Am I reduced to reading cookery books?

[MANICHAEAN]

I was in London today and by chance happened to go into one of the more prestigious book stores with a seemingly initial wide range of choice.

However, perhaps I'm becoming jaded.
Small classics are absurdly priced. I do better in charity shops with the contents of cleared out houses when people have died.
The historical offerings seem to be desperate in their endeavours to find new twists to established narrative.
A lot of the fiction is dumbed down to cater for whatever the latest genre happens to be.

So I found myself in the cookery section. At least there was something creative there.

I'm not normally one to subscribe to Wolf's freewheeling anarchic approach to English literature, but perhaps there is something in what he lately infers; that the seeds of constructive growth in this language we admire, lies in forums such as these, albeit unrecognised at the current juncture.

[YesNo]

Besides these forums there are also author-published ebooks to choose from.

[AuntShecky]

I've heard you can download lots of material to e-readers, which I can't afford to get right now. Besides not sure Pong 3.0 is up to the task. BUT you can access a great deal of material that's in the public domain. Much is right here, on the Lit Net! That's the only place where I could find Sylvie and Bruno. You can find books on several other sites, e.g. Gutenberg Project and various universities. Reading from a screen is difficult for yours fooly, though. Melville's The Confidence Man is difficult enough in a bound book, so you can imagine what a slog it was trying to get through it online. Ditto Cymbeline, for some reason absent from my edition of Shakespeare.

If you're flush enough, you can try commercial websites like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. Dover Publishing has many classics in inexpensive paperbacks. Shipping and handling is almost always an added expense when you order books on line.

The provenance of my book collection is mainly used book sales, either at garage sales or from the annual book sale at the library.

[108 fountains]

Also, as it appears you travel a lot, try the bookstores in Southeast Asian countries. I started building my collection of paperback classics when I was in Vietnam - the price was the equivalent of anywhere from 2 to 5 USD, usually, 2-3 dollars. In India, too, the English language classics are dirt cheap. Bookstores in Malaysia also have very good prices, although the selections are smaller. In Thailand, it was hard to find English language books except in the big shopping malls in Bangkok, and because they were in the big shopping malls, they were relatively expensive. I haven't really shopped anywhere else, but I'll bet you can find good prices and a good selection in the Philippines. I was told once that when publishing houses and/or distributors are overstocked with inventory, they will dump them in certain Asian markets. I don't know if that's true or not, but for those of us who travel to or live in these places, cheap books are one of the many advantages.

[YesNo]

I've heard you can download lots of material to e-readers, which I can't afford to get right now.

You can download the Kindle app free to your computer. You don't need to buy a Kindle to buy ebooks from Amazon or read them on a Kindle interface. I actually prefer pdf to the Kindle's mobi interface anyway. Many of those books are free.

There is also Smashwords which has a lot of free ebooks: http://www.smashwords.com/

I'm reading poetry by Syed Faizan, Indian Sonnets and Diwan, both free on Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=syed+faizan

[108 fountains]

I do about 1/4 of my reading online (at work in front of the computer during lunch breaks).
But I really prefer paper books, mostly for the convenience of being able to flip through pages quickly when I want to go back to find something.

[YesNo]

I prefer an ebook to a physical book. I think I can search better with the ebook, but the main reason is I don't want to store a physical copy.

[MANICHAEAN]

The whole wall in my living room in the U.K. is comprised of books, floor to ceiling.
They are almost like my children.

[YesNo]

I've got my books in boxes. I used to have them in bookshelves in the basement in an old house we lived in. It was quite an elaborate maze of bookshelves because the basement was old and irregular, but dry. I miss it in some ways. However, the maze attracted me more than the books themselves. There were even some cookbooks in there that I never read.

[MANICHAEAN]

YesNo, it conjures up images of a Gothic movie in the catacombs of an aged secluded mansion in Chicago, where vast tomes, covered in dust lie.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

...However, perhaps I'm becoming jaded...
...The historical offerings seem to be desperate in their endeavours to find new twists to established narrative.
A lot of the fiction is dumbed down to cater for whatever the latest genre happens to be.

So I found myself in the cookery section. At least there was something creative there...



I'm sad to say it won't be long before the cookery section turns rancid with the likes of Fifty Shades of Beef or Texting While Grilling for Dummies.