Is there a book in this class?

You can do the required readings that are not pdfs several ways.

You can find them on Project Gutenberg.

The obvious advantage of Gutenberg is that the reading is free. You can also search the text using “command F” and you can look up words in the wiktionary using right click (I can on my mac computers, anyway).

So what's wrong with reading a text on Project Gutenberg? The text is not a critical edition. For examples, see Norton Critical Editions. See also Oxford World's Classics. A critical edition tells you about the composition of the text--when it was written and published--what else the author wrote and when, and endnotes tell you what words in a foreign language, usually Latin, mean and fill you on information you may need to understand a passage. And there is usually a timeline or chronology matching historical events to events in the writer's life. A critical edition is designed to help you understand difficult parts of the text (this is called philology); how text was written and published (this is called genetic criticism or textual criticism) and also place the text in the context of the author's life (this is called biographical criticism) and reading (this is called source criticism or influence studies), in the historical context in which the writer wrote (this is called historicism), in the literary period of which a writer is said to be a part of, like Romanticism (this is called literary history), and genre. Some critical editions include literary criticism of the text as appendices. These are all called paratexts.

Critical editions give you a linear narrative, a story about the text you are about to read or have read.  They offer the reader a kind of map, a way of creating a comfort zone for first time readers. They give yu timelines, bibliogpahies, and sometimes biographies.  So you should get a critical edition.  You’ll need it not only to save time but also in order to be able focus closely on the text itself (this is kind of formalism), not its author (intentional fallacy).  Close reading is not about explaining away the text as if it were transparent or its meaning were hidden and easily discovered.  Literature is worth reading because its meaning is NEITHER transparent NOR hidden. Therefore reading literature (or anything good) is endless. No text is transparent. No letter by an author, no biography or autobiography. And some of hte most interesting autobiographies cross over into fiction. See Orson Welles's Filming Othello, for example.
 
If Project Gutenberg is out as a primary resource, the question is really: what kind of critical edition should I get, paper or electronic? After a lifetime of buying books on paper, I have begun to buy both paper and electronic versions of a text. The kindle is cheaper than the print copy, you can look up words as you read, you can highlight text, you can find a word or passage you remember reading earlier in the text by searching instead of flipping pages, and you can take notes. You can also quickly scroll through a text, the way you can a movie on netflix. You'll always be able to find your copy as long as you have a device that gets you online. And you can adjust the size of the font to make the text easier to read. The LED lighting of a computer screen also makes the text easier to read. Btw, I don't own a kindle device. I can access it through amazon.com on my mac book pro (on my iphone and ipad too). You can also often find digital scans of texts printed on paper, but I recommend them only as ancillary resources because you can only scroll them.

Still, I always read books printed on paper. I like taking notes on the flyleaves and in the margins. I also like being able to see my books in my library. Sometimes, I can't find a book because I can't remember where I put it. (I have over 2,500 books in my house, lolz.) But many, many, many times, I happen to take a book off a shelf for no reason and find that it concerns something incredibly interesting that relates to something I've been thinking about, teaching, researching, and so on.  I also find stuff online as well.  And I also find new books and articless while searching for books and periodicals in the stacks in Smathers / Library West.

Here is an essay about paper notebooks (and other analog media) that have advantages over their digital counterparts, the chief attraction being the relative lack of distractions (or multi-tasking).

I recommend using paper as your primary source for books and using kindle as a back up. However, if you prefer kindle or a similar app, then go and use it.

Open Culture


Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read


Paul Feyerabend, Against Method