Lockdown Library

“‘So, Inspector, you can see, the only person who could have done all these murders is the man sitting over there’. So saying, Johnny Oxford pointed his finger at…’Men are you skinny? Do you have sand kicked in your face?’ Wait a minute, that’s not right! There’s a page missing! The last page is missing!” – From The Missing Page by Ray Galton & Alan Simpson

As I’ve mentioned before, one of my favourite episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour is The Missing Page. Having borrowed Lady Don’t Fall Backwards by Darcy Sarto from his local library, Hancock is incensed to find that the last page is missing…or so he thinks. It turns out that the author died before finishing the book, which has been published without a last page (hence it skips to the Charles Atlas advert). Frustrated by his experience, Hancock abandons books and the library in favour of a new hobby, the gramophone, which would have suited him now, what with the libraries being closed.

 

The announcement last week (23^rd June 2020) that lockdown restrictions are being eased from 4^th July means that libraries can re-open from that date. Whether they do so or not, and what services they will provide will depend on local councils. Some libraries have been offering limited services during lockdown, legislation having allowed “digital library services and those where orders are taken electronically, by telephone or by post (for example no-contact Home Library Services)” and it has been the digital services that I have been using.

 

I have never been much of a library user, but I have borrowed more books during lockdown (three) than I had during the previous forty years. I rejoined the local library last year after several decades away, and started browsing the website to see what ebooks were available. Like millions of other people, I have mostly read books on my Kindle for the last twelve years, and even if it had been possible to go and borrow a physical book from my local library, I would still have preferred to borrow an ebook.

 

Borrowing an ebook ought to be pretty straightforward; download the library’s app on a phone or tablet, find a book, download it and read it. Not quite. There are four apps used by my local library; BorrowBox, Libby, RBdigital, and Overdrive: as yet I’ve not worked out why there are four, but there are. I’d guess that the reason is that different apps offer different functionality and different user experiences, and that no one app delivers all of the required services. This may be due to licencing issues, file formats, system compatibilities and the usual fact that as new services and functionality come along, it’s sometimes easier for developers to come up with a new app rather than trying to shoehorn it into an existing one.

 

For instance, in addition to books, RBdigital has a wide range of magazines and comics that can be borrowed (696 magazine titles, and 1,508 comics, ranging from The Economist to Spiderman). But a book that I have borrowed using the library website, and read using Overdrive, does not return any result when searched for on RBdigital. The magazines that are on RBdigital are not on the other apps, nor the library website. It’s slightly frustrating, and the part of me that used to test things like this for a living has an urge to start writing some test scripts to get to the bottom of which app does what. Fortunately, I have managed to supress that urge!

 

When lockdown started, I decided that I did not want to read books with a contemporary setting, but rather historical stuff, or books set in a slightly off-kilter version of today; escapism rather than gritty realism. I mostly read books on my Kindle, but a friend lent me three paperbacks back in March, which I have read in the last few weeks (well, two of them; one - With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed by Lynn Truss - proved to be too over-written, too annoying, and too cliched for me to be able to plough through it). Of the others, Ben Elton’s The First Casualty was hugely enjoyable, if a little predictable in places.

 

One book that I bought and read on my Kindle was Dissolution, the only book in the Shardlake series by CJ Sansom that I had not yet read. Dissolution is the first in the series, and Shardlake was markedly different compared with later books, in which his character had clearly and realistically aged and evolved.

 

Then I remembered another series of stories, one or two of which I had read years ago, about the slightly oddball detectives Bryant & May, of whom Christopher Fowler has written fifteen novels. Deciding to start with Bryant & May’s first case, I bought and read Full Dark House, but having decided to read some more in the series, it occurred to me that rather than buy, why not borrow? The second book in the series – The Water Room – was not available to borrow from the library (just like physical books, there’s a finite number of copies of ebooks, defined by the number of licences purchased by the library, I assume), so I skipped to the third, Seventy-Seven Clocks.

 

I wanted to borrow The Second Sleep by Robert Harris because I’d read some reviews and been intrigued. The reviews were mixed – disappointment with the ending being the main criticism – but I’ve generally enjoyed Harris’s books in the past (Fatherland is a masterpiece, for example) and wanted to make up my own mind. Sadly, the library’s copy was out, so I bought it on my Kindle, and thoroughly enjoyed it, although I’d agree with those who thought that the ending was a bit of a let-down. What did surprise me was that in none of the reviews that I’d read did anyone acknowledge the debt it clearly owes to Walter M Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz.

 

Next on my reading list is a revisit to Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine, a mash-up of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. I must have read it a year or so after it first came out, as whenever I think of it I’m taken back to the staff room at Midland Bank in Gants Hill – where I started work in 1976, the year the book was published – reading it while eating a crusty cheese roll from Barton’s The Bakers that I’d bought for my lunch. Odd, how memory works.