First, an amazing couple of pieces about books.

Becoming a Book (Part One)

With all the talk about censorship of late, Ray Bradbury's wonderful book, Fahrenheit 451 has been on my mind. For those of you who haven't read it, Bradbury posits a society in which people surround themselves with walls of empty, contentless media which keep them from ever having to think or feel. Any books that are found are burned. But booklovers cannot be discouraged that easily. They keep books alive by each committing one or more books to memory in entirety. So long as they live, no society is powerful enough to destroy the books that live inside them.

It raises an impossible question, doesn't it? If you lived in such a society, which book or books would you choose to become? Our memories being the shallow, limited things they are, we each could only save at best a few. And how would you decide?

Becoming a Book (Part Two)

Having told you last week what books I would save were I in the world of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, I invited you to tell me what books you would save. And I've got to tell you, if you and I were in charge of the canon of books the educated person should know, it would be very different from the current one.

I am pleased to report that Henry James did not make the cut, possibly because anyone whose sentences routinely contain four dependent clauses is absolutely unrecitable. Books that are to be memorized and told aloud have to have rhythm, movement, recognizable human speech patterns. As my friend Craig said, memorably, "I would choose a book that invites recitation around the campfires outside the caves of the resistance movement. Dickens, Twain, Poe, something for the human voice." Twain's writing, especially Huckleberry Finn, was a frequent choice, partly because, as Bill said "it survives narration--it's true to genuine human speech."

both thanks to BookNotes

Recently I saw a review of a biography of the first modern biographer - Boswell. The book, Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson, sounds interesting and I've added it to my evergrowing Amazon wish list. (Come on people. I can't afford to buy all the stuff I'm adding to the wish list. I need help! Be warned, it does take a while to download. Sorry, sometimes I can't control myself.)

Well, I haven't read Boswell's Life of Dr Johnson so I started looking in Amazon for it. I found it.

You know how Amazon teases you with like-minded books? They stick them on the side of the page. So there it is. A book I haven't heard of since college, maybe high school (if you added up how many 39th birthdays I've had, ask Craig if your not sure, you would know it has been a *long* time): Samuel Pepys : A Life.

This looks like an interesting book too. But if I add Johnson and Pepys to my wish list it will do nothing but take up a little more Amazon server space since I don't have the money to buy them right now. What to do? Then I remembered.

All of the above is a lead in to:

Project Gutenberg

The premise on which Michael Hart based Project Gutenberg was: anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely. . .what Michael termed "Replicator Technology" The concept of Replicator Technology is simple; once a book or any other item (including pictures, sounds, and even 3-D items can be stored in a computer), then any number of copies can and will be available. Everyone in the world, or even not in this world (given satellite transmission) can have a copy of a book that has been entered into a computer.

This philosophical premise has created several offshoots: 1.Electronic Texts (Etexts) created by Project Gutenberg are to be made available in the simplest, easiest to use forms available.

2.Suggestions to make them less readily available are not to be treated lightly. Therefore, Project Gutenberg Etexts are made available in what has become known as "Plain Vanilla ASCII," meaning the low set of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange: ie the same kind of character you read on a normal printed page-- italics, underlines, and bolds have been capitalized.

The reason for this is that 99% of the hardware and software a person is likely to run into can read and search these files.

Books free for the download! Everything from Alighieri (Dante) to Zane (Grey). Dickens is there. Twain is there. Poe is there. Of course the books must be public domain which is a moving target. But there are over 3,500 titles and more are being added as we blog. Load them into Word. Load them into a text editor. Read them.

I downloaded Boswell's Johnson and Samuel Pepys' Diary. And while I was there I downloaded The Book of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura, Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Essays Before a Sonata, by Charles Ives, The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman, Jr., The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, and four Anne of Green Gables books.

Go to Project Gutenberg. See what they have. What Michael Hart, and his many volunteers, have done, is the antitheses of what our dear corporations are trying to do to books today.

By the way, The Diary of Samuel Pepys is incredible!