In research for my review of Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions I spotted this recording of the great George Guidall reading The Library Of Babel. This is a kind of Fantasy, but somehow it reminded me of Ted Chiang‘s Exhalation. But before you begin listening, consider: How many letters are in the English and Spanish alphabets?
The Library Of Babel
By Jorge Luis Borges; Translated by Andrew Hurley; Read by George Guidall
1 |MP3| – Approx. 21 [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: July 2010
ISBN: 9780142428085
Source: MPages.org
The universe consists of an enormous expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. |ETEXT|
Posted by Jesse Willis