Other Fiction Bennett, Arnold: The Grand Babylon Hotel. 15 Sept 07

[RWood]

When the 3rd richest man in the USA returns to England with his daughter and buys the world's most exclusive hotel so that they may feast on beefsteak and Bass you have the setup for an interesting lightweight comedy. Thankfully Bennett rises above the easy to present an enjoyable book.

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[akiburis]

Has "The Grand Babylon Hotel" been on your to-do list for some time? Or have you just read it, enjoyed it, and taken some extra trouble to format it nicely before "sharing" it? Or is this some sort of unacknowledged response, or reaction, to readingaloud's very recent posts on the posting-guidelines thread? (Just wondering, perhaps quite gratuitously and unfairly.)

[RWood]

I did a Bennett book some time ago (How to Live on 24 Hours a Day) and downloaded a number of his other works at that time. Many of these have been converted and formatted for BD. When I was cleaning the hard disk on Friday I found them again and decided to finish the ones that I had completed and enjoyed. This was the first.

There is no attempt to steal another's thunder. After your note I checked and indeed his selection was the same book. Perhaps that is what led me to choose this one as the first of the lot I cannot say. It was not by any direct effort other than I feel I have contributed very few texts recently.

[readingaloud]

I'm glad that RWood did this book, and appreciate his many contributions. And I don't think I have any thunder for him to steal--if more folks find and enjoy this entertaining title through his good offices, so much the better.

I looked at the text, and had a few thoughts about the matter.

1. While it's a good thing that this version is available, it doesn't really remove the case for mine. I don't think that most folks, given the choice, would prefer this version for reading on the iLiad (it's obviously better for any other platform).

2. There's a level of quality that you get only after you've proofread the book. The PG text of Grand Babylon has a number of problems with spacing, paragraph breaks, and so forth, most of which are corrected in my edition. But I don't generally correct these--since I'm making the book principally for my own use, it doesn't make sense for me to proofread the book--by the time I'm done, I've already read the book. So, though I recognize a number of the mistakes I corrected in RWood's version, I can't fault him--those mistakes were in mine, too, until I corrected them, and I only did that because I planned to share that particular book with a special friend.

3. Even if I had a sensible place to put them, I doubt that I'd post books I hadn't read. Not all PG texts have the problems of the Grand Babylon, and so many of them look pretty good with only the kind of 'global' corrections you can make without reading the book. But you don't know, until you read the book, whether there are going to be such problems or not. Perhaps I'm just too fussy about these things--if my uncorrected books are good enough for me, perhaps I ought to assume that they're good enough for other people.