One of the advantages of starting a library in my 30s almost from scratch is being free to choose economical editions without sentimental attachments holding me back or (too much) stress over clashing classics.
Conflicting impulses of completism and regressive minimalism have seen me fixating on the shelf-saving, unwieldy, often almost unreadable omnibus format, packing the most author(s) into the least binding I can. Which turns out to be more than I'd thought possible or reasonable.
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Bought partly because I thought it would look funny on the shelf. Even funnier on the bus. |
It usually saves money too, at least if you're exclusively buying pre-read hardbacks (since I'm collecting books now, I might as well do it properly).
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Admittedly, it will prove less economical if my daughter doesn't have that classics phase |
The Library 2.0 rule still applies – to be worth buying, these quality assortments have to be actually worth reading, in their exhaustive entirety. If I've got enough book to last a lifetime, I'd best crack on.
All aboard the omnibus. Ding, ding! But where does it gorr?
The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) ****
As is bound to happen when you dip into a series a couple of times at random, the first one you pick up is the one you've read/seen before (I think on that train ride down the Nile, quite irrelevantly). Its unrelatable upper-crust crises didn't have me slapping my thigh, but the extended joke of all events being filtered through our utter twat of a narrator kept it entertaining even through the repetition. And 'Steggles' is still an inherently hilarious name to me.
A Study in Scarlet (1887) ***
The definitive origin story (that most of us come to retrospectively), I'd forgotten about the bizarre split that spends half of the novel following almost completely unrelated characters in a completely different setting with barely any relation to the plot before we finally get to the adventures of Jefferson Hope and the gang that we're all here for.
A Christmas Carol (1843) ****
Like Dracula, I've come around to the source over the adaptations, and I hardly missed the Muppets at all this time. Even reading (some of) it aloud to an oblivious toddler to kick off what will hopefully be a stubborn family tradition, I found the escalating sentimentality excessive. I might not be a Scrooge, but I'm some sort of arsehole.
A Christmas Tree (1850) ****
This stream of consciousness through ornamental descriptions and miniature vignettes was more my sort of thing, though it wouldn't stand up to compulsory revisiting in the same way. Dickens' ultraviolet prose is what I'm here for.
