William Morris - The wood beyond the world.

I heard years ago that William Morris wrote proto-fantasy novel and wanted to read them but only ever found his poetry. However, after seeing the Gorgeous copy he made of Chaucer I decided I would see if our library had any.

They had a gorgeous 19th century edition of The Wood Beyond the World, it had lovely thick paper and was beautifully type set which really added something to the story. Many books these days get referred to as "Fairy tales for adults" which usually means re-telling of traditional fairy tales or sex with elves. But this actually was. It was beautifully written in a totally unnecessarily complicated writing style that I loved. (He used the word Gangrel!) It really added to the otherness of the story. The story itself was a lovely tale of mystery, love, obsession, sex and danger. I really enjoyed it. It was the closest thing to Dunsany that I've read. I shall definitely be reading the other 4 of his romances that we have at work.

Shan Sa - Empress

I read this book in French a couple years ago but re-read it in the English translation for bibliogoth. It's a good historical fiction. It has all the main events of Wu Zetian's life, though an interesting interpretation on the reasons behind the events and whether she did or didn't do certain things.

I thought it was interesting that she came across as such a sexual creature, and that all the rumors about her sex life were confirmed (and more that were never said were admitted to) but that all the claims about ruthlessness that went along with her rise to power were denied. Personally I would have liked to see her a little more like Livia in I Claudius. But it was still fun for a novel, and nice to see her using translations of the actual edicts that Wu gave.

One thing I did find rather annoying was the translation of most (but not all) of the Chinese names. In particular I don't know why Chang An had to be referred to always as Long Peace whereas every other city was given the transliteration of its name. Similarly having Tai mountain instead of Mount Tai, when all the other mountains were referred to as Mout X seemed rather annoying.

Still a good read, not one to be taken as history, but still an enjoyable novel.

Gaskell - A new introduction to bibliography

This book is the standard book for learning about antique books. (So I have been led to believe by UCL and the people at my work). It gives in Great detail every aspect of book production from the hand-press period, (making paper, ink, layout, type, binding etc.) as well as for 19th century book production. It answers a lot of questions and is a great referrence. It is however a little dull to read all the way through. And suffers from the problem of trying to explain in words complicated physical procedures. I found at many points I was picturing scences from Stephen Fry's documentary on the Guttenburg press. I'm glad they have it at work for reference but probably won't be getting my own copy.

web 2.0 - ideas to scribble down before they are lost...

The book I'm reading at the moment for prep for the library course seems to be focusing a lot on the impact of "web 2.0" and how because of this increased "user involvement" more is going to be expected out of the library "users". They give examples about myspace, youtube and wikis and how nowadays people are expecting to be able to contribute to a website, rather than just not being able to read it. I would like to call Bullshit.

I remember the internet from the days when it was a text adventure. I remember when everyone had a geocities account or their own webpage, there were discussion boards and comments pages and people were being creative and contributing to each others ideas all the time. I would say the difference between then and now is not the fact that "users" are now interested in creating thier own content, but rather people have gotten conned into joining "corporations" and all their creativity is being sucked into some large organisation, which is something that the people who write these types of books can see and take note. Instead of having a webpage now people will have their own "profile" on myspace, LJ or even (shudder) facebook. They seem to have forgotten that in the past we didn't need google to tell us where the other goths were, or what they were doing. Not to mention the fact that before there was the web there were BBS's.

Just because something has been incorporated into a company doesn't mean that it's a new idea. And deciding you need to change the strategy of an entire profession to fit in with what you see this new idea as being, seems a little silly.