I prefer paper books, but the Kindle does have a pretty good screen, and you can read in the dark while walking home from Starbucks, and lots of copyright-expired books are available for free. Hence my perambulating reading for the last few months has been The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott.

Mark Twain famously blamed Sir Walter Scott for the American Civil War. I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but Twain was living then and I wasn’t. Twain’s right, of course, about the general tenor of the novels; all (except St. Ronan’s Well) are historical, and they all romanticize history – chivalrous knights, ladies fair, heroic and picturesque Highlanders, beautiful and tragic Mary Queen of Scots. Ironically, just like Scott contributed to the “Lost Cause” myth in the American South, he also seems to have created a “lost Scotland” myth in Victorian England, where the upper classes, usually with a less-than-tenuous connection to the Highlands, dressed in imaginary tartans and had pipers and ghillies on their hunting estates. (For that matter, I wonder if the popularity of Highlanders as contemporary romance novel heroes can be traced back to Scott? My impression is ladies of Scott’s time would have been more likely to be appalled than intrigued by the prospect of romantic entanglement with a Highlander).


To be fair, Scott didn’t intend any of this; his books are not propaganda for lost causes but historical romances. He’s sympathetic to the losers – Montrose and Mary and Margaret of Anjou and Cedric the Saxon and so on – but also makes it clear that the winning side was in the right. A favorite device is romance between couples on opposite sides of the political/religious fence; the lady is on the “wrong” side but is persuaded to convert – often in an epilog – after toying with the hero’s affections for the whole novel (Rebecca the Jewess in Ivanhoe can’t convert, of course, so ends up shuttled off to Granada so Wilfrid of Ivanhoe can marry the vapid Saxon blonde Rowena).


Scott’s writing style is antiquated but not terribly difficult; it seemed to me that reading was easier when Scott was using his own voice in introductions (as Jedediah Cleishbotham, supposed editor of the Tales Of My Landlord books or Chrystal Croftangry, the equivalent in Chronicles of the Canongate) than the style he used in the novels proper. I probably spent about two hours on each book. Whether that was a fully worthwhile two hours isn’t clear. It’s important to have some familiarity with culturally important novels but I’m not sure I needed to read the whole oeuvre ; you could easily argue that Scott’s novels are more important as cultural influences than as works of literature. A number of the novels have been translated to other media; the 1952 movie version of Ivanhoe and Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor are probably the most famous. In a more recent reference the powder-blue alien diva in the science fiction movie The Fifth Element sings the aria from the mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor which is based on Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor; I wonder if Scott would be amused, appalled, or indifferent.


Having finished with Scott my current walking-home-in-the-dark-reading is Jaques Futrelle’s The Thinking Machine detective stories. I remember a couple of these from junior high school and they’re also available copyright free on the Kindle. ( )

This particular e-book edition (Delphi "Complete Works" for Kindle) is a real disappointment. I read Anne of Geierstein and it has typos in nearly every fifth paragraph or so. I'm surprised, because Delphi's "Complete Works" e-book sets are usually quite well formatted, but it seems like someone had a bad hair day on this one. ( )