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Free, media experiment – final week
The last week of my experiment in consuming only free media for a month came to an end yesterday. It has been a huge success as far as books are concerned, and reasonable with regard to video. Music was harder to find (apart from classical).
The last week was mostly dominated by short stories. I carried on with Poe, but am a long way from finishing his complete works.
As before, looking for free books has read me to read things I would otherwise have missed—this time a whole genre. I have always said that, with very few exceptions, I disliked crime fiction apart from that by a handful of authors (Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Sayers, and, more recently, Christie). I have now found a lot more that I like.
One was a book from which I have previously read two short stories in anthologies. The Golden Slipper : and other problems for Violet Strange.
The next was an excellent anthology The Lock and Key Library Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Modern English. I skipped some of the stories I have already, read, but it is a substantial anthology so that was not much of a loss. I discovered some authors I did not know (such as Egerton Castle: which I was amazed to discover was not a place).
The Lock and Key Library Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Old Time English was less to my taste, but it did start of with a hugely enjoyable Dickens story I have not read before, The Haunted House.
So that draws my experiment to an end. I have enjoyed it, and have read a lot that I would otherwise not have read. I can find new free books to read faster than I can complete them, and more video than I have time to watch. I am left with a backlog of downloaded but unread and unwatched books and video, which it would have been very good to be able to write up.
I am no longer bound by the conditions of the experiment, but I have no doubt that free will continue to dominate my reading and watching: its convenient, cheap, and there is no reason to look for paid except when there something I particularly want. There is no longer a need to, for example, brose bookshops looking for books to buy.
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