant on electronic copies alone. I remain a Kindle resister.
Step by step to the classics 
August 18, 2011 at 11:58 am
Scribes and Scholars is a brilliant book. My undergraduate degree was in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, and in fact they did make us read it in the first year (or at least those of us doing the palaeography option had to). That was some years ago now, though, and I doubt it’s the case any more.
I wonder whether, perversely, the Kindle might help people to be more rather than less aware of the role of editors? Only as you say there are so many really badly produced books available for the Kindle that maybe people who don’t usually think about such things are beginning to get a sense of the editorial role. I use my Kindle tons, but almost exclusively for leisure reading. When it comes to cheap or free books I stick to things written in English by authors who got the chance to see their works through the press, and I don’t get random ones from the Kindle store, I get them from Project Gutenberg, where I know someone has been through checking the OCR against the real text. (Even so it made me boiling mad when someone had changed “vicegerent” to “viceregent” in a Trollope novel!) I would love to have Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy on my Kindle, but you look at something advertising itself as “Tolstoy’s War and Peace” and you just think, really? Really, Tolstoy‘s War and Peace? Who translated it, who edited it? Any free one is probably Constance Garnett. If only the reliable publishers like Penguin and World Classics would get their act together and put out reasonably priced (e.g. about a fiver) editions of these things. And when it comes to proper scholarly texts which one uses for research, it’s going to be a long time before the Kindle can deal properly with an apparatus fontium and an apparatus criticus, and maybe even longer before the publishers of proper scholarly texts get their act together to produce reasonably priced electronic editions. So all my Kindle reading is for fun, with the exception of a few things I compiled myself — I put the Gallicanum Psalter on it, a few poems I like, a pdf of the London tube map, and some local bus timetables. But when it comes to throw-away leisure reading, the Kindle is wonderful!
August 19, 2011 at 8:03 pm
I can really see the advantage for holiday reading – being able to take one light gadget in your bag rather than a pile of books. I’m very attracted to the idea of a personal vade mecum, and never being without certain key texts (of which a tube map is definitely one); the problem is that not much of the stuff I consider essential is available in that format yet. What I would love is to be able to ‘upgrade’ to digital editions of books I already own (on payment of a modest additional fee); I hope we’re moving in that direction.
August 19, 2011 at 8:19 pm
O’Reilly will let you upgrade from physical books to ebooks for a small fee, and you then get free upgrades when there are new editions. Unfortunately O’Reilly only do computing books. It would be great if other publishers caught on.