Phoning It In

I think I am still in that phase of being overwhelmed by choice due to all the e-books that are available.  I'm sure I'll eventually get used to this and just focus on the ones that supplemented my previous reading program.  It does look like close* to all of the NYRB Classics (or at least the ones of main interest to me) are available as e-books and are at the Toronto Library.  It is much rarer for Modern Library books to be in the system, and as far as I can tell there are no LOA e-books in the Toronto system.  As expected, they have good to great coverage of Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant.  There are certainly some weird exceptions, so only about half of Timothy Findley's novels are available and very few novels by Jack Hodgins or Susan Swann or Morley Callaghan, though virtually all of Callaghan's short stories are available.  Robert Kroetsch is particularly ill-served in the e-book transition.  A lot of George Bowering's fiction has made it over, but almost none of his poetry, which is unfortunate, as his reputation basically will (or rather should) rest on his poetry.  Almost no Earle Birney or Al Purdy is in the system at all.  Basically, with the exception of Atwood and Dennis Lee (and the poets who have books from Brick Books), poetry is extremely poorly served in the e-book system.  This is generally the case for US poets as well with John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Robert Bly and Robert Creeley dropping completely out of e-print and Donald Hall only being represented by his essays on aging and not his poetry.  Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath do have reasonable coverage.  It looks like about 2/3 of James Wright's poems are in his 1971 Collected Poems, which is available, but Above the River, which is his "Complete Poems," is not available.  I know this shouldn't be a complete surprise, but it will likely have lasting impacts on their reputations.  Of course I am repeating myself, and there isn't anything I can do about this for the culture as a whole.  I simply have to be willing to remember to go off and seek out the physical books when it comes to poetry or plays.

A few months before the crisis, I finally installed the Libby app on my phone and read a couple of science fiction books by the Strugatsky brothers and Hanif's Red Birds (which I hated) and then eventually Toni Morrison's Home.  I do try (now) to leave one or two books on the phone for when I am waiting in a long line to enter a store.  I managed to get most of the way through Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology, though I finished that up at home.  I'm debating starting in on Don Quixote, though I know I won't be able to make it through the whole thing on that tiny screen.

One thing that is interesting in terms of what is available is the mid-list authors that I have neglected.  At one point I owned a complete or nearly complete set of Walker Percy novels, but I never managed to crack any of them, not even The Moviegoer.  I also have neglected Thornton Wilder, though in this case, I have at least seen his major plays, Our Town and By the Skin of Our Teeth.  While I don't want to make any "promises" that I can't keep, I will try to sneak a couple of these books onto my main reading list, though it has been completely derailed by the effort to just get through (and then get rid of) books on the To Be Read and Discarded pile.

I probably won't actually purge most of the fiction books, even when I have an e-book backup, until the next move, but at that point, I will be truly ruthless.  Some of these books have been moved upwards of 10 times (and have survived major purgings of books along the way), and I don't feel like moving them again if I have a reasonable alternative this time around.  That's the plan at any rate...


* One recent Ana Kavan book, Machines in the Head is an exception.  The library is supposed to be getting the newest Krzhizhanovsky volume, Unwitting Street, and I believe I am first in line when it shows up.  I'll just have to keep monitoring if Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk by Nikolai Leskov and The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington show up this fall, but the odds are fairly good.