21 March 2025

An Epic project still taking shape

I’ve had an eventful week (for me). I’ve spent the past two days in Sydney seeing some shows and today is my first opportunity to reveal the inevitable book transgressions that result from so much time in the city.

Although it may not seem like it, the newly titled ‘Homer and the Epic Cycle’ project (it used to just be ‘The Iliad’) has been high in my thoughts. It probably seems like I’m goofing off because at the moment I’m in the middle of reading a rather large novel, Dickens’ David Copperfield. And because that was too large to lug about Sydney, I took the second book in John le Carré’s George Smiley Series, A Quality of Murder, to read on the train.

But I have managed to make some progress on rewriting and rejigging a new Project page for ‘Homer and the Epic Cycle’, although that is not available through any menus yet. I am hoping to get a basic page up later next week with the navigation ready to go for all aspects of the Epic Cycle as soon as I get around to reading that material.

As to the books I’ve just bought … I bought three in the last two days: Electra and Other Plays by Sophocles; Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography by Alberto Manguel (a book looking at various facets and issues related to the two poems); and The Homeric Hymns (a set of hymns recited at festivals to honour the Olympian gods. They contain some of the legends of interest to me).

But I’ve been buying more books on the subject, too, recently. The Greek Epic Cycle by Malcom Davies is a beginner’s guide to the subject. The Greek Epic Cycle and its Ancient Reception edited by Marco Fantuzzi and Christopher Tsagalis is a large scholarly book on the subject. The Cypria and The Telegony by D.M. Smith attempt to reconstruct two of the lost poems of the Epic Cycle (at least what they were about). And Euripides’ play Iphigeneia at Aulis is another version of the story of Iphigenia’s sacrifice that is alluded to in other plays I have recently reviewed.

It’s already taken me a long time to get through most of The Iliad, so I will probably be dead before I ever get a substantial way through this entire project. But it’s good to have plans. I have a number of other books, too, which I already had, to be used for this project. So, apart from setting up the new project page, I intend to get a basic page set up with all my sources and then expand that later with more detail. Again, that’s for later next week, I think.

In the meantime, here are the covers for all the books I’ve mentioned in this blog post, just to make it pretty:

- bikerbuddy

8 March 2025

A Box of Books

Me and Keith in his back shed

The Box of Books

The subject of old books seems to be coming up a lot lately: of what to do with them. In contrast to digital books sold to you by places like Amazon, real books are likely to be with you for life unless you choose to get rid of them. Or lend them. When I was younger, I found that lending a book was akin to giving it away. Which was a problem for me, since you tend to lend books that you think people will really like, AKA your favourite books. I once lent a copy of Catch-22 signed by a celebrity I happened to sit next to in a plane. The reality was, I had given it away. I was told they had lent it on to someone else who in turn denied they had been lent the book.

But we’re talking about getting rid of books here. That’s what will happen to many of my books as I grow older, I know, or after I drop off the perch. I know my sons will keep some, but they will not be able to keep a vast majority. Though this will be something of a chore for them – to get rid of many of my books – I still think it is preferable that they will have a choice rather than the situation in which large companies like Amazon remove book libraries from people who happen not to be paying attention to the latest set of terms. I’m referring to my last post, here.

Getting rid of books is where our near neighbours, Keith and Veronica, are now at in their lives. Like us, living only two houses away, they have a house on a large suburban property which requires maintenance. They are of an age at which they are looking to downsize their home, and so they must get rid of a lot of their furniture and possessions, including their book collection, before they are able to move. They asked us to visit yesterday to see if there were any books we might like to take, because whatever was left was going to be sent to second hand book stores or charity shops. Keith said he had a large collection of John le Carré. I’ve only read two le Carré in the past, but I enjoyed them. Back in 2018 I reviewed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. So I thought that taking a few of those would be good.

Keith led me down to his back shed (which is perfectly neat, Veronica, for a couple in the throes of transition! 😉) where we talked about books and past things while I fossicked through his boxes. The picture on the right represents what I brought home: far more than the few le Carrés I anticipated, and realistically far more than I will probably ever be able to finish, given my reading commitments, already. I completed the Smiley series with six more books, and quite a number more le Carré titles, too.

However, once I started looking, I also found the following that interested me. I found a couple of Enid Blyton books I hadn’t heard of in old hardbacks. I have a biography I bought not so long ago about Blyton, and I still have it in my mind that I might do something on the Famous Five on this site in years to come. I also found some Biggles books in lovely old hardbacks, so I took them, too, as well as The Swiss Family Robinson and Mary Poppins from the same era. I also found a lovely hardback edition of Wanting by Richard Flanagan. I reviewed the book last year and really liked it. Also, having just reviewed Tim Winton’s latest novel, Juice, in January, I was drawn to Dirt Music. Keith actually had two copies! After reading Juice, it was in my mind that Dirt Music was a novel that I should get around to reading. And Keith is also a Morris West fan. He had a lot of these, but I only took the three novels of West’s Vatican Trilogy on Keith’s recommendation: The Shoes of the Fisherman, The Clowns of God, and Lazarus.

I took the photo of Keith and me in his shed. Jenny had told him about the website. I try not to ever mention it to people in conversations because I don’t want to be that person who pins people down about my obsessions. But he had shown some interest so I told him there would be a blog post and I’d put the picture up. So, thank you Keith and Veronica for your friendship and generosity. From a selfish point of view, I hope you don’t move too soon!

- bikerbuddy

2 March 2025

A Bag of Books

I was out yesterday when I received a text from Jenny including the photo to the right. I don’t know whether this is done overseas, but we have a Facebook page here, ‘Pay it Forward’, in which anything can be offered to the public for free. I guess the idea comes from the 2000 film? Someone had posted that they had a bag of books to give away. It was a take all or take nothing deal. Jenny doesn’t have the same taste in books as me and generally doesn’t know what I own, so she decided to pick up the bag of books for me. Hence, the text.

Unfortunately, I have read and I own most of the titles that were in the bag. They are all classic nineteenth century novels. So, I will distribute those to local street libraries or give them away. I already gave the copy of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge from the bag to Victoria. For some reason I was telling her about the book a few weeks ago. This is one of the nice things about books. They are something to talk about and share. As it turned out, it was only a couple of Hardy titles from the bag I hadn’t read (Apart from Eliot’s Middlemarch, which I own, but I have a planned order in which I wish to read all of Eliot). So, I now also have The Return of the Native, Under the Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes.

Last month another webmaster on Neocities who runs the Bright Eyes website suggested I do a piece about the problem of ePublishing (and I guess eBooks) and the way that that is changing the industry. The issue lay with the rise of AI generated books. For me, that is a problem in how reading habits are potentially changed, and how the industry and culture is impacted. Years ago, I read a book by Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age. I feature an extract from the book on my profile page in this website. Birkert’s book was considering how reading will change in the digital age. Of course, many issues associated with eBooks and ePublishing have superseded the issues discussed in that book now, but the simple fact remains, that the presence of eBooks in our lives changes our relationship with books and the kind of books we may consume or even have access to. This doesn’t have to be a negative thing, but it sometimes might be.

Bright Eyes made the suggestion for this topic early last month, but then the issue of Amazon and Kindle came up: how Amazon was changing the terms under which people could access books they had paid for; that if people didn’t download their books by a certain date, they risked losing their libraries.

There’s too much to unpack here about issues of corporate influence on culture, and about the legal or ethical aspects of this decision. I will just make a simple point. Books were once considered valuable items, stitched together in signatures and bound in sturdy covers to keep their contents safe. Books were once handed down from one generation to the next. But Amazon’s move devalues books even further in modern culture, suggesting they are even more disposable. Someone I watched on YouTube who was critical of Amazon, wondered whether they should return to traditional books as a result of this decision, but weighed that option with the portability of devices like Kindle and Kobo: that they could take their whole library with them! Sure. That is convenient. But I can only read one book at once. Even if I was to have five books on the go at one time, as I was likely to do at one stage in my life, I can still only read one book in any given moment, and on a train journey, for instance, one book is a pretty portable device.

I remember years ago that Bruce Willis was in some legal dispute with Apple about whether he could bequest his music collection to his family. The question raised was, how much do you really own the files you have bought? I never followed the story at the time to find out how the case played out. But with Amazon’s move last week, it seems to suggest to me that eContent is separate from any physical medium. We own the media on which it is stored, but we never buy that media as part of the purchase of buying the book (or music or film). All we own is a right to access the intellectual property, which may be amended or taken away, as we have been shown. In essence, we haven’t bought anything. We have signed a contract: entered into a legal agreement which is less than fungible: it is revokable.

But when we buy traditional books, we are buying access to the intellectual property (say, a novel) even though we don’t own the copyright. In addition, we buy with it the storage media: the paper upon which it is printed and the covers which protect the media. We do own that! And that is the difference.

I was in Harry Hartog bookstore yesterday before I received that text from Jenny. They have an old book section there which I always love exploring. It contains old obscure works and more well-known books too from the nineteenth century, as well as quality modern productions like Folio and Easton Press of older works. Some of the older books are a little tatty, but most are of very good quality, some with beautiful leather bindings. These beautiful books were bought by someone many years ago: often over a hundred years before I was born. Now I can buy them, too, and I can smell their pages and pore over the illustrations and appreciate the different aesthetics of a bygone time. I can even read them! As always, I spent some time looking through the shelves in the store. I didnt buy anything yesterday. But just last week I bought an old copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped from Harry Hartog.

So, I received that text from Jenny on my way home and I now I have a few new (old) books and others to share around. And down in my book nook at the back of my yard I have shelves of books, including the few old books my mother possessed when she was young. She died back in 2023, but they are next to me when I read.

- bikerbuddy