Special expertise

Once upon a time during summer vacations I was for some reason sitting in my office at the Department of Comparative Literature when a call came from the University phone exchange. "Someone from the press, they said. Asking whether there is any expert in fairy tales at the university. We tried your department. You were the only one in". The press had reached the right person for fairy-tale expertise, but the question was weird. An American movie star was having an affair with a "simple" Swedish girl. Everybody was talking Cinderella story. The press wanted to know exactly what the Cinderella story was. Next morning I was quoted in 300,000 copies.

Apparently they kept my name on the file because when princess Diana died and everybody was saying she would become a myth, the press called me, bypassing University phone exchange, to inquire what exactly a myth was.

It's strange how you can become a dedicated expert on journalists' files. What obscure things haven't I been asked to comment on! A couple of times I was on hold when the Nobel Prize in literature was about to be announced, in case it was a Russian. Even now, four years after I have left Sweden, Swedish media call me every now and then, and I can never guess what they might want this time. A recipe for Russian pancakes or a comment on Lord of the Rings?

When BBC called me yesterday I had a quick rush of thoughts: Olympics? No. Has some important children's writer died? Hope not, too many have died this year. Ahh, Fifty shades... No, I haven't read it. My instinct of self-preservation keeps me away from it. I had to read Twilight and Hunger Games and Divergent for professional reasons, but thank goodness I am not an expert on Mom porn so I don't have to read Fifty shades. Not even Forty-nine shades. Still, could I please say something..? About the phenomenon... marketing... social media... reader engagement..?

For a moment of weakness I considered getting the book on Kindle. Then I decided that life is too short. Ars longa vita brevis, as we used to say when I worked as a film researcher, and a long and boring film was screened.

I had done my homework by the time they called again, as well as some contemplating, and I referred confidently to Gone with the Wind and The Thorn Birds, much to the reporter's surprise. (Where have all the thorn birds gone?)

Although I could not help thinking about the old evil times in the Soviet Union when all sorts of people said or were forced to say: "I have of course not read Solzhenitsyn, but he is a bad writer".

Further reflections on e-books

Yesterday night I read some more Tess, this time on my little laptop, and it was just as easy and not as heavy. The cat was happy beside it. Apart from enjoying the book very much (I was too young to enjoy it when I read it first time), I tried to think what was actually different from reading a paper book. One thing, of course, is that you cannot physically see how much you have read and how much is still to read. Although Kindle told me, when I put in a bookmark, that I had read 15%. Putting in a bookmark is good, and unlike a physical bookmark, you cannot lose it. I have all kinds of fancy bookmarks, but I always end up using a receipt or a boarding pass.

What I definitely miss is the paratexts. As one of my students would expertly explain, paratexts is everything that is not part of the text. The cover, for instance. There is no cover on my Kindle Tess, and thus no cover image. I don't really mind it, but still worth noting. What I mind - or at least lack - is the back cover, with a publisher blurb. I tell my students to skip blurbs because they are stupid, but I always read blurbs carefully, perhaps exactly because they are stupid. Especially when you have read the book before and know how stupid the blurb is.

I also miss the pages where the author is presented.I miss the copyright page. I miss the table of contents - I always go back to it several times when I read a book. For Tess particularly, I miss the Introduction, timeline and notes they have in Penguin Classics. I usually read notes in advance because I don't wnat to be interrupted in my reading, but don't want to miss the comments. I guess there is another e-edition of Tess that has notes hyperlinked. Kindle has, without my consent, downloaded Oxford American (!) dictionary so that I can look up words I don't know. I haven't tried it yet, but it might prove useful. They say you ought to read books to learn.

I do not not miss the gentle rustle of pages, nor the feel of paper. Is there anything fundamentally wrong with me?

Final surrender

Let me get it right - I love books. Have always loved books, have always bought too many books, have several times got rid of huge numbers of my books for various reasons: moving countries is a good reason. Or running out of shelf space.Then I buy more books.

I have great respect for books. I don't write or highlight or underline in books (if I work with a book, I use post-its). In my youth, books were hard to get hold of. Books were valuable. I could occasionally pay a monthly salary for a very attractive book (were books expensive or was my salary miserable?).

On the other hand, I have no reverence for first or rare editions, and I like paperbacks, not only because they are cheaper, but because they are lighter and easier to read in bed or bring on a trip. And I have long ago discovered the practicality of Project Guthenberg when you are looking for a quote.

Yet I have so far not succumbed for reading devices.

I wonder whether having a Kindle is something literature people don't talk about, like a shameful disease. Because we all love books. Because books are so important, and all these horrible electronic things imply demise of the book. No literary scholar with self-respect will ever fall as low as reading e-books. Although for me it is most often the text that is important, not the physical object.

Anyway, yesterday as I started thinking about what books I want to take with me when I go to Sweden next week and then to Brazil the week after... and I remembered last time I was in Brazil and ran out of books and all those transatlantic flights when you finish a book in the middle of the trip and have no other choice than to start all over (you can do it with some books, but not all). And all the times you open a book you've brought on the plane and discover that you just don't want to read it right now, but you have to because there is nothing else to read except the inflight magazine.

I went on amazon and started looking, to begin with, whether any books I have on my current reading list were available as e-books, and of course they were, and since I am in the period of re-reading major classics, most of them are free. As I was clicking around I saw a link saying "Download Kindle for your PC". I thought I would try to see whether I sort of generally, in principle, hypothetically would be happy to read a novel on a screen. Because if it was awful there'd be no point in getting a Kindle.

I downloaded it, and I downloaded a book that had been on my reading list for a while, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I read Mayor of Castebridge a couple of months ago, and it was magnificent. A good, solid, crisp, smelly Penguin Classic. Could it be as good on screen? Yes, it was. It actually made no difference at all, except that when I had my laptop in bed, there was no room for the cat, so she was upset and left and never came back. But I read Tess of the d'Urbervilles for a couple of hours, and it made no difference whatsoever, and I played a bit with changing font size and opening two pages on screen, but it really didn't matter. Only my laptop is definitely heavier than a paperback, and it also gets very hot. I have a smaller laptop that I take with me on travel, and this morning I downloaded Kindle onto it and discovered, to my joy, that my Tess was there as well. And yet...

The estimated delivery of my Kindle is next Monday. I'll keep you posted.

Social media

I am on a foreign territory. Everybody seems to write about and comment on social media; tthere are a couple of papers in my upcoming conference on the topic, not to mention my brilliant daughter who does it for a living (that is, writing about social media). I have been reluctant on the edge of hostile until recently, but of course when I started this blog I succumbed. I also belong to a dollhouse discussion group. My next step was Shelfari, which is a book sharing site where I have been building my personal bookshelf for a year now. I have always wanted to compile some form of database for every book I have ever read, with comments on when and whether I read it for work or for pleasure and whether I liked it. Shelfari is just the thing I need, so I play with it every now and then. I only have 1238 books on my shelf so far, but I am doing my best.

Last summer I finally signed up for Facebook. I knew very little about it and certainly never thought I'd get addicted. When I created my account, FB immediately picked up a dozen email addresses from my address book, and most of them were on FB. It was fun to know that a retired colleague in Canada is growing vegetables in his backyard.

However, what I certainly did not expect are the professional contacts. A colleague (not on FB herself) who is a university librarian asked me the other day whether I used any social media and whether I used them privately or professionally. I estimated that half of my FB friends were professional contacts, and later I realised that I was wrong, it's far more than half. And apart from boasting about your vegetables and pets, sharing professional stuff is great. There is so much information out there nobody can follow everything, but if I see a link posted by this or that colleague, I read it - and frequently repost for other colleagues; and I read their formal and informal reviews of new books; and I read about conferences and events that I cannot attend. So I can with confidence say: FB is not just play, but a very important part of my professional life. If you asked me a year ago I would dismiss it as nonsense

I am still keeping away from Twitter, but I do have a Spotify account.