danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

The rain this morning is preventing me from doing some things I’d like to do, like ride my bike down to the post office and check out Goering’s to see if they’ll give me a decent price for a couple books I’d like to sell back.  If not I’ll sell them on Amazon, but if they come close to the prices I see for the same books on Amazon, I’ll sell them to Goering’s and buy some more books I’ll need for the coming semester.  Plus, it may be that students from my Age of Johnson class have sold back their copies of Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, a book which we covered very briefly at the end of the semester, which I didn’t buy at the time because of the $18 price tag.  However, if some of my fellow students have sold back their copies to Goering’s, I might be able to pick it up for $9 or so.  Also, other literature students may have sold back copies of some books I’d like to pick up as well.  I still need Richardson’s Clarissa (which is over 1,500 pages!) for my upcoming Eighteenth Century Novel course.

In a related story, I went to Barnes and Noble this week, where they have their own line of classic novels, but was disappointed in them.  It wasn’t for the price, since bundled as they were three or four novels to a volume they were quite inexpensive.  But I noticed that they had few, if any, endnotes, and at least one novel–it may have been one of Victor Hugo’s–was abridged.  I am becoming quite fond of the editions in the Penguin Classics series, the Oxford World’s Classics series, and the Norton editions.  I have been reading the Penguin edition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and I must say that in older literature, it is helpful to have some degree of editing for spelling or punctuation (these books frequently have words spelled different ways from one chapter to the next, for some reason), and footnotes for allusions that are made or geographical references.

In a less related story, I see that NBC is set to have a Robinson Crusoe television series this fall.  I predict swift cancellation.

Now, as I hear it raining still harder I am beginning to suspect that I won’t be able to get out today.

Filed under: Literature and Books, Meteorology, Television on August 14th, 2008