Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

I went to Powell's Books where I traded in some books I didn't want to keep - and came home with:

Complete Novels of Flann O'Brien, in the new Everyman hardcover edition, $25. This purchase was just an upgrade, from some fusty old paperbacks I already owned to a new hard cover.

Collected Poems: 1943-2004, Richard Wilbur, a new (remaindered) paperback edition for $8.98. A middling good poet. He doesn't get too far from the concrete, which I like about him. He is pleasant, too, but that only gets you so far. Passion is unfortunately rare in his work. Wit does make some appearances.

christina stead - the man who loved children
tom mccarthy - remainder
jason lutes - berlin: city of stones
woody allen - without feathers
chris adrian - the children's hospital

I bought the set of six for $15 at the book festival today
http://www.postmodernlibrary.com/

I liked the concept (even though I could probably just use the internet to the same effect) and the aesthetic, and I was impressed with the guy's idea in an entrepreneurial way as well.

Notting Hill Comic and Book Exchange made me happy. Compact OEDII for £30. Eyebleed city! Also Wedekind's Lulu plays (trans Stephen Spender) & Journey to a War by Auden/Isherwood for a couple of pounds each.

Just had to put all my books into storage because I am currently of no fixed abode. The only solution was... to buy more books, cheap as possible.

The Fashion in Shrouds - Margery Allingham (one of the supposed queens of '30s and onward detective story fiction, for those who don't know)

Very strange style. Remarkably stilted. Something about the way psychological observations keep on intruding into the dialogue. Also contains things like 'mental' used in a sort of modern way -
'My dear girl, forgive me. I was thinking aloud. I forgot you were in this. I'm mental.'

And this advice to an upset woman, from Albert Campion himself:
'What you need, my girl, is a good cry or a nice rape— either, I should think.'

Makes your eyes water don't it.

Also

Mere Christianity by CS Lewis, from a series of wartime lectures on the radio. A sort of step by step guide as to why you should believe in God. Of historical interest mainly. Some of the presuppositions sound odd to the modern ear, certainly not for cultural relativists.

Got a volume of selected Keats and became mildly obsessed with Ode to a Nightingale. Contains both the rather silly 'blushful Hippocrene' (sounds like a pompous twerp at a dinner party - 'Spot of the blushful Hippocrene, Ratsey? Not bad if I do say so myself), and also 'Bacchus and his pards' - I say, you ARE a poet, Keats old chap aren't you?

But also the beautiful 'tender is the night', 'Now more than ever seems it rich to die,/To cease upon the midnight with no pain.'

So I kept on reading it over and over like a moonstruck victim of calf love.

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace, in a well-used paperback edition that was printed in Great Britain (Abacus) and somehow found its way to my local thrift book shop, for 50 cents. I think this copy could survive one more reading before starting to shed random leaves.

Practising History: Selected Essays, Barbara Tuchman, in a used paperback, for $1. I like her approach to history at least half the time.

The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins, in a used Penguin paperback edition, for 50 cents. There is an off chance I will read this and like it. I am willing to give it a try.

C'mon, Wilbur is front-rank, a master of restraint.

Robert Lyons Danly, ed., In the Shade of Spring Leaves, the Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiyo, A Woman of Letters in Meiji Japan. Completely unknown to me, but it won a translation award.
Edward P. Jones, The Known World.
Pio Baroja, The Restlessness of Shanti Andia. Also completely unknown to me.

That last one was, uh, "free", never mind why.

Mishima - After the Banquet
Kobo Abe - The Face of Another
A nice looking comp of Hart Crane's poetry
Cortazar - The Blow-up and Other stories
Nathalie Saurrate - Childhood
George Steiner - On difficulty and other essays
Kenneth Tynan - A view of the English Stage
Harry Matthews - Cigarettes
Marguerite Duras - The Sailor from Gibraltar
Thomas M.Disch - 334
Before the Golden Age 2 (ed. Asimov)

Pity I can't read as fast as I find.

'The Moonstone' is great, but Collins' 'The Woman in White' is even better.

I got my bookstore fix today at Powell's City of Books and Goodwill. I came home with:

Collected Poems, Mary Barnard, with an introduction by William Stafford, in a used hard cover, first (& possibly the only) printing, published in 1979 by Breitenbush Books. She's a local poet who achieved a minor national reputation. Her best known work was a translation of Sappho. This was in very good shape at $6.95.

White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006, Donald Hall. Used paperback in nice condition for $8.95. He was Poet Laureate of the USA for a couple of years. (These days they hand that title around pretty rapidly, which is a nice bit of publicity for the recipient and helps them sell a few more books of poetry.)

The Great Influenza, John M. Barry, used paperback for $3.99. A history of the 1919-20 epidemic that killed 20,000,000 people. The blurbs made it sound very promising.

Picked up Louis MacNeice's Collected Poems (the nice hardback edition from last year) for half price in a second hand bookshop, good as new! Ha cha cha! (Gamaliel Ratsey does an ill-advices jig).

Also picked up for a friend's birthday Hag's Nook by John Dickson Carr - the first of the Gideon Fell mysteries, and picked up The Mad Hatter Mystery and Poison in Jest by him for myself at the same time.

I did some book shopping today as a birthday self-indulgence. I brought home:

Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems, by John Ashberry in a new (remaindered) hardcover edition, for a mere $12.95. I've been eyeing this for months, but was unwilling to splurge $35 for it. I didn't have to, after all.

Collected Poems, by Patrick Kavanagh, used paperback in very good condition for $6.50.

Poems & Other Writings, by Henry W. Longfellow, used in excellent condition, in the Library of America hard cover edition for $9.95. This is a beautifully printed and designed book that makes it much easier to read L's poetry, which is a needlessly difficult chore in cheap editions.

in the Library of America hard cover edition for $9.95. This is a beautifully printed and designed book that makes it much easier to read L's poetry, which is a needlessly difficult chore in cheap editions.

what's the deal with library of america editions? whenever i read philip roth, there's that foreword about how his work is being published in definitive library editions etc etc. i looked through some once, and it was like three-books-in-one with really tiny print. is this appealing? is this the same thing?

i am just about to finish the new roth, anyway, and am otherwise trucking through non fiction like manifesta etc

Meridon, Phillipa Gregory

Novel 11, Book 18 (Dag Solstad)

Edition 69 (Vitezslav Nezval)

The Book of Other People (Zadie Smith, ed.)

Life: A User's Manual (Georges Perec)

A new translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin by Stanley Mitchell (see how this measure up to the Charles Johnston one I love)
England under the Norman and Anvengin kings 1075-1225, Robert Bartlett
The closing of the western mind, Charles Freeman

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Book Of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

(20% off at Waterstones, so I splurged)

got orhan pamuk's "snow" at a hospital book fair for $1

Schlump, yes, those Roth ones are the same Library of America series. I wouldn't be at all sure about them for novels, but for poetry and other things they're incredible: there just aren't any collections of eg Pound, Bishop, Stevens, Ashbery that can compete. Also the easiest way to get hold of a lot of shorter works by big prose writers, as in the Twain set.
Nice, durable editions: paper's thin, and they can be a bit cramped compared to individual volumes, but not enough to be a serious issue for me. I think I'd rather read a paperback of a novel though.
The Ashbery Collected Poems -1987 is my latest purchase. Have also shaken the publishing tree for a copy of 2666 by Bolano.

"Slow Learner", Thomas Pynchon. Had to stop myself getting Vol 2 of "Man Without Qualities" and "The Third Policeman" (better books I know but I've nearly finished G Rainbow and don't want to, kinda)

Today's purchases:

The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman, used hardcover, no dust jacket, $1.50. I am not in the mood for unreliable narrators.

A Blistered Kind of Love, Angela Ballard and Duffy Ballard, used paperback, Mountaineers Books Press, $2.50. This book probably is not literature in any sense I would recognize. It has to do with my much-loved hobby - long-distance trekking in the mountains of the western USA. In this case, it describes a thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail - approx 2,650 miles in about 6 months. I need this kind of book to read during the winter doldrums, when the trails I love are buried under snow.

Donald Barthelme 40 Stories, Gilbert Hernandez Human Diastrophism, Frank Moorhouse Loose Living, Michael Moorcock Behold the Man

The Barthelme is great. The Moorcock is clever, mildly pulpy fun. I've yet to really enjoy a Frank Moorhouse: I can see what he's trying to do, it just doesn't really grab me admittedly the books of his I've read were VERY 70s-ish in their concerns and politics, and had not aged terribly well).

Yeah he's a v 60s/70s political/boho sort of guy, it doesn't really bother me (or I don't really notice) when it comes out in the books... have you read Forty-Seventeen?

I haven't, but just Googled it and it looks really interesting, actually.

Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara - Ben Fountain
The Man who made Vermeers - Jonathon Lopez

I've had so much good (lucky) charity shop shopping lately that I've been spending too much on books even though I haven't paid over £2 for one. And my single lonely bookcase is both full and under the strain of precarious towers of books stacked on top of it. I think my choicest finds have been 1970s Picador editions of Richard Brautigan's 'Sombrero Fallout' and 'The Abortion' for 50p each, hidden away in a discount tub with tattered self-help guides, romance novels and maps. Maybe my first ever find that would be considered a good one by anyone but myself!

My most recent shop got me 'The Name of the Rose', 'London Fields' (on a six-month old recommendation), and 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' (on a six-year old recommendation. I'm a bad friend) for £1.50 each, I'm happy with that, at least until I read them and hate them.

Mishima - Thirst for Love
Alexander Trocchi - Young Adam
Djuna Barnes - Nightwood
Olaf Stapleton - Sirius
K.W. Jeter - Dr.Adder
G. Cabrera Infante - Three Trapped Tigers
Boris Vian - I Spit on Your Graves

State By State - A Panoramic Portrait of America (Weiland and Wilsey, eds.)

The Snow Tourist (C. English)

The Informers (Vasquez, translated by Anne McLean

)

Hey, I've just been reading Barthelme's Forty Stories lately, too! Picked it up last month cuz my girlfriend still has my copy of Sixty Stories* and I eventually realized that Barthelme is the kind of writer who I love to have lying around so that I can read one or two stories when I've got nothing better to do. Great stuff, of course.

I also bought To the Lighthouse on a whim a few weeks ago, because it was rainy and it seemed like the right thing to read. Slow going so far, but I think I'm enjoying it? Probably still prefer Mrs. Dalloway, tho.

(*: she bought me some awesome books for my birthday, including the beautiful Everyman's Library edition of Tristram Shandy and the extremely funny and previously unknown-to-me Moscow to the End of the Line, so I don't mind too much)

Poems & Other Writings, by Henry W. Longfellow, used in excellent condition, in the Library of America hard cover edition for $9.95. This is a beautifully printed and designed book that makes it much easier to read L's poetry, which is a needlessly difficult chore in cheap editions.

i don't have the money to buy books lately : /

"Forty-Seventeen" is vv awesome, as I remember, read it about 12 years ago tho and don't remember too clearly. If a forty- and a seventeen-year old getting it on's going to bug you don't bother, perhaps. Got Moorhouse's "Dark Palace" today cos I LOVED "Grand Days" (this is the sequel, more League of Nations historical stuff I guess, yay!) but I doubt I'll get round to reading it any time at all soon.

I apparently only feel like posting here when I get something with a particularly dreadful cover.
http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c133/OysteinietsyO/Shallowgrave.jpg

(Except I see now that I apparently posted that dreadful Tolstoy cover in some other thread)

there are lots of bad purdy covers! he's cursed, apparently. my trade paperback copy of narrow rooms is a photo of a gay porn muscleman cowboy lying in a pile of hay or something. i tried to get a friend of mine to read it and he refused based on the cover. and he's gay!

i do like this old paperback copy of malcom though.i have another old paperback of malcom with another great cover too:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2182/2093996638_9400914ec9.jpg?v=0

but this is just bonkers! ?????????????????

http://media.perseusdistribution.com/covers/high/9781852423681.jpg

even the most recent reissues suck:

http://www.wright.edu/~martin.kich/PurdySoc/covers/eustace.jpg

I've never even heard of this Purdy fellow! The Dorothy Parker blurb has me interested, though. Is 'Malcolm' a good place to start?

yeah, Malcom is a good place to start. Or one of his short story collections. If you want full speed ahead dementia then read narrow rooms. if you like one, you are probably gonna want to read more. that's what happened to me anyway. he's an amazing stylist and he's just, um, kinda bonkers! but bonkers in a very unique way. The Nephew is a good starting place too. i dunno. dive in!

from his wiki page, here is a short list of some of his fans over the years(!!!!):

"His work has been translated into more than 30 languages. It has been praised by writers as diverse as Dame Edith Sitwell (an important early advocate), Dorothy Parker, Edward Albee, James M. Cain, Terry Southern, Lillian Hellman, A.N. Wilson, Francis King and Marianne Moore. From the start, his work has often been at the edge of what was printable: Gollancz could not bring himself to print the word motherfucker in the 1957 UK edition of 63: Dream Palace; decades later, the German government tried to ban Narrow Rooms, but a court threw the case out. Although many readers were scandalized, a solid cadre of distinguished critics and scholars embraced his work from the start, including John Cowper Powys and Susan Sontag, who warmly defended him against prurient critics."

oh, and i started reading his stuff after i read an interview where john waters said he was his favorite writer. i figured that was good enough for me.

i can't help but picture john cowper powys and susan sontag hanging out together when i read that last wiki sentence.

(hangs head in shame)

This past weekend I spent about $350 on new backpacking equipment. I may not have spent that much on books this entire year. I suppose this speaks volumes on my warped sense of priorities. However, if the books I bought cost from $100 to $150 a pop, they would add up much faster.

i just dropped $320 on two books for my boyfriend's birthday!

Do you have a twin sister?

And what were the books?

the lettered/slipcased edition of the black sparrow press bibliography (he's a collector of BSP stuff, particularly bukowski, john yau and paul bowles).

the numbered (1/150) and signed edition, in a beautiful clamshell box, of alex gross' art book, including a 7-colour silkscreened print.

i should mention that he bought me a $650 book very recently (limited edition ray caesar art book, in a clamshell box, linen covered, signed and numbered).

i just gave them to him tonight - he's very happy!

As who wouldn't be with such a thoughtful gift.