Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

i picked up incidences at random, i didn't realise he was on here already. huh.

Found an old paperback of Elaine Dundy's "The Dud Avocado".
To quote the cover: "The blithe and bubbling bestseller about an American girl who goes to Paris to be naughty-- and quite often succeeds!"
Well!

Also picked up a bunch of old science fiction paperbacks for a bonus-gift for my father. Intend to wrap a stack (well, five) of them in newspaper and tie it up with some old string to make a nice hobo-gift. I got a raise at work today, so clearly I'm intoxicated by money!

When you read it, do tell us if it succeeds in being "blithe and bubbling", while yet remaining readable. This is a difficult feat, worthy of homage.

I've read a few chapters of it and so far it does succeed at that- it's like Holly Golightly telling her story in the first person. Although maybe that is a cause for worry, that all will not end well.

The NYRB classics just released a new edition of Dud Avocado last month.

the book sale was this weekend! three days. it's quite the affair. went the first day and spent about 30 bucks. but today, monday, everything is free! believe you me, they have a LOT left. anyway, here is what i have picked up in the last couple of weeks at the book sale/thrift store/dump:

annual world's best sci-fi volumes: 72/76/77/78/81/83

nebula award stories eleven (edited by ursula leguin)

harlan ellison - approaching oblivion

ann pyne - in the form of a person (short stories ???)

grace paley - later the same day

adam haslett - you are not a stranger here (short stories ???)

robert anderson - ice age (short stories ???)

italo calvino - marcovaldo

o*blek (literary mag)

john cowper powys - lucifer

bruce wagner - the chrysanthemum palace

kate atkinson - behind the scenes at the museum

evan s. connell - the alchymist's journal

penelope fitzgerald - the gate of angels

helen knode - the ticket out (crime novel)

paris review 40th anniversary issue (delillo and toni morrisson interviews. cheever journal excerpts.)

robert coover - the universal baseball association, inc, j henry waugh, prop.

andre dubus - dancing after hours

paule marshall - brown girl, brownstone (really nice out of print 1st edition of little-known african-american 50's lit)

tom phillips - a humument - a treated victorian novel

j.g. farrell - troubles

denis johnson - angels

pam houston - cowboys are my weakness

harold brodkey - first love & other sorrows

harlan ellison - the beast that shouted love at the heart of the world

vernor vinge - the collected stories

j.g. farrell - the singapore grip

calvin trillin - floater

william gass - in the heart of the heart of the country

five fingers review (lit mag)

graham swift - last orders

denis johnson - fiskadoro

malcom lowry - under the volcano

toni morrison - the bluest eye

brian moore - the color of blood

bizarre books (basically, long lists of weird books)

frederick barthelme - painted desert (which i'm reading now)

thomas berger - neighbors

tim powers - the drawing of the dark

marijane meaker - game of survival (couldn't resist this. weird 70's thriller about people stuck in an elevator!)

l.p. hartley - the go-between

tom drury - the end of vandalism (just finished this one)

anne lamott - hard laughter

paula fox - desperate characters (which i've read, but don't own a copy of.)

john fante - dreams from bunker hill & 1933 was a bad year

italo calvino - invisible cities

john westermann - sweet deal (soho crime)

kate atkinson - case histories

russell banks - continental drift (signed!)

alice munro - the progress of love (couldn't remember if i owned a copy)

frederick busch - harry & catherine

andre dubus - voices from the moon

paula fox - a servant's tale

dennis cooper - try

(all told, i don't even think i spent 40 bucks. beat that, amazon!)

WOW! That's a great haul! It's probably a good thing I live on the other side of the country, I would go snap up all their free leftovers.

Whimper.

How far away was this? Why was I not told?

this is on martha's vineyard, chris! i believe you are as far as jaq, no? and yeah, i made out like a bandit today when everything was free. and i was in such a book fog that i completely forgot about the art/architecture/photography section at the front of the gymnasium! oh well. next time. i'm not greedy. much.

Well, no, I am in NYC for the summer.

ah, a mere stone's throw away!

dennis cooper - try

if you haven't read this yet you're in for ahem a "treat" the rockcritic character is beyond perverse. on the whole I found this book profoundly moving and utterly twisted...long after I thought there were no taboos left to be violated "try" proved me wrong (again)

nice haul scott. i love brian moore, haven't read that one tho.

In between library runs lately I've bought a few used paperbacks.

patricia highsmith -- the blunderer

kingsley amis -- i like it here

bruce chatwin -- on the black hill

shiva naipaul -- north of south: an african jounrey

Latest batch is:

<I>The Procedure</I>. Harry Mulisch.
<I>Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books</I>. Marcel Benabou.
<I>After Many a Summer Dies the Swan</I>. Aldous Huxley.
<I>Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing</I>.
<I>Snake Catcher.</I> Naiyer Masud.
<I>Crooked Little Vein</i>. Warren Ellis.
<i>Curses</I>. Kevin Huizenga.

Not sure if i'm in the mood to read any of them right now though. (Except Curses.) Too fickle.

The Brian Moore (Colour of Blood) is really good - read it on the weekend.

That Benabou book is one of my favorites.

It is of course mentioned in Bartleby & Co, by Enrique Vila-Matas which I recommend to you, Chris. I tried to take it out of the library, but they only had another called something like Get Rid Of This Book Quick!, so I reserved that instead.

Eager to read that Benabou. It'll be my first of his.

Yes, Bartleby & Co. is fantastic. Montano's Malady i'm still working on, as i don't want the two books conflated in my memory. The friend who recommended it is not so keen on it as he was on the first. He's slathering for Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Anyone have any idea when that Borges biography by Bioy Casares is going to make it into English translation? although i picked up the Williamson one, i have no intention of reading it. Him hanging with Bioy Casares and Ocampo slagging everyone seems more fun... at least in small doses. The TLS review interested me.

I bought one of those Aberystwyth detectivey stories. I imagine it will sit in my book mountain until I donate it to Oxfam.

From neighborhood junk store:
Jean Cocteau - Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film
William J. Schnell - 30 Years a Watchtower Slave
Anna Deavere Smith - Fires in the Mirror
Atul Gawande - Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
C. Vann Woodward - The Strange Career of Jim Crow

'no one belongs here more than you' by miranda july. just arrived and i can't wait to start reading it.

online book-buying will be the death of me:
spitting off tall buildings - dan fante
the heart is a lonely hunter - carson mccullers
the magus - john fowles
mister dog: the dog who belonged to himself - margaret wise brown

the last one is a long-lost childhood favourite. i didn't realise they were still printing it, till i mentioned it to a friend and he searched it out on abebooks for me.

I sold some books to Powell's Books in July and had amassed a whopping $33 in trade credit, so today I went down and overspent it. My purchases were:

Poems and Translations, Ezra Pound, in the hardcover American Library edition. This has the works: 1200pp of poems, including his uncollected chaff, plus a chronology, notes and index (those indispensible aids to time wastage). It was in great shape for a mere $32. Now I can sell my paperback edition of Personae and recoup a couple of dollars on this extravagence.

The Journal of Cardan: Together with The Quest of the Opal and The Probelm of Form, J.V. Cunningham, for $5.95. A hardcover with dust jacket, most probably a first printing, because Cunningham is presently so obscure. These are essays by a mostly-forgotten, but quite good poet.

Collected Poems in English, Joseph Brodsky, 'first edition', hardcover with dust jacket, in excellent condition for $9.95. Flipping through this he seemed to have some interesting licks - good enough to justify the Nobel he won.

Collected Poems, Stevie Smith, in an xlib hardcover with dust jacket, Oxford U. Press, for $7.95. Not a solid favorite poet of mine. She wavers between the faux-naive and the genuinely charming. The price sold me on this one.

I made some other thrift shop purchases lately:

Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, V.S. Naipul, hardcover, dust jacket, $6.00.

One World, Ready or Not, Wm. Greider, trade paper in good shape, $4.00. I've read it already, but I kind of bought it as a tribute to Greider, who I still think has sussed out the tenor of the times better than far more celebrated pundits.

The Shaping of a City: Business and Politics in Portland, Oregon 1885 to 1915, E. Kimbark MacColl, trade paper, $1.00. This is a local history of our highly venal and typically American founders.

my order for 'mister dog: the dog who belonged to himself' just got cancelled :(

That Pound dealie includes the Cantos?

That's not a bad price on that Portland book.

No Cantos included. You need 45 more box tops for that. But it has his translations of Confucius and Sophocles and the Noh plays, etc.

Oh hey even better really. 1200pp without the Cantos? Damn!

Why do I get myself into these situations?

Anyway, I just bought another 1150pp. of scintillating prolixity that I shall someday feel obligated to read: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West, in a massive Penguin paperback edition that would choke an anaconda, for $5. Shoot me now.

Also, I bought Collected Poems of James Joyce, a much slimmer read, for $1.29.

Presumably you have finished the Joyce poems by now, at least.

I keep seeing that Rebecca West book! I had never heard of it, but it keeps popping up in bookstores. I suppose $5 would have been pretty tempting.

I met up with Ned in Powell's yesterday but we did not stay long enough for me to be tempted to buy anything. This is probably a good thing!

It seems odd to me that the foremost inventor of twentieth-century modernist fiction wrote poetry as a pastiche of Elizabethan lyricism and Celtic Twilight romanticism. It's hard to say where he would have gone with it, had he stuck to poetry. He wasn't terribly bad at it, but I suspect he made the right choice in abandoning it.

Book purchase or no, I imagine Ned beamed upon you. Being as he is the patron saint of ILE, I imagine Ned beams aplenty upon his flock. I have been the recipient of one or two electron-composed nedbeams. May he live and prosper.

Poems: New and Collected: 1957-1997, Wislawa Szymborska, hard cover, $17.95. (I can't decide if it was a remainder or a used book in like-new condition.) I admire her wit. She manages to be both astringent and cheerful.

I found a 1983 Pocket Penguin edition of Edmund Crispin's Fen Country for $2 on Friday. Yay.

i bought "the art of alex gross" (signed) for my best friend and; he bought "the raw shark texts" for me.

I just bought a copy of David Peace's Tokyo Year Zero, based partly on teh Britishes rave reviews of The Damned Utd in the archives.

david markson's detective novels. (the cashier told me he also wrote a western, albeit one that is out of print. he also gave me a copy of something called 'context: a forum for literary arts and culture', my curiosity about the topic of out-of-print markson novels apparently having qualified me as someone who would be interested in such things.)

the frank miller designed edition of gravity's rainbow.

'modern dramatists: gilbert and sullivan', by charles hayter.

psmith journalist and all omnibuses containing it seem to be out of print. bah.

I don't think I'm ever going to get around to finishing Markson's Down In Mexico novel, so I haven't bothered going near the detective novels.

Isn't Context an organ of The Dalkey Archive?

I treated myself! A good hour of browsing in a lovely dusty old second-hand-bookstore turned up the following:

A Frolic of His Own - William Gaddis
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
Summer in Baden-Baden - Leonid Tsypkin
The Barracks Thief & Selected Stories - Tobias Wolff
Authority & the Individual - Bertrand Russell
Mr Palomar - Italo Calvino
Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar

Plus a $3 copy of Antony and Cleopatra since it's my favourite and I did't own a copy.

The Psmith omnibus is in print in the UK, I believe.

I have been buying books for school. They are schoolish. But "The World's Major Language" looks pretty hot.

dirk gently compilation Adams

hhg2g hardback Adams

thousandfold thought l scott bakker fantasy

Watchmen graphic novel

god delusion Dawkins

made in the USA Bryson

to kill a mockingbird

all cos i got to go book shopping in london and i needed to get presents.

A Mencken Chrestomathy, selected writings of H.L. Mencken, in a hard cover edition from its first printing, back in 1952. Approx 650 pp. I paid $6 for it. Now I'm set up for life for all my miscellaneous Mencken needs.

Mark Twain's Speeches; it's an orphaned volume from one of those Mark Twain's Works Authorized Edition sets that reproduce his signature (none genuine without it!) on the front cover. This one has a pale yellow cover with marroon and phony gilt decorations. I paid $2.99. He was a fantastic speechifer, by all accounts.

We Pointed Them North: Reflections of a Cowpuncher, by E.C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott. A cowpoke's memoirs, issued in a nice hardcover edition from The Lakeside Press in 1991. I paid $2.99 for this, too. Americana, you know. Like the snuff boxes in the Senate.

Byrne, Anthony Burgess, new(?) hardcover copy for $7.95.

The Exclusions of a Rhyme, J.V. Cunningham, excellent condition paperback for $5.95. This book of poetry serves as Cunningham's 'collected works'. He was best known as an epigrammatist, but all his poetry shows a condensed and compact form, with a sharp intellect behind them. I may toss one or two onto the poetry thread for inspection.

Aimless, didn't you already read Byrne, and report on it across several threads?

Some used books yesterday:
Frank Norris - McTeague (thanks to the old ILB, innit. The random pages I read didn't look too hot, but I'll give it a proper whirl)
Conan Doyle - Tales of Unease (It's got "twilight excursions" from "Doyle's vivid imagination for the strange". Gotta be good)
Maxim Gorky - On Literature
Benedetto Croce - Aesthetics (A Norwegian translation that only includes the theory part)

And some new stuff last week:
Tommy Bernhard - Cutting Timber: An Irritation
Donny Barthelme - Sixty Stories & Forty Stories (The foreword by Dave Eggers reinforces the impression that I must never read Eggers' books)

I just bought McTeague as well.
Also:
Patrick Marnham - The Man Who Wasn't Maigret
William Carlos Wiliams - The Doctor Stories
Richard Yates - Young Hearts Crying.

JR (&tb), yeppers.

I bought a 1947 Teach Yourself Russian book. It is kinda gorgeous. I do not really plan to learn Russian but I hang out with all these Slavicists and actual Russians and I felt, you know, obliged. Except then one of the actual Russian profs laughed at its old-skool pedagogical technique, which I think might actually be better suited for someone like me.

Although then I noticed that it waits until lesson, like, 10 to give you verbs, and then it gives you the entire verb system at once, seemingly. So maybe it is a bit crazy.

Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch in a brand new, remaindered hardcover copy that I found on Alibris for $11.00, which price includes the shipping.

Selected Satires of Lucian as translated into English by Lionel Casson, hardcover, no dj, unmarked, for $8.95 at Powell's.

Rising Up and Rising Down: Some thoughts on violence, freedom and urgent means ny William T. Vollmann. This is a one volume abridgment of a seven volume work, as a remaindered trade paperback, for $7.95 at Powell's.

Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer by Andy Russell, used hardcover, $1.00. This is just some random book I ran across in a used book store, published in 1971, when wilderness wandering books were enjoying a small vogue.

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975, used paperback in fairly decent shape, $8.95.

The Writings of William James: A comprehensive edition, edited by John J. McDermott. New trade paperback, 850 pp., for $16.95. I just felt the need to have more Wm. James available on my shelf to read when I want a brilliant and practical writer to spend time with.

My copy of Chomsky's "At War With Asia" (ordered from Haymarket Books, no less) arrived with the parcel package ripped open. Does that mean I'm under surveillance?