Yesterday's visit to the public library was unplanned. I started thinking that my internet might be down longer than expected and was afraid of going into withdrawal. I know, silly, but it is sort of scary how dependent I have become on technology. There are times when I am working (and if you stop by here regularly you know I work in an academic library) when I think our main goal these days is to provide services for anything but books. That is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Everything is going digital and online and paperless. That may be great, or that might not be so wonderful, but really the argument is best left for another post on some other day.
For me libraries are first and foremost for books, but yesterday I spent most of my visit using one of their public computers. Unlike the library where I work, which has rows upon rows of computers, my public library has pretty small area of computers (though they do have a computer lab open in the afternoons that I have never used). You have to log in using your library card and initially you only get 30 minutes. There are times when 30 minutes seems to drag on and on (like when you are exercising and are not in the mood for it or you are at work and it is Friday and all you can think about is the weekend), but 30 minutes to complete you internet business is really not very much time at all. They do give you 20 additional minutes if there is no on one waiting, and even 20 minutes after that. I found it hard working with a clock ticking away the minutes on the bottom of my screen, however, so I hit my daily sites and saved surfing for when I could do so at home at my leisure.
In my rush to get things done I read somewhere a mention of Vita Sackville-West's The Edwardians (sorry--not sure who was talking about it as I didn't take the time to write it down). Why did I have it in my mind that this was nonfiction? It is actually a novel, which I went to go find since I was so conveniently at the library. Lately I have become very interested in the Edwardian period--not just in the literature, but in society in general, so I am apt to pick up books relating to the period. When I am reading I tend to concentrate on the actual story and not how it is being told. I think blogging and being exposed to how others read makes me notice things I wouldn't ordinarily notice. I think it is thanks to Dorothy W. and her insights into the structure of the novel that made me take notice of this. The Edwardians starts out with the author inserting herself and talking about how a novelist should start a novel:
"Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least the weighty choice of the moment at which to begin his novel. It is necessary, it is indeed unavoidable, that he should intersect the lives of his dramatis personae at a given hour; all that remains is to decide which hour it shall be, and in what situation they shall be discovered. There is no more reason why they should not first be observed lying in a bassinette--having just been deposited fir the first time in it--than that the reader should make their acquaintance in despairing middle age, having just been pulled out of a canal. Life, considered in this manner from the novelist's point of view, is a long stretch full of variety, in which every hour and circumstance have their particular merit, and might furnish a suitable spring-board for the beginning of a story. Life, moreover, as we continue to consider it from the novelist's point of view, life although varied is seen to be continuous; there is only one beginning and only one ending, no intermediate beginnings and endings such s the poor novelist must arbitrarily impose; which perhaps explains why so many novels, shirking the disagreeable reminder of Death, end with Marriage, as the only admissible and effective crack in continuity. So much for the end; but there are obvious disadvantages to starting the hero off with his birth. For one thing, he is already surrounded by grown-ups, who by reason of his tender and inarticulate age must play some part in the novel, or are at any rate in the first chapters of it, and whose lives are already complicated in such a fashion that it is no true beginning for them when they are hauled ready-made into the story. For another thing--but I need no enlarge. The arbitrariness of choice has already been made sufficiently evident, and no further justification is necessary to explain why we irrupt into the life of our hero (for so, I suppose, he must be called) at the age of nineteen, and meet him upon the roof a little after mid-day on Sunday, July the 23rd, nineteen hundred and five."
Sorry, that quote was very long, but I thought it was interesting. The next paragraph jumps into the story. I'm looking forward to reading this, though really I should try and finish a book or two that already sits atop my groaning night table! I don't know much about Vita Sackville-West--other than a bit about her relationship with Virginia Woolf, but I do have a couple of her books. Another author I will have to investigate!