So, let’s give up the ghost — I’m working on a massive public domain project at work, and it’s amazingly fun. We’re creating really beautiful ebooks from PD texts, and creating some fun content around events (like the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic) and it’s a really great list. It’s also a little like a cyclone — we whirl around and pile on more books into the never-ending spreadsheet and very rarely come out the other side as the wind whips us along.
As a result, I’ve been reading a whole pile of PD texts, from the utterly strange (John Jacob Astor’s A Journey In Other Worlds, #12), to the utterly brilliant (Hemingway’s The Old Man in the Sea), to lesser works by great writers (To Have and Have Not [an abysmally bad Hemingway novel, #13] and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe), to a whole host of nonfiction around the sinking of the Titanic (#s 14, 15, 16: The Loss of the S.S. Titanic, The Truth About the Titanic & The Wreck of the Titan), to some classic children’s literature that I had never actually read (The Secret Garden, #17), and the list goes on (well, to a reread of Tender is the Night (#18) even though I was sure I read it in university).
Anyway, by the time I’m finished reading through the books, checking the ePubs, getting frustrated with how Edgar Allan Poe uses so much flapjacking Greek, I don’t feel like blogging about the books at all. However, I am making great inroads in terms of my 1001 Books challenge, which is enough of a reason to continue with the public domain project in general…
PS – I forgot one yesterday, Gulliver’s Travels (#20), which I enjoyed immensely and had a great conversation with my RRHB about, he insists it’s the first of science fiction, I equate it to the rollicking adventure stories of the time, like Robinson Crusoe. I did admit that the end bored me a bit, and that I preferred the first three parts to the fourth, but, overall, it’s probably my favourite that I’ve read since embarking upon this project…