More Kindle Tidbits

More pleasant Kindle surprises from the past year:

The Case History of the Light That Went Out
The Case of the Registered Letter
Both of these, along with 3 or 4 more available on Kindle, were written by Auguste Groner (actually Frau Augusta Groner) in the early years of the 20th Century and set in then-contemporary Vienna. All feature the same underplayed intuitive detective Joseph Muller of the Imperial Austrian Police.

Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues
By: Randall Peffer
The story of a straight, soon-to-be married, court-appointed lawyer and his Vietnamese transvestite client, who was raised by two drag queens in Bangkok after they all three of them had escaped from Vietnam. The client is now living in Provincetown, starring in a local drag show and charged with murder. It is an interesting story of the lawyer confronting his own sexual prejudices and rethinking his imminent marriage. It was particularly interesting because the lawyer and his fiancee are both members of a Portuguese-descended fishing community in New Bedford, Massachusetts and it has both Portuguese and Thai language and cultural references which I recognized.

The complete collection of The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy for $0 .99. Considering my love of Victorian Lit, I can't believe I've ignored these books until now. They might have remained unread, but for Kindle. Like the works of Anthony Trollope, they are a great chronicle of change in England, in this case from about the 1880s through the end of WWI, built around 3 generations of one upper-class family. I'm not sure, but some of Galsworthy's other books may also be considered part of this series....so maybe I haven't read them all.

Paul Clifford, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
This is the book with the much-ridiculed opening line "It was a dark and stormy night." I've never thought there was anything particularly wrong with that line, and Bulwer-Lytton certainly has some strengths as a novelist. There are a few scenes that are clearly included because a novel in that period was expected to be of a certain length, but it is a worthwhile read and subverts some of the stereotypes of the hero in the Victorian novel. Bulwer-Lytton could turn a good phrase. He is the origin of "the great unwashed," "pursuit of the almighty dollar," and "the pen is mightier than the sword." No, it wasn't Shakespeare, apparently. Bulwer-Lytton is another of those authors who I never would have got around to were it not for Kindle. He was prolific and I will read more of him.

A Charming Fellow, by Frances Eleanor Trollope. I had never even heard of this woman, a sister-in-law of my beloved Anthony Trollope. Another Victorian novelist who one is sorry to see ignored.

Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell. This is probably the best-known novel of a Victorian author who has been pretty much forgotten. Her book, North and South, although I finished it, was something of a dog, but it didn't cost anything, so what the hell?

A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, a collection of human-interest newspaper columns from the 1920s by the journalist, playwright, screen writer, novelist Ben Hecht.

Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, the result of a WPA oral history project.

Then there is all of the lesser-known work of Anthony Trollope, P. G. Wodehouse and many other authors whose works are mostly still in print, but not always so easy to find.

Finally, there is the satisfaction of trying out some authors at little or no cost and learning you don't like them. I'm thinking of a couple of Edna Ferber novels I downloaded that date from about 1915-1920. I didn't finish either of the two, but now I know what I haven't been missing and it was a free lesson. I can ignore Ms. Ferber without guilt.

While preparing this post, I went to Wikipedia to check on something about Elizabeth Gaskell. I knew that she, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins had collaborated on a short story and I wanted more information. There I found out that there was a fourth author involved in the collaboration, Adelaide Anne Procter, who I had never heard of. A quick check at Amazon shows that I can see what I think of her on Kindle too...at no cost, of course. See what I mean? These four writers collaborated on other projects as well. At least one of their joint efforts is available on Kindle, A House to Let.

Unfortunately, the quality of ebooks remains sketchy, with lots of punctuation and pagination errors. Apparently the software programs used to convert books to ebooks still have a lot of bugs, and publishers don't bother to hire proof readers. An example: I'm reading a book at the moment which was published in the 1970s. Every multi-syllable word that was hyphenated at the end of a line and continued on the next line in the original hard-copy version appears hyphenated in the ebook version regardless of where it appears in the text.

I think Project Gutenberg's conversion of public domain books is all done by volunteers. Unfortunately, the quality of the resulting ebooks is usually awful. At least errors can be corrected, and otherwise-forgotten books are being made available.

Does anyone else have ebook discoveries to share?