Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

That's the middle one of the Shelby Footers, isn't it? I bought them for my dad a while ago. I remember thinking that he was maybe a bit pro-Southern... the stuff in the first book about how Jefferson Davis would only punish any of his slaves after they had been convicted by a jury of their peers struck me as being a bit O RLY. And in the volume you have he never even mentions Joshua Chamberlain at the battle of Gettysburg.

Sorry, that's my inner nerd coming out.

The Figes book is great crack. Maybe I should read it from cover to cover some time.

IR buy with birthday book tokens:

William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal, about the last Mughal Emperor and the Indian mutiny. I get the impression that this book will be a bit sadface. I've been meaning to read something by Dalrymple for a while, and am currently on an India kick (having just finished Mike Dash's Thug

Alan George's Jordan, a book about the country of Jordan. I am not *that* interested in Jordan, given that it is a boring country made up of leftover bits of other countries, but I found Alan George's book on Syria very interesting.

two textbooks!
the resettlement of british columbia: essays on colonialism and geographic change by cole harris
and a double issue of bc studies from 1997/98.

We had a Vancouverite poet read tonight, and I liked her work. N@talie Simps0n.

I seem to be on an east Asian religion bender lately. Yesterday I bought:

The Diamond Sutra, translated by Red Pine, with extensive commentaries, from Sanskrit and Chinese. Trade paperback in excellent condition. It was US$14.00 at Powell's, but I had $13.50 in trade and I used that.

The Book of Tea, Okakuro Kakuzo, used hardcover in a slipcase, a bit warped, but in decent shape. This is one of the older Tuttle editions that were printed in Japan. I owned this long ago and I don't exactly consider it indispensible, but it was nice to find a cheap (US$3.00) copy in OK condition.

i do not know that poet, but will recognise her name now if i see it!

i had a good day at value villiage:
-"night of the shooting star" by dan vipond. a 1970's conspiracy/thriller, set entirely in the canadian wilderness!
-"fellowship of the stars", a 1974 sci-fi anthology focused on "the friendship between humans and beings from other dimensions"
-"the tent peg", by aritha van herk. western canadian lit, about misfits ending up in the yukon.
-"survival: a thematic guide to canadian literature", by margaret atwood. a classic and a steal at $1.99
-"roadside empire: how the chains franchised america" by stan luxenburg. from 1985, all about the historical development of franchising in the US and the subsequent effect on cultural expectations.
-"act of faith: an illustrated history of the reform party" - a 1991 history of the western-based PC splinter that became canada's official opposition by 1997 and, in a vague sense, is currently in government.

I bought 2 Coetzees today, 'Waiting for the Barbarians' which is one of my favourites, and 'The Life and Times of Michael K' which I've not read before. Also 'Pale Fire' because I don't own a copy and was feeling rich.

Also 'Pale Fire' because I don't own a copy and was feeling rich.

Damn good excuse.

I prefer to think of it as a rationale.

A remainder-fest:

Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse, and Parasites Like Us (can't remember either author, but looked promising)
Mark Salzman: The Soloist, The Laughing Sutra
Robert Frost:Early Poems
The Letters of Sacco & Vanzetti
Somerset Maugham: Mrs. Craddock, The Razor's Edge
Hesse: Siddhartha (I'll probably regret this one, even at $3)
Hannah Arendt: Between Past and Future
DH Lawrence: England, My England and Other Stories
Iris Murdoch: The Good Apprentice, The Bell
Pynchon: Vineland
DuBois: The Souls of Black Folk
Conrad: `Twixt Land and Sea
Garland: A Son of the Middle Border

I visited my favorite cheapie bookstore today and came away with:

One Man's Meat, E.B. White, a collection of essays from the WWII years and just prior. A 1944 "new and enlarged' edition, hardcover with dust jacket, in good shape, $3.

Saints and Strangers, George F. Willision, in a 1945 hardcover edition, $1. This is a history of the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, starting from their days in England, up through exile in Holland and the voyage to North America. It seems to paint a pretty realistic picture of them.

The Golden Casket: Chinese Novellas of Two Millenia{, tr. into English by Christopher Levenson, from a German translation from the original Chinese. (Whew!) This is a used Penguin paperback in marginal condition and I don't think it ever sold very well, because I've never seen it before today. It seemed worth a tumble for 50 cents.

Beauty and Sadness - Kawabata Yasunari
The Stain in the Snow - Georges Simenon
Breakfast with the Ones you Love - Eliot Finushel
Alphabet of Thorn - Patricia McKillip
Varieties of Disturbances - Lydia Davis
Call Me By Your Name - Andre Aciman

Lonely (or is it Lovely?) Bones. Seems to be good.
Fast Food Nation (for less than 3 dollars!)
Cheap ass chicken recipe book (less than a dollar!)
Children Recipe book

I traded a bunch of books at Powell's yesterday and used up some of my credit to upgrade my paperback copy of The Dream Songs by John Berryman, to a used hardcover copy. It is a first printing (which I don't care about) in standard condition, and was heavily marked in pencil by the previous owner, so it was marked down to $15 from an overly optimistic $30. I have been busily erasing the pencil markings.

I also picked up a nice harcover edition of The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan and translated by Earl Richards. It was only $7.

Earlier this week I picked up a used copy of Ernie Pyle's posthumously published Home Country for $1. It's a just cobbled-together rehash of his journalism from before WWII, but I enjoy Pyle's style and observations, just as his millions of loyal newspaper readers did, so it's fine by me. He was another of those Indiana boys who mastered typing, like Vonnegut.

Bookmooched recently:

Jose Ortega y Gasset - History as a System
Christopher Lasch - Revolt of the Elites

Impulse bought Someday I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman and that Miranda July book, borrowing the new Arthur Philips and Consider the Lobster.

I do like that Book of the City of Ladies.

I think I am off to the Strand now.

I bought one of those Aberystwyth detective novels, in the hope that my unread book mountain will assume critical mass and blow up the world.

Oh, and I also bought Gore Vidal's memoir, Palimpsest, which was on sale at the Strand Annex.

Yesterday:

JR by William Gaddis, in a used in-new-condition Penguin paperback edition, $4.99. Constant favorable effusions by ILBers led me to buy this book.

Plutarch's Lives VII: Demosthenes and Cicero, Alexander and Caesar in a used Loeb classical library edition, $2.99. I cannot pass up any Loeb edition less than $5. I just can't.

Picked up Cronopios and Famas by Cortazar and Calvino's The Baron in the Trees on some old store credit I forgot I had yesterday.

Not a purchase, but my mommy was in town last week and left me a couple of her books:

Wild Latitudes by Barbara Else (a Kiwi)
The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens (which was actually her Christmas present from me last year, but which I am more than happy to get back)

my university gave me book tokens:

philip dick, 'four novels of the 1960s'
- notes (tho no introduction, hrmf) from jonathan lethem. i already own all the actual novels. but it's a library of america edition of philip k dick, hey.
daniil kharms, 'incidences'
dee goong an, 'the celebrated cases of judge dee'
- looks bizarre. an 18th-century historian's detective novel version of seventh-century chinese legal cases, englished in the 1940's by a dutchman.
david foster wallace, 'infinite jest' (10th anniversary 10 dollar ed)
- i don't know why i felt i needed a second copy.
tove jansson, 'moomin: the complete tove jansson comic strip'
- one wonders if they'll publish her brother's.

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?

Yes. We will be watching you until you post your reaction to reading it.

Those are decent prices, but not the stunning prices I've come to expect from you, Aimless.

Sometimes you just hafta pay for yer books.

It's a shame. A damn shame. A dirty, rotten, no-good, stinking, lowdown, goddamned, filthy, crying shame, if you ask me. But what can you do?

(he shrugs and, with elbows pulled in, displays his palms at waist level turned upwards, while wearing a chagrinned look)

Lately I've been reading The Exception by Christian Jungersen. I really like his no-nonsense writing style; it's the kind of thing that gets ridiculed, I think, for being not sufficiently "literary," but -- so long as it is his genuine style and not just an excuse for lazy writing -- the straightforward clarity in his prose is refreshing.

Also, he knows how to build drama and tension into a novel. Really, the book is about how even fundamentally good people can turn on each other -- and do such evil things -- in difficult situations. It's very good.

The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, used hard cover, $3. I bought this so I could be hectored by a generally humorless atheist into disbelieving what I never believed. No, actually, I am curious to see if he is creative enough to break a single clod of new ground in the ages-old arena of religious controversy. Probably not, but you never know. When I'm done I'll sell it or give it away.

The Goshawk, T.H. White, used paperback, 50 cents. Animal story.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972, Hunter S. Thompson, used paperback, 50 cents. I lived through this back when it happened the first time. I am a masochist to want to go back and recall it with any vividness. I should be kicked in the head.

I am told that the answer is "no" to the Dawkins, but maybe you'll find something.

I am reading a book from the 50s about the history of the book before the printing press. Its title is something similar to that. It is the sort of book from the 50s that likes to talk about today's "primitive" people, and how the "Oriental man" is "naturally suited" to singing. Still, some good stuff in there, and nice (if black-and-white) pictures.

For birthday/Christmas:

Nine Hundred Grandmothers by R.A. Lafferty (lover of the Russian Queen)
Nadja by André Breton
Platform by Michelle Houellebecq
The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian by Robin Lane-Fox
The Further Adventures of the Queen Mum by Harry Hill

I got just one book for Christmas: Justin Paton's <i>How to Look at a Painting</i>. It's fabulous so far, and very kiwi. Excellent for homesick old me.

Received for Christmas:
So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State - Forrest Church

Today I bought Atlas Shrugged and The Story of a Nobody by Checkhov.

I knew that looked wrong, Chekhov.

I think you'll find the second book is waaaay better than the first, 'I Know'.

merry xmas, me!

jaroslav hasek - the good soldier svejk
knut hamsun - hunger
irving sandler - from avant-garde to pluralism: an on-the-spot history
muriel spark - everyman library novella collection with the prime of miss jean brodie and the girls of slender means
witold gombrowicz - cosmos/pornografia two-fer
jg ballard - concrete island
richard burton - prague: a cultural history
norman davies - both volumes of god's playground: a history of poland and the heart of europe: the past in poland's present
out-of-print (i think) 4-volume "writers from the other europe" series that has: milan kundera - laughable loves, bruno schulz - sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass, tadeusz borowski - this way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen, and danilo kis - a tomb for boris davidovich
anne tyler - the accidental tourist
italo calvino - if on a winter's night, a traveler
joyce carol oates - because it is bitter and because it is my heart and you must remember this
joan didion - the year of magical thinking
celine - journey to the end of the night
the collected stories of eudora welty
stanislaw lem - solaris
walter m. miller, jr. - a canticle for leibowitz
hannah higgins - the fluxus experience

Are those books you received as gifts, or books you bought for yourself as gifts? Either way: excellent haul. Cosmos is faaaaabulous.

all gifts. and i apparently have two more on the way because amazon is sloooooow

I'm curious about that Fluxus book now. Let us know how it is.

My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk, used paperback in new condition, $1.99 at Goodwill. It's a Faber edition and when I got it home I found a sales slip from Paris, France. Looks quite interesting, but it will have to get in line like everyone else.

OK, Joe, you can marry me after all.

How many Richard Burtons are there?

My Name is Red is a great book. Deserving of just as much praise that "Snow" has gotten the past few years. It's a good book to sink into, in that it feels mysterious because of its setting and tone as much as because it is, at base, about a murder(er).

Today I bought a collection of Nabokov short stories for a buck at the Strand.

Music for Chameleons Truman Capote
Licks of Love John Updike
A Good Man is Hard to Find Flannery O'Connor
Nine Stories JD Salinger

And a couple other things I can't seem to remember for the life of me.

"jaroslav hasek - the good soldier svejk
knut hamsun - hunger

muriel spark - everyman library novella collection with the prime of miss jean brodie and the girls of slender means
witold gombrowicz - cosmos/pornografia two-fer

out-of-print (i think) 4-volume "writers from the other europe" series that has: , bruno schulz - sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass, , and danilo kis - a tomb for boris davidovich
italo calvino - if on a winter's night, a traveler

celine - journey to the end of the night
"

harlot,this is what i read from your list,and it's all masterpieces.
esp. the east european stuff.

"A Good Man is Hard to Find Flannery O'Connor "

one of the best short stories collection ever written.powerfull as hell.

Uncle Wiggily in Conneticut is one of my favourite stories of all time xxpost

Finally getting around to A Sport and A Pastime. Racy!

Thirding the O'Connor favourite-ing.
Now there's a horrible sentence.

Jack London - To Build a Fire and Other Stories

I'm embarking on some ambitious pre-law reading, using this list as a starting point:

http://www.amazon.com/Favorite-Pre-Law-School-Recommendations-Amazon/lm/3GJSC216GWISB

Ordered first three books:
- Death of Contract by Grant Gilmore
- To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization by William Alford
- A History of American Law by Lawrence Friedman

also Discipline & Punish by Foucault, which is also from that list buit probably less directly related.

in my amazon cart (which i never order EVERYTHING from but mostly use as to-buy reminder list, select a few at a time:

Matter - Iain M Banks; Hardcover
20th Century Selected Poems - Osip Mandelshtam; Paperback
My Last Sigh - Luis Bunuel; Paperback
Vertigo - W Sebald; Paperback
Selected Stories of Robert Walser - Susan Sontag; Paperback
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York - Luc Sante; Paperback
I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 - Victor Klemperer; Paperback
I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945 - Victor Klemperer; Paperback
Chess Story - Stefan Zweig; Paperback
Notes on the Cinematographer - Robert Bresson; Paperback
H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life - Michel Houellebecq; Paperback

ok i just ordered the banks, the bunuel and the mandelshtam... somewhat at random.

Fantagraphics had a 1/2 off spring cleaning warehouse sale and I got 3 Krazy Kat & Ignatz compilations, 5 Love & Rockets collections, Ellen Forney's I Love Led-Zeppelin and the graphic adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass.

Score!

I am trying not to buy books, sadly.

just bought Lush Life and the Savage Detectives, started the latter.

the ol' bookshelf is getting a little crowded, i think it's time to part with some things.

Always picking them up on the cheap. Only way to live.

Friederich Durrenmatt - The Execution of Justice
Germaine Greer - The Female Enuch
Durgnat on film
William Empson - Some Versions of Pastoral
Robert E.Howard - Conan The Usurper
Nietzche - The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner
Trotsky - The Young Lenin and A Life
Andrea Dworkin - Letters from a Warzone
William Vollmann - The Rainbow Stories
A copy of the I Ching
Three Negro Plays

A week ago I visited my favorite charity bookshop and picked up:

Poems of William Cullen Bryant, a used hardcover 'blue-cloth with gilt decorations, printed on superfine India paper' edition, issued in the Oxford Standard Authors series, for 50 cents. (I'm not a big fan of Bryant, but at that price I'll bite, especially since it takes almost no shelf space.)

A Homeric Dictionary, used paperback. It covers a lot of the specialized or archaic words Homer used, such as ones describing the ship's tackle. 50 cents.

Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow. Used paperback in good shape, 50 cents. Reading material for a camping/hiking trip.

Six volumes of Robert Browning's poetry. Parts of the Ohio edition are stupidly cheap (£5 a throw) at the moment & I've only ever had the eye-bleed double-column collected before now. Almost feels wrong to be reading him on a decent page.

Waiting on these from Bookmooch:

Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire
Michel Houllebecq - Elementary Particles

love finding older hardcover sci-fi books at the thrift store for some reason. though i don't know when i'll get around to reading them all. anyway, found really cool stuff last week (mostly book club editions, but what the hell, for a dollar i'm not picky) got some non-sci-fi stuff too:

element 79 - fred hoyle (this looks CRAZY)

freezing down - anders bodelsen (great cover! danish writer. never heard of him. don't think he was specifically a sci-fi writer)

74 annual world's best sci-fi (DAW)

no one belongs here more than you - miranda july (i know people hate her and love her and hate her? i don't know much about her. the dave eggars quote on the back where he says that lorrie moore fans will want to rub this book all over themselves almost kept me from buying it. eww!)

the werewolf principle - clifford d. simak

ursula k. leguin - the lathe of heaven (such a nice copy! dust jacket and everything)

one step from earth - harry harrison

chocky - john wyndham

a collection from 1959 called *science fiction showcase* with phil k. dick and richard matheson and lots of other biggies

the worlds of clifford d. simak

the ophiuchi hotline - john varley

brothers of earth - c.j. cherryh

in the ocean of night - gregory benford

the persistence of vision - john varley

all the traps of earth - clifford d. simak

the ice people - rene barjavel

nova - samuel r. delany

up the walls of the world - james tiptree jr.

the ring of charon - roger macbride allen

beasts - john crowley

also a larry brown book i've never read. but he ain't sci-fi he's downhome cookin'.

I just ordered The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, trade paperbound, from Amazon for $18.15.

the new one, right? i have the old collection with the larry rivers cover. the new one has lots more stuff in it, i think.

right, the new one.

There's a new collected? I heard about a new selected, but... hunh!

My mistake. The publication date for the Collected Poems in paperbound is Mar 31, 1995, Not "new" by any sensible measure. The Selected Poems has a pub date in 2007.

I enjoyed Lytle Shaw's book on Frank O'Hara, "The Poetics of Coterie", although the last few chapters (on his art writing) didn't do much for me.

Scott's got some good ones in that haul: I loved Crowley's 'Beasts', Wyndham's 'Chocky', Le Guin's 'Lathe of Heaven' and Varley's 'Opiuchi Hotline'.

i will start with those then!

(after i finish the larry brown book i'm reading. shouldn't take me long.)

I rarely post on this thread, but buy way way too much, so it would just be embarrassing.
Today's purchase was too cool not to share though:

http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c133/OysteinietsyO/04062008.jpg
(sorry about the poor picture, I only have a camera on my phone)

It claims to be unabridged, but there's no word on who translated the stories. Also, the introduction is simply signed "the editors".
The book is "a volcanic force of world significance" according to famed sexologist (and blurber) Havelock Ellis.

I want more classic with trashy pulp covers plz k thx. This one is part of the "Avon Red & Gold Edition" series. I gather Avon mostly did pulp novels and comics, and are currently a romance imprint for Harpercollins.

That is great.

Then and now...
http://bp0.blogger.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/SDZWZ3QdB9I/AAAAAAAAAqM/i_0g4i-Xiho/s1600/orwells.jpg

used book haul:

pocket-sized copy of SPEAK MEMORY by Vlad Nabokov w/pictures!

MAFIA USA early 70s anthology of articles about the mob, edited by Nicholas Gage

Friederich Durrenmatt - The Novels (um, more novella size)
AJP Taylor - The Origins of the Second World War
Christopher Hill - The Century of Revolution 1603-1714
Michel Butor - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape
Robert Pinget - Mahu or The Material
Kathy Acker - Young Lust (its a collection of three novellas)
Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media

Son of a bitch. My picture vanished. I'll try again... then and now...
http://bp0.blogger.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/SDZWZ3QdB9I/AAAAAAAAAqM/i_0g4i-Xiho/s1600/orwells.jpg

Fuck, now it vanished again... I meant this.
http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2008/05/1984-then-now.html

hemingway - in our time
faulkner - three famous short novels
katherine anne porter - collected short stories
dagoberto gilb - 10 woodcuts of women
toni morrison - sula
mccarthy - cities on the plain

Ford Madox Ford - first 2 of Parades end
Don Marquis - Archy and Mehitabel (6 bucks for awesome 30's edition!!!)

Went to Sydney, had a book binge:

Collis: The Worm Forgives the Plough
Hanley: The Furys
Nell Dunn: Up the Junction (disappointing)
Saroyan: The Amazing Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (also disappointing)
Sartre: Huis Clos & Other Plays
Martin Boyd: Outbreak of Love
Maugham: Christmas Holiday
Highsmith: Two Faces of January
HE Bates: The Something-or-other Girl (can't remember)
SY Agnon (sp?): Two Tales
Violet Trefusis: Hunt the Slipper
Helen Garner: Honour & Other People's Children
Judy Johnson: Jack (enjoyable "verse" novel--really just a novella with big margins and erratic line-breaks, if we're being honest)

plus other stuff I now forget...

I finally found time to take a jaunt to my fave thrift shops and came away with some cheap used books for summer reading material:

Fermat's Enigma, Simon Singh, paperback for $4. A math geek solves Fermat's Last Theorem and the math geek world is agog.

Krakatoa, Simon Winchester, paperback for $4. A spectacular one-day event becomes the excuse for a 400 pp book.

Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel, paperback for 50 cents. The gripping human story that takes you behind the headlines!

Egil's Saga, as a Penguin paperback for $2. I already have this in a larger compendium of Icelandic sagas, but this is a small format, lightweight book I can take on a backcountry hike.

The Royal Game and Other Stories, Stephan Zweig, paperack for 50 cents.

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, Robert Coram, paperback for $1. I already mentioned this one on the 'what are you reading in summer 2008' thread.

I liked 'Galileo's Daughter' well enough as I recall.

I read Longitude by the same author, last summer. Based on that, I can see that she understands how to write a clear historic narrative that is both popular and not overly shallow or sentimentalized. She's no Barbara Tuchman, in that she seems more a biographer than a historian, but I expect I'll enjoy it well enough also.

I liked Longitude a LOT but Galileo's Daughter was a little dull. The Planets, her latest, is better, informative rambling and eccentric riffs on the solor system. she's got her own style.

'The Royal Game' is ace, and 'Egil's Saga' is good neck-hewing, mighty-thewed drama, too.

today was the last day of the big four day west tisbury book sale. first day, full price. 2nd day, half price. 3rd day, half of that. 4th day, FREE. an entire school gymnasium filled with books. man, i tell you, if i owned a used book store on cape cod, i would be down here with a u-haul truck on free day. people were bringing in dollies and carts and you name it. anyway, i'm getting pickier in my old age, but i still found good stuff to take home. this was the first year that i didn't go early on the first day all breathless like i used to. i went yesterday with the kids and let them grab as many books as they could fit into shopping bags and i perused the cheap videos and got some of them.

here's what i bagged today for FREE!!!!!!:

curtis white - the middle mind (looks like it's right up my cranky alley.)

sylvia townsend warner - selected stories

alfred kazin - starting out in the thirties (always wanted to read this. still need a copy of a walker in the city.)

angela carter - shaking a leg - collected writing (i always pick up angela carter paperbacks and someday i will read them! i think i just like the idea of angela carter.)

hrold brodkey - the world is the home of love & death - stories (i was a big fan of stories in an almost classical mode. his stories can kinda tire you out though. the intensity and feverishness never really lets up.)

angela carter - burning your boats - collected short stories

alice munro - the progress of love (nice 1st ed. hardcover)

theodore sturgeon - god body

john cheever - the stories (super-clean hardcover copy of the massive 1978 collection.)

women of wonder - the contemporary years - science fiction by women from the 1970's to the 1990's (very cool collection! and now i want the previous 40's to 70's volume.)

klaus kinski - kinski uncut

marianne wiggins - bet they'll miss us when we're gone - stories

harlan ellison - an edge in my voice (huge collection of his newspaper/magazine column writing. WAY more harlan ranting than ANYONE would ever need, but i couldn't resist it. good for dipping into the mind of a lunatic.)

mavis gallant - in transit - stories

alfred kazin - an american procession (american writers 1830-1930)

john le carre - a perfect spy (i've never read any le carre. philip roth calls this book "the best english novel since the war" on the back cover. so, i figured it was a good place to start.)

jincy willett - jenny & the jaws of life - stories (reissue of the 80's collection with a forward by david sedaris who calls it "the funniest collection of stories i've ever read." so, there you go.)

stella gibbons - cold comfort farm (julie burchill calls it "very probably the funniest book ever written." so, there you go. love the movie. never read the book. looking forward to it. was it m.coleman who nominated it on the funny book thread?)

gary soto - buried onions

elizabeth bowen - the last september

dorothy allison - cavedweller

brian moore - the great victorian collection

ann beattie - perfect recall - stories

jonathan cott - conversations with glenn gould

edmund wilson - axel's castle (i've read it, but i couldn't remember if i owned a copy.)

richard bausch - the fireman's wife - stories

elizabeth hardwick - a view of my own - essays

e.b. white - writings from the new yorker 1925-1976

claire messud - the emperor's children (i remember hearing this was good. it's in large print though! have you ever read a book in large print? i never have. i guess you get used to it.)

peter devries - let me count the ways (started reading this a month ago and i got a hundred pages in and there were 20 pages missing from the book! a printing error. so, it just so happens that the only devries book at this sale happened to be the same book WITH the missing pages. now i can finish it.)

bill hicks - love all the people - letters, lyrics, routines

richard yates - young hearts crying

kate atkinson - behind the scenes at the museum

paula fox - desperate characters (i've read it, but i'd like to read it again.)

wow!

recently purchased from dudes selling books in front of library (where i do about 95% of my book shopping):

balzac - pere goriot
zola - therese rayquin
wharton - summer
gide - the counterfeiters

I just ordered "The Conquest of the Incas" by John Hemming.

Holy fuck, Scott, I can't believe you got those free. Some amazing stuff in there--the Jincy Willett is one of the best books of short stories I've ever read.

it's a circle game. it's a library sale and on the last day all the other libraries on the island get first dibs and they cart off loads of books for THEIR sales, and the people like me, dragging home all these books, end up giving them to the thrift store (well, i don't that much, but most people do) or donating them later for next year's sale!

i should actually get some stuff together for the thrift store. stuff i won't read again or will never read.

this woman i work with brought two big boxes of books in to work to make room for all the books she knew she would end up getting at the sale. she just put them out for people to take. i ended up taking home, like, 20 of her books a couple of weeks ago!

(it's a bookish place)

people are still sad about the bunch of grapes bookstore here burning up. people loved it. i never buy new books, so my feelings aren't as strong. i'm just glad nobody was hurt. it was a handsome book store though. if i weren't so cash-deprived i'm sure i would have bought stuff there.

you can watch it burn if you happen to be a bibliofirebug:

http://vineyard.plumtv.com/videos/main_street_fire_vineyard_haven

http://www.mvgazette.com/images/photocache/gallery_photo/2284.jpg

http://www.mvgazette.com/images/photocache/gallery_photo/2282.jpg

I went to Value Village and got 2 Poirot books, an old mm ppbck of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, and Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay. Awesome.

Those photos are sad.

yeah. they are.

I found the used bookstore near campus that has the nice scholarly titles.

R.L. Ullman, Ancient Writing and its Influence
Marie de France, Fables
Mitchen and Robinson, A Guide To Old English
various, Medieval Literary Criticism
George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

Swamp Thing Vol 2: Love and Death, Alan Moore/Stephen Bissette

first edition hardcovers of raymond carver's cathedral, where i'm calling from and what we talk about when we talk about love

two alice munro collections

descent of man by t.c. boyle

ultramarine by raymond carver

got that new george pelecanos and junot diaz's 'drown' through my hookup

If anyone likes the Sopranos, go buy "Close" by Martina Cole. I got it as a gift and it's mesmerizing.

Edward Dahlberg - Because I Was Flesh
Mark Crispin Miller - Boxed In: The Culture of TV
Basil Bunting - On Poetry
Harry Mathews & Alastair Brotchie - Oulipo Compendium
Egil Skallagrimsson's Saga
Gilgamesh & Atrahasis (single volume)

I've been book-shopping at my usual cheap bookstores. It's time to 'fess up.

The Spoils of Poynton, Henry James, in a used Penguin Modern Classics paperback, for 50 cents.

On the Shortness of Life, Seneca, in a used Penguin 'Great Ideas' paperback (prob. just one of his many published letters) for 50 cents.

Short Stories: volume 1; A Shahib's War and Other Stories, Rudyard Kipling, in a Penguin Modern Classics used paperback, for $1.99.

The Collosus of Maroussi, Henry Miller, a Penguin used paperback for $1.99. Purchased more for the Greek content than for the Henry Miller authorship.

What is Poetry, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, good condition used paperback for 50 cents. Might be a dud. Too cheap to refuse.

"Edward Dahlberg - Because I Was Flesh"

Yay!! My Hero!

er, dahlberg is. but you too!

becoming a writer - dorothea brande
empire falls - richard russo
mind of clover: zen buddhist ethics - robert aitken

Yay!! My Hero!
Woohoo!

er, dahlberg is.
Oh...

but you too!
Woohoo!

Bought a used 5-volume collection of Norse sagas.
Shame I bought Egil's saga just a couple of days ago, as this contains the same translation.
Also got Carmen Laforet's "Nada".

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.

Wow!

Diarmaid MacCulloch - The Reformation: A History
Kathy Acker - Blood and Guts in High School (Plus Two)
Jacobus de Voragine - Legenda Aurea (selections in Norwegian translation)

The Colours of My Life - Malcolm Allison. Read before after borrowing it from a friend, but decided that it was definitely worth having a copy of my own.

Teehee, bought Twilight. But also Stendhal's Red 'n' Black book, No Country for Old Men, Gibson's latest Spook County (?), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

I had a feeling I already bought it. Yep, Stendhal will be returned for another book. Roffle.

Just Christmas presents

For one brother - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - PKD, Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury, We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
For girlfriend - Rings of Saturn - WG Sebald (even though I have big problems with this book, I think she'll like it)
For mum's husband - the first three Flashman books and The Colours of My Life, because he's a Palace fan and because it's great (see above).
For other brother - hmmm, still not sure. Was thinking of Buchan's Hannay stuff, but I got that for my mum last year - maybe Sherlock Holmes, or maybe, yes, wait! Father Brown Stories. Hmmm. Lots of standing around in bookshops to do tomorrow.

not purchased by me, but purchased FOR me for my birthday:

'drop city' - signed first edition by t.c. boyle
'call if you need me' - raymond carver, first edition
'horsebucket' - carol es (1/50 edition, signed, manually typed text accompanying sketches)
'proofs' - james crombie (kickshaw press), entirely letterpressed/screenprinted in way cool slipcase covered in this bizarre 'pebble' paper
slipcased library of america editions of willa cather's work
'the upset' - collection/analysis of contemporary lowbrow fine art
'counterpoint' - robert and shana parkeharrison (photography book)

apparently these are the 'small' presents and the 'big' book present is coming in january - it's on order but not ready yet.

(also, this rubyredd, i've just got a new user name)

Purchased today at Half-Price w/glorious VISA gift card:

The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction
Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up -- Norman Fischer
Days of Obligation: Arguments with my Mexican Father -- Richard Rodriguez
Girl in Landscape -- J Lethem
Wall of the Sky, Wall of the Eye -- J Lethem

just bought "the man with the axe," which is a book about alfred jarry, illustrated by bill griffith. i was stoked to find it in hardcover, since i wasn't aware one ever existed.

got a bunch of books from fantagraphics too- most excited about jimbo in purgatory and jimbo's inferno by gary panter.

i have stopped buying books and started reading them, huzzah

i try to be ambidexterous that way.

I made my first bookstore run since mid-November. I bought:

Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin, used trade paperback in standard shape, at my favorite thrift shop for $3. The cashier informed me this book is very fashionable now, as it has been linked to the magical name of Obama. I expect good things from it.

The Prelude: Version of 1805, William Wordsworth, in an Oxford Standard Authors blue-cloth hardbound edition, reprint of 1949, with a dust cover (somewhat tatty), and some light pencil underlining for $10. I got this at Powell's Books, where browsing the shelves makes for as pleasant a way to spend an aimless winter's afternoon as I am ever likely to find.

A really nice, compact paperback edition of Don Quixote
Victor Serge - Birth of our Power
Yasunuro Kawabata - Beauty and Sadness

Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago', complete set. Which I may eventually get around to reading!

Anne Applebaum's 'Gulag'.

Douglas Coupland, 'Generation X'.

Granta 103 - The Rise of the British Jihad.

a coworker just bought me the 20th anniversary, 1968, edition of 'other voices, other rooms' by truman capote, as an engagement present. pretty awesome gift, considering i've had my eye on it for awhile now.

i am still waiting for the january-surprise book gift mentioned upthread.

yeah me too.

I went to my local super-cheap charity bookshop today and books kept jumping into my hand.

Treasury of American Folklore: Stories, Ballads and Traditions of the People, ed. B.A. Botkin, copyright 1944 hardcover, 918 pp. for $3. The editor was in charge of the Folk Song Archive, Library of Congress. A quick browse shows this to be a pretty good mirror of USA folkways, up to and including racism and egg-sucking dogs.

Morte D'Urban, J.F. Powers, trade paper NYRB Classics, $1. Looked interesting. Blurbs very persuasive.

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions), Kurt Vonnegut, mass paperback, 50 cents. Read this long ago and have forgotten every words of it. Time to re-read it.

Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten, mass paperback, 50 cents. Not a favorite author, but she has few, if any, peers, so worth having a selection.

The Greek New Testament, Matthew, Mark, God, et. al., in a vinyl cover, for $1. I must admit I bought this mainly to resell at Powell's for more than I paid for it.

A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament, Dana & Mantley, hardcover, for $1. Purchased for the same reason as above.

For xmas, all used:

Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds
Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thompson

And earlier tonight, from Half Price Books, for 67 cents,
Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm

i kind of wish i knew people who gave me used books for christmas.

The Reynolds is well-written, and told me all I want to know about that world.

what, the 90s?

Yeah I enjoyed it and it sent me in the right direction on the things I was curious about, though I kinda lost interest 2/3rds of the way through.

John Dos Passos, The U.S.A. trilogy (in Paperback)
Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives (reading this one right now)
Warren Beck, Joyce's Dubliners: Substance, Vision, Art (just came in the mail)
Will Chirstopher Baer, Kiss Me Judas (hasn't arrived yet)
Dave Sim, Cerebus (mentioned this in ILC; has not arrived yet either)

i kind of wish i knew people who gave me used books for christmas.

So do I. Bought 'em with cash.

We should be those people! Lets start doing it. So cheap, too.

splurged on a bunch of stuff:

White Teeth Zadie Smith
Corregidora Gayl Jones
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere ZZ Packer
A Visitation of Spirits Randall Kenan
Revolutionary Road Richard Yates
Joe Turner's Come And Gone August Wilson
Assassination of the Black Male Image Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Tree of Smoke Denis Johnson

I got The Plague from a charity shop today (which I've read before, but I also got The Fall, which I haven't) and then had a bit of an awwwww fuck when I opened it and saw that someone had annotations in it. But then they gave up on the third page. Phew.

Taking good advantage of offers and a £5 off voucher I also got The Corrections, Fathers and Sons, Women in Love, Revolutionary Road and White Noise from Borders for £21, which isn't too bad.

"A Visitation of Spirits" is one of my favorite books of all time. I re-read the last page on a weekly basis. So good.

I just picked up Cowley's "Exile's Return".

tonight:

Pride & Prejudice
Infinite Jest
Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin
William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire

i found a clearance table in an academic branch of waterstones.

david jenemann, adorno in america
murat aydemir, images of bliss: ejaculation, masculinity, meaning

i found this box of books outside by the dumpster, all in really good condition. probably the most interesting books were some film books from hungary from the early '70s, a series called "szemtol szemben". small paperbacks, one book each on fellini, antonioni, welles, wajda, and bergman. can't read a damn word of them but still...

lol there was a huge dumpster outside the Albion College Library full of books, and one night before it rained I climbed in and got a bunch of weird/cool textbooks abt schizophrenia, and an interesting book that has made my reading list called "The Inner World of Mental Illness" edited by Bert Kaplan...

also:

lately I've bought
Xaime Hernandez, The Girl from HOPPERs (death of Speedy Ortiz and whatnot)
Xaime Hernandez, Perla La Loca (Wigwam Bam, bang on some spam)
Collected Poetry of Wallace Stevens
Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2
Frank Kermode, Shakespeare's Language (found this in Brighton abt 5 yrs ago & liked it a lot)

i'm about to bid on the big palomar and locas collections by the los bros on ebay in about 4 minutes. we'll see if i win them. i bought deitch's pictorama yesterday - i'm pretty excited to read it.

so ytth were u successful?

nope, he got outbid. probably a good thing, since the antiquarian book fair is coming up soon.

just as well. Locas was my intro to L&R but the hardcover was unwieldly, and "Flies on the Ceiling" wasn't included...he should really look for the new TPBs on Amaz0n...The Girl from HOPPERS (which DOES have "Flies") cost me only $7...and that was with S&H!!!

Also I don't know if I've mentioned anything yet, but it deserves to be said, too many times...ab3b00ks.c0m is the abs0lut3 sh1t!

i don't really use abe that much, but it's good place to check if a price on another site is realistic, e.g. some idiot on ebay trying to sell a copy of carver's 'what we talk about when we talk about love' (first ed.) for $750... go to abe and you can find copies in the same or better condition for MUCH cheaper.

Today I went to Powell's Books and to Goodwill, where I purchased:

The Manyoshu, ed. Donald Keene, used hardcover pub. in 1965 by Columbia U. Press, for $8.95. This is a collection of 1000 poems extracted from a Japanese poetry anthology from circa 780 A.D. that contained about 4500 poems.

The poems are translated into English, along with transliterations into Romanji (a more-or-less phonetic representation of the Japanese using the latin alphabet). It's in nice shape, with a dust cover that's a bit worn along the edges. I already owned a paperback copy of this, but it is on its last legs. For $9, this was a steal!

Poems, Christina Rossetti, a selection in a small used hardcover, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series, for $1.99. I didn't need her Collected Poems. A small selection meets the need quite nicely.

The Voyages of Captain Cook, ed. Christopher Lloyd, used hardcover, 375 pp., for $2.99. Selections from Cook's journals. He wrote quite readable prose and the subject matter is pretty fascinating, too. (From what I can gather, Mr. Cook's first name must have been Captain, since no one uses any other.)

I picked up a used paperback copy of The Road by Cormac McCarthy for $2 a couple of days ago. It's in the queue now, but may take a while to rise to the top.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (B&N)
Richard Peck, Don't Look and It Won't Hurt (abebooks)
Honore de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low (abebooks)

Jack Vance, Tales of the Dying Earth
Octavia Butler, Dawn (omg this was the best SF novel I have read since Left Hand of Darkness!)
Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Shore
GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
Michael Chabon, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Brian Stableford, The Walking Shadow

Not quite my most recent purchase, but I picked up an essay collection by Arne Melberg at a sale, and, well, it tempted me to start an ilb cover-connections thread:
http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c133/OysteinietsyO/cc-melbergoggass.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0140442243.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1847491049.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0199553890.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

I go on (and on) about these duplications here.

Not quite the same thing, but Atkinson Grimshaw is the go to man for Victorian Ghost stories and collections of 'em.

My neighbourhood finally got a used book store this weekend - went to the Grand Opening and held myself back enough to only buy 2: Wodehouse, How Right You Are, Jeeves and Jim Thompson's After Dark, My Sweet.

Imagine the plot of those two books combined--'After Dark, Jeeves': Bertie Wooster gets mixed up with a femme fatale, and only Jeeves can make the hit that saves him...

I bought a book on saturday in which this Tony Parker guy interview loads of lighthouse keepers. The book is a reprint, originally published in the 1960s or something. I am hoping for lots of "I hates the sea, and everything in her" action.

Imagine the plot of those two books combined--'After Dark, Jeeves': Bertie Wooster gets mixed up with a femme fatale, and only Jeeves can make the hit that saves him...

― James Morrison, Sunday, 5 April 2009 23:26 (Yesterday)

I would buy this.

Gene Wolfe, An Evil Guest.

Nathalie Sarraute - Do you hear them?
Marguerite Duras - The Ravshing of Lol Stein
Proust - The Way By Swann's (Lydia Davis Translation)
Henry Green - Party Going
Elfiede Jelinek - The Piano Teacher
Robert Musil - The Man Without Qualities (3 vol Picador ed)
Klaus Kinski's autobiog.

A couple of others I'm sure I've forgotten...

today my husband won me a SIGNED copy of raymond carver's 'where i'm calling from' on ebay - it's a hardcover first, not too common to find signed (lots of franklin library editions, though) - for a mere $70!!!! i never ever thought i would own a signed copy of one his books, a book that he actually signed and isn't just a bookplate or bound-in signed page.

i'm still in shock- today my wife bought me Heat Wave by charles bukowski... i never thought i'd own it, although i am a little concerned about where she found the money to afford it.

lol you

i think that's a hint

The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis, used hard cover, no dust jacket, via Alibris for $18. Not as talented as Lorca, but he's greek, not spanish, so that the light is very different where he stands.

Got a used copy of the Complete Collected Essays by V.S. Pritchett in the mail yesterday. Goddamn is it ever big and heavy -- I think I need to get myself a reading desk to go along with it.

Bought Oliver VII by Antal Szerb (loved Journey by Moonlight, found Pendragon Legend shrill and tiresome), and The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, after recommendations everywhere.

Not sure whether you'll like Oliver VII then--it's more like Pendragon than Journey. But then I liked all three, so it's hard to say. Either way, you can't go wrong with Penelope. I wish she wasn't dead.

I.A. Richards - The Principles of Literary Criticism. First heard his name in connection with Empson, the book looks pretty exciting, lots of little bits on all manner of things - feels like a great crazy book on everything. The fact that it was first published in the 20s adds to that feeling.

Beckett - Proust

Jim Thompson - A Swell Looking Babe

a good couple of days, getting Philip Roth's 'Exit Ghost', George Saunders' 'The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil' (combined with 'In Persuasion Nation'), Sacher-Masoch's 'Venus in Furs', Graham Greene's 'The Heart of the Matter', Zadie Smith's 'On Beauty', and Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland', for an average of £1.10 each - half of them brand new, half of them nice condition second hand. I've been really terrible with overbuying books this year, especially since I'm too immersed in the academic stuff to do much leisure reading and so they just pile up (I think I'm now about 150% over the capacity of my bookcase), so now it's time for another few weeks abstinence. Um, after the Oxfam book fayre on Friday, that is.

Seems that my copy of Netherland has the hardback cover, but is a paperback. Sup with that.

The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner, used hardcover w/ dustjacket intact, from a somewhat early printing from U. of California Press, for $9.

It's one of the few lit crit books I've read more than once. It is more like a historic survey with critical commentary, than hardcore lit crit, but it throws a huge amount of light onto Pound's more obscure cultural references, so you can make a bit more sense out of both the era and The Cantos.

i'm getting £90 of amazon vouchers tomorrow (from some crap old incentive at an old job I got these voucher things from about a year ago but completely forgot about until last week) and I've already decided what I'm getting and it is:

The Disco Files 1973-1978: New York's Underground, Week by Week - Vince Aletti

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage classics) - Italo Calvino

The Great Gatsby (Penguin Popular Classics) - F Scott Fitzgerald

A Sentimental Education: The story of a Young Man (Oxford World's Classics) - Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics) - Gustave Flaubert

The First Man (Penguin Modern Classics) - Albert Camus (this is the only Camus I haven't yet read)

The Rebel (Penguin Modern Classics) - Albert Camus

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol - Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

Moby Dick (Wordsworth Classics) - Herman Melville

Also buying a guitar hero guitar but that's not really relevant.

bought used:
Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein's Nephew
Andre Breton, Nadja
Muriel Sparks, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (entirely due to ILX recommendations)
Jose Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night
Ben Marcus, Notable American Women

bought new:
Kierkegaard, Everyman's Library hardcover thingy with Fear and Trembling and The Book on Adler (kind of in a Kierkegaard mood lately, I dunno why)
John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner

God, I read that several times as a student, liking Pound and Lewis as I did (still like Lewis, and indeed bits of Pound in certain moods to be fair). Sticks in my froat now. I'm sure there was a tipping point where I hurled one of his books across the room and shouted 'KENNER YOU TWAT!' but now can't remember what prompted it. Possibly a hangover.

just arrived:

A Sea Ringed With Visions, Oskar Kokoshcka (sic?)

I read the first page of The Pound Era several times as a student. I was definitely familiar with that first page.

Wow--languid's got some great books on the way! Not sure you'd want a Wordsworth version of Moby Dick, though. The last couple of books I bought from them had some serious OCR-induced typos. Wait until later in the year and Penguin's putting out a version with a cover by Tony Millionaire:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143105957.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Friday morning I got some in the mail (paperbackswap.com):

Created from Animals, by James Rachels
Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said
No Logo, Naomi Klein
and Marx's Concept of Man, Erich Fromm

then, around 3, I head to Half Price Books and get:

Consciousness Explained, Dan Dennett
Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O'Connor
The Age of Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm (Age of Capital is all I need to complete the series!!)
and The Second Sex, Simon de Beauvoir (better-looking and smaller copy than my old one)

xpost penguin's series of covers by cartoonists kicks so much ass. the chris ware candide is my favorite.

serious OCR-induced typos

ah, so that's where those weird typos come from.

I already bought myself a new copy of Moby Dick because I didn't like the last one, consarnit. Upgrading from an old Penguin Popular Classics edition with hilariously crammed text and a dull cover to this:

http://a4.vox.com/6a00fad69d53b0000500fad6a17bfc0005-500pi

which I like fine, but that new one is tempting.

thanks for the heads-up about the Moby Dick edition, James.

'There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night' - Cao Naiqian

*googles* that sounds good Michael, let us know...

Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein's Nephew

Same here, Correction is one of the best half a dozen or so bks I've read this year

It's excellent; very poetic.

Ha, just bought this: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0140620621.jpg

i bought a couple dozen very cheap copies of '50s and '60s penguin paperbacks based entirely on their covers. lots of self-help, mystery, sci-fi stuff.

and i just picked up a copy of 'a deepness in the sky' by vernor vinge.

i know the vinge book is a prequel to 'a fire upon the deep', but i don't have that...does it matter which one i read first?

i bet the moby-dick penguin classics has jettisoned the insane 300-page critical commentary by harold beaver

i have way too many penguins acquired 'based entirely on their covers', though my last girlfriend bought most of them for me

i have had bernhard's 'correction' lying around for ages

along with max frisch's 'i'm not stiller' which for some reason i associate with it. i mention this because i saw an old orange penguin paperback of it this weekend

i have just bought a job lot of muriel sparkses on ebay

along with max frisch's 'i'm not stiller' which for some reason i associate with [Bernhard's 'Correction'].
Perhaps because they're both on Donald Barthelme's Syllabus ?

Just got word that my copy of the complete Cosmicomics has been shipped, hooray. It's been a good while since I read anything new by Calvino. Oddly few of his works have been translated to Norwegian -- I did pick up a Danish paperback of Cosmicomics last year, but I haven't actually read it.

i know the vinge book is a prequel to 'a fire upon the deep', but i don't have that...does it matter which one i read first?
Pretty sure it doesn't matter much, though I never finished 'A Deepness' (and, to be honest, I wasn't terribly keen on 'A Fire...' either.)

Frisch and Bernhard are v different. Can't quite see why Bernhard or Celine are on that Barthelme list (if you're gonna make the assumption that the list wasn't compiled on a whim).

Recently:

Celine - Journey to the End of the Night. Read it before but it was a library copy
Robert Graves - Greek Myths vol. 2
Bohumil Hrabal - I Served the King of England

Looking for 2nd hand copies of Biely's Petersburg and Zeno's Conscience. Also vols 2 and 3 of Proust (the multi-translator ed). Good luck to me etc I know :-(

I love Hrabal!

just got a copy of faulkner's "light in august" on the street for a buck

been having my mind blown reading "billy bathgate" and wanting to be a 1930s bronx hoodlum.

Michael - In case you haven't seen, see here for a piece on Hrabal, it is what got me to look out for him.

Proust - Remembrance of things Past (trans. Scott Moncrieff) vols 3-10: Within a Budding Grove (3-4), Guermantes Way (5-6), Cities of the Plain (7-8) and The Captive (9-10)

Its the vols published in the 40s by Chatto & Windus, looks unread...

Only the last two vols left and have the Lydia davis trans of Way by Swann's.

I'm ready to go :-)

The nice thing about shopping at charity bookshops is the pure randomness of what is there. I just combed the shelves at Goodwill and came home with these:

We, Eugene Zamiatin, used paperback published by Dutton, $2. Looks like one to take hiking, maybe.

The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World: Poems 1953 - 1964, Galway Kinnell, used paperback published by Houghton Mifflin. New condition, $4.

Gilgamesh: A New Rendering into English Verse, David Ferry. Used paperback in good condition, $3. I had seen this once before for cheap, but I passed it by and then had regrets. Not this time.

Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947 - 1985, Gary Snyder, used hardcover published by North Point Press, good condition, $4.

'We' is great stuff.

The randomness of charity bookshops is fantastic. I love/hate how very occasionally I'll find one that's so good that I end up buying a dozen books at once.

Once you break the barrier of looking at the shelves thinking 'what do I actually want' you are done for. The moment you think 'Oooh, I've heard of that/that looks rather neat' it's time to go fetch the shopping trolley.

Seconds for We here, as well, very good.

Patricia Highsmith - Carol (her first novel, published under a pseudonym)
Nathalie Sarraute - The Planetarium
Jim Thompson - Nothing more than Murder

just got some rilke and the new denis johnson. fuckin love that dude.

which rilke? i've been meaning to post some of the terrible, terrible translation of the duino elegies i picked up a while ago on here

"An Angel, alone, is misted in dread." Uh-huh.

The Denis Johnson ('Nobody Move') is almost pure (uneasy) fun.

JG Ballard The Millenium People
JG Ballard The Drowned World
George Pelecanos The Turnaround
Simon Reynolds Energy Flash

All £2 in Fopp.

thomp, is it the 2 Buddhist women translating Rilke? I can't think of their names but they've put out several different volumes recently. I have a couple of them, and I while I don't speak a word of German it was obvious even to me that they were taking huge liberties with the original lines.

no it is this:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3289/3129371925_2374aabce0.jpg?v=0

1957.

<a href=http://bostonreview.net/BR25.3/krauss.html>;this article</a> is interesting; i might try and get hold of the gass book.

Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans
Mark Folse, Carry Me Home: A Journey Back to New Orleans
Earl J. Higgins, The Joy of Y'at Catholicism
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

VII by Mark E Smith

which is to say the new, improved and updated Mark E Smith lyrics book.

It's fantastic - a collage of images, letters, utilities bills, paintings and newspaper snippets, Smith's scrawlings and typings, advice and playlets.

i got three milan kundera novels i haven't read yet. $1/apiece. immortality, the joke, and the book of laughter & forgetting.

Jaka's Story by Dave Sim
The Wild Ass's Skin by Honore de Balzac

my kids called me from a bookstore yesterday asking if there was a book i'd like to read. i said yup, and it's called infinite jest. 24 hrs later, they gave it to me giftwrapped, for father's day.

Got round to spending some book vouchers my mum gave me for Christmas -
library love and abebooks were somehow preventing me before.

The Confusions of Young Törless - Robert Musil
Chaos and Night - Henry de Monterhlant (loved The Bachelors, and great title, Henry!)
John Betjeman on Churches - Jonathan Glancey (John Betjeman's essay at the
beginning of English Parish Churches is brilliant, and well,
I'm not really sure why I've got this now, but perhaps something to do with cycling past some lovely tenth century churches in Kent at the weekend. I'm not actually a believer, but there's something curiously soothing in their brickwork and their spires seen across fields.

Still got more to spend and am thinking of getting Ooga-Booga by Friederick Siedel, but they didn't have it in the shop. Was served by an exceptionally surly girl, in fact I'm having one of those days where I appear to have the word 'RAPIST' tattooed on my forehead.

Wicked - this is surprisingly dark and more entertaining than I was expecting

The Olivetti Chronicles - John Peel (a collection of articles he wrote for various newspapers and magazines over a 30 year period)

Visit to a charity shop today while I was waiting for my train yielded the following:
Rites of Passage by William Golding
Super Cannes by JG Ballard
How to be a Bad Birdwatcher by Simon Barnes
The Black Album by Hanif Kureshi

Final Del Juego by Julio Cortázar.

Bought a bunch of Indian classics from a cheap Indian online bookshop as a bit of a trial (Oxford Bookstore they're called, and the prices are VERY low, but weirdly you can only get their site to work if you run Netscape, rather than Mozilla or IE).

First-edition hardcovers of Barthelme's The Dead Father and City Life for 8 bucks each. The same store wanted 30 for The Dead Father last time I was in there, so that was cool.

my husband bought me a copy of raymond carver's first ever mass-produced book - a semi-chapbook limited to a 1000 copies.

Did some bookshop cruising today - including Powell's:

On the Loose, Jerry & Renny Russell, used hardcover in a slipcase, $2. A sentimental purchase harking back to my high school period. It's a calligraphed book of quotations and photos put together by a couple of college kids circa 1965 and published by Sierra Club - about the wonders of poking around the CA wilderness and being young and reckless. David Brower loved it, of course.

The Jewish War, Josephus, as a used Penguin paperback, $3.

Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach, tr. A.T. Hatto, as a used Penguin paperback, $7.95. I greatly enjoyed Hatto's translation of Tristan and may like this one equally well.

Poems from the Greek Anthology, tr. Forrest Reid, in a 1944 hard cover edition printed by Faber & Faber, $5.95. These versions are a bit bald, but at least they are not all tarted up with contemporary slang and goofy typographical conventions.

Bought a bunch of Indian classics from a cheap Indian online bookshop as a bit of a trial

These arrived, and groovily, the package was sewn carefully and tightly in muslin and sealed with sealing wax (with an unreadable image stamped into the wax).

That's so great - except that if I received such a thing I'd never be able to bring myself to open it, and would have to go back to hunting for mass-market paperbacks instead.

I took photos before ruining it by cutting it open:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/28475170@N02/3703165865/"; title="Delivery from India by jrsmorrison, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2333/3703165865_f86efb6d33.jpg"; width="425" height="346" alt="Delivery from India" /></a>

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2333/3703165865_f86efb6d33.jpg

Sorry about that--never posted an image from flickr here before.

complete poetry of emily dickinson for 99p this afternoon

in the past week:

five novels by ronald firbank
baron corvo - hadrian the seventh
kierkegaard - fear and trembling/repetition
janet frame - owls do cry
jean rhys - good morning, midnight
patricia highsmith - high water
esther leslie - hollywood flatlands: animation, critical theory and the avant-garde

Coincidence: last night I was reading a group of Graham Greene essays on Baron Corvo, wherein he praised Hadrian the Seventh as the best novel of its era.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Sterne

Pierre by Melville - for a friend; we're conducting an informal literary pissing contest, one that began when I mentioned that if there was any book that had beat me bloody and pulpish twenty pages in, it was this one. If there are any official literary pissing contests being conducted, do tell.

A Voice Through A Cloud - Denton Welch
A Private View - Jocelyn Brooke
The Senior Commoner - Julian Hall
Murder in the Submarine Zone - John Dickson Carr
A Thousand Nights and One Night - illustrated Jan Pienkowski

The first three were to replace library copies that I kept on getting out/renewing and decided I might as well buy.

Murder in the Submarine Zone was me finally giving way to getting a new Dickson Carr (Carter Dickson in this case in fact, I think). I was trying to ration myself, because I realised that there weren't many that I hadn't read - and they are a pleasure on rainy afternoons with beer and nothing to do, when you have no heart for 'serious' reading. It's rather easier to get in the American edition (And Death Makes Ten) but I prefer the English title and so splashed out a bit extra to get that one.

The Arabian Nights was a present for a newborn baby girl - not that I expect her to read it now, but with any luck, it'll be something she'll have when she grows up. Cunning heroine as well, which is nice as it's for a girl. Rather scary illustrations.

The Literature Machine (Essays) - Italo Calvino
Another Day of Life - Ryszard Kapuscinski
Children's Stories - Anton Chekhov

Ooh, 'Another Day of Life'--that's really good. Started me off on my Kapuscinski kick.

GamalielRatsey what Carr books do you recommend? I read The Three Coffins and He Who Whispers and they were great. Then I read a few that weren't so hot.

What I got for my birthday:

Good Book - David Plotz
My Dark Places - James Ellroy
Bowie in Berlin: A New Career In A New Town - Thomas Seabrook
The Complete Novels - George Orwell
The Radetzky March - Joseph Roth
The Best of Slate (10th Anniversary Edition) - Miguel de Cervantes
Miles: The Autobiography - Miles Davis
Map Addict - Mike Parker

GamalielRatsey what Carr books do you recommend? I read The Three Coffins and He Who Whispers and they were great. Then I read a few that weren't so hot.

― abanana, Friday, July 31, 2009 4:22 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

The Blind Barber in particular nearly put me off him for life; displaying what is often his greatest weakness, a sort of hysterical facetiousness that's incredibly wearing on the nerves and perhaps more importantly incredibly destructive of one of his great strengths; the build-up of a sinister atmosphere from more or less mundane particulars.

I suppose I should state my stylistic preferences before I list my favourites, so you can get some idea whether you share them: I prefer the Dr Gideon Fell novels (John Dickson Carr) to the others, in particular those of Sir Henry Merrivale, who I find incessantly irritating, but who did appear in some excellent stories. I don't mind the early Henri Bencolin novels, those I've read of them anyway, even though they are rather high on gothic atmosphere and low on the fiendish detection that makes the later stuff such a pleasure. I haven't read any of his later historical romances.

I don't mind, in fact am sneakingly rather fond of, the novelettish aspect to his books, the romance etc, sometimes rather laughable perhaps.

I have got used to grown people saying things like 'Weeee' when delighted in his books, but it was an effort. Still some part of me winces.

I don't mind a bit of the facetious humour, but only a bit (The Case of the Constant Suicides is about as far as I go and I get off well before The Blind Barber), having learnt in some degree to accept it as part of his literary fingerprint.

The Hollow Man (The Three Coffins in the States) is my favourite I think, as you say, it's great. My other favourites would be -

The Burning Court (features a nondescript detective who doesn't appear anywhere else but is excelled only by the The Hollow Man for its build up of sinister force.)
The Case of the Constant Suicides ('humour' rather tiring, see above, but the mystery and solution excellent)
The Ten Teacups (Carter Dickson, so Henry Merrivale, but if you can turn a blind eye to his obscene eccentricities, brilliantly entertaining)
The Crooked Hinge (but I don't like, or even really understand the solution at all, although others have said it's one of his finest)
The Reader is Warned (great stuff, one where he alerts you to the clues as he goes along, although if I remember rightly, not one of my favourite stories, and the blasted Merrivale again)

I also like,

The Judas Window, The Black Spectacles and Hags Nook (the first Gideon Fell mystery).

Emphatically stay away from The Problem of the Wire Cage (ludicrous and just plain bad) and in general from the later ones. I see from quickly looking at a list that I've read quite a few others, but I can't remember them very well, so would hesitate to make recommendations. Although I've got to the stage now where I'll read any of them, even the bad ones, have developed a mild-ish case of addiction to him.

I'm delighted to say I'm not sure I've read He Who Whispers though, and shall seek that out soon, but perhaps not too soon.

The Best of Slate (10th Anniversary Edition) - Miguel de Cervantes

What?

Just checking to see whether anyone reads my posts. You're right, it's actually Goethe.

The Senior Commoner - Julian Hall

How'd you find one?

I initially read it in a library copy but Faber Finds have 'published' it. I'm rather ambivalent about this enterprise, but in this particular case I'm ignoring my qualms because I want a copy.

That said, I had it on order prior to it's released. On the day of it being released my order cancelled itself. I ordered again and received a phone call the next day to check I had really ordered it. I assured the caller of the sincerity of my intention, whereupon she informed me it would be dispatched 'soon'. Since then I've heard and seen nothing, so it may maintain it's legendary scarcity.

'its release' obviously.

regarding He Who Whispers: the Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection (great site; unchanged for at least a decade) doesn't even mention it, but the Mysterylist.com guy considers it his best (no spoilers for HWW)

Thanks abanana, interesting. I think I disagree with this chap for the same reason I tend to disagree with the arguments of a lot of mystery and detection wonks in their analysis of books; they, understandably perhaps, tend to focus on the crime and detection elements, but at the expense of atmospheric and, for want of a better word, artistic elements. [SPOILERS OF A SORT FROM HEREON] I think part of the reason The Hollow Man is my favourite, well, lots of people's favourite, is the body in the middle of the dead end in the virgin snow with no one around, the mysterious tall figure at the beginning, the grotesque history to the deaths, the strong sense of a supernatural flying hollow man, who can appear and disappear at will - there is a sort of magic about it that is uniquely compelling.

I don't necessarily think it's too far-fetched to say that much of JDC's best work is like MR James subjected to rational detection(in fact the connection is made more or less explicitly in The Burning Court).

He gets rather hoity about it not really being a locked-room mystery, but all I can say is it looks like one, and that's surely what counts? Especially in a novel devoted to the nature of illusion and magic.

Whatever the reasons, it will stay my favourite, although that certainly doesn't mean I'm not looking forward very much to reading He Who Whispers.

Gamaliel Denton Welch sounds amazing to me! Must chase

As for me:

Jaroslav Hasek - The Good Soldier Svejk
Camilo Jose Cela - The Hive
Arthur Schnitzler - Dream Story

The Julian Hall came through the post yesterday. Those faber find books really do look horrible, although I daren't rip the cover off because the glue doesn't look like it would hold the pages together for more than a couple of days.

Anyway, just went and bought Inherent Vice. Wasn't really feeling the love, but as I had a book voucher that needed using, and I'd also bought Mason & Dixon and Against the Day (which I really liked) when they came out, I thought I might as well. Will probably save reading it for a bit though.

Nearly also bought The South Country by Edward Thomas, but something put me off. Again, not really in the mood - the meditations seemed like they might be a bit impressionistic for what I wanted, not too much historical substance. More feeling something like Oliver Rackham's History of the Countryside at the moment, which is great, but I've left it in a place I am not, and so have had to move on to something new (probably Murder in the Submarine Zone, truth be told).

Harold Brodkey - Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.

I think when I get round to reading Proust in a month or so I'll double with short story collections like this one.

Actually I don't know whether this is a good idea.

Sold a bunch and bought in exchange:

Leonardo Sciascia - The Day of the Owl
Alberto Moravia - Contempt

Sciascia! Great choice, Julio. I never read a Sciascia book I didn't like.

(I got your mail about the Scando miserabilism too and I will reply, honest.)

Thanks Tim! (btw you should read the Jelinek, its awesome!)

went to a book exchange in l.a. today and came away with the following for free:

he's a rebel - mark ribowsky (book about phil spector)
crimes of war: guilt and denial in the twentieth century (essay comp)
rosemary's baby - ira levin (looks like a first edition hardcover)
the best film ever made - pauline kael (about citizen kane)
battle royale - koushun takami
the luhzin defense - vladimir nabokov
freedom song - amit chaudhuri

I will admit to a book-buying binge. Here is the evidence.

The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, used Penguin paperback, $2. FSF exposes Hollywood!

The Jewish War, Josephus, used Penguin classics paperback (black cover) stating "Revised Edition", $3. Stout Romans crush resistance by nasty ungrateful Jews.

1066: The Year of Conquest, David Howarth, used Penguin paperback, $4. The Conquerer comes and conquers.

Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire, William Rosen, used Penguin paperback, $4.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written By Himself, used Modern Library paperback, $3. Slave autobiography from abolition times.

The Future of Life, Edward O. Wilson, used hard cover, $5. Talented biologist indulges in well-informed speculation.

Genius: The Life and Times of Richard Feynman, James Gleick, used paperback, $4. Talented physicist rampages through staid academia and wins Nobel Prize.

The Velocity of Honey: And More Science of Everyday Life, Jay Ingram, used hard cover, $5. Science popularizer follows up with sequel to earlier popularization.

Medieval English Lyrics: 1200 - 1400, ed. Thomas G. Duncan, used Penguin paperback, $8. Looks like a honey of a book, with great attention to detail and mastery of the subject matter.

Narrow Road to the Interior: And other Writings, Matsuo Basho, tr. and ed. Sam Hamill, in a new (remaindered) trade paperback, Shambhala Press, $8. I like Sam Hamill's style.

Rivers of America: The Columbia, Stewart Holbrook, used hard cover (early edition) in good shape, $2. I consider this a steal. Holbrook was a top-notch journalist and a great lay historian. I've seen this priced at ten times the amount, but I plan to keep this one.

This haul should keep me in reading for the rest of the year and beyond. And I still have $31 of trade credit at Powell's Books to help tide me through the coming months.

i'm eagerly awaiting the new issue of my favorite magazine - matrix. it's shipping from the UK, so i get to play the will it/won't it game every day when the mail comes at work for around three weeks now.

even though it's a periodical, i count it as a book, since it only comes out once a year.

Denton Welch - A Voice Through a Cloud
Friedrich Durrenmatt - The Judge and His Hangman

Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet. Dumb title, but looks good. A bonus is the 1943 OK by the War Materials Board for the use of paper. $2.

Michelle Naka Pierce, Beloved Integer. From that ocean of contemporary poets I have never heard of, all of whose books have three blurbs by other poets I have never heard of. Looks OK. $2.

On our way to a hike last Friday, my brother and I stopped in the small town of Estacada, Oregon, where I noticed a thrift bookstore run by the volunteers to raise money for the local public library. These shops always sell at shamefully low prices. So, I purchased:

Haiku: Volume 2: Spring, R.H. Blyth, a used hardcover in fair shape, with a dust jacket. This looks to be a 1950 edition, printed in Japan by the Hokuseido Press so it is likely a first printing. I paid 25 cents for it.

This is something of a classic, in that the four volumes of this collection were probably the first real attempt to present and explain haiku to the English-speaking world. For a long time they were the only haiku collection you could find. I can recall longingly fingering these volumes as a impecunious college student, circa 1978, when I couldn't afford such expensive goods.

Huizinga's book on the Middle Ages! I had seen it in a second hand shop with my friend. But it was closed so I asked my friend to buy it. She didn't. In the end I told her I would come over (to Antwerp) and buy it myself. When we arrived IT WAS GONE! I was so angry. I kept looking but it was gone. ARGH! Then I looked once more thinking noone could have bought it... Lo and behold it was located somewhere else. Someone had moved it. 4,50 euros for an out of print classic. Yipieeeee

I am still reading the other books I purchased, namely the Sookie Stackhouse series. Will probably start the last one this week. And also got the Treasury of Knitting Patterns books. Classics in their own field/ :-)

Rainy Saturday. Visited a few bookstores. Bought:

Aurthurian Romances, Chretian de Troyes, translated by Wm. Kibler and C.W. Carroll, used Penguin Classics paperback, $6.95.

The Ring and the Book, Robert Browning, Oxford Standard Authors, 'thin India paper' edition from 1930s, $6. Couldn't resist RB's magnum opus in such a compact form at such a good price.

The Beleaguered City, Shelby Foote, a hardcover Modern Library edition that excerpts just the siege-of-Vicksburg section of Foote's huge Civil War history, $4.

Nice 2nd hand run:

Henry de Montherlant - Chaos and Night
Joseph Roth - The Radetzky March (btw, Judd books have several new copies of this going for 2.95)
Robert Musil - Young Torless
Leonardo Sciascia - To Each His Own

all 8 vols of Best SF Stories from New Worlds (1967-74)

Just got a copy of The Annotated Alice (for those who don't know - Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass with marginal annotations on history, translation, mathematics and later uses in the arts). For some reason have never acquired this before, tho have been meaning to for years.

Likewise with Sciascia in fact - never read any and have been meaning to for ages, so I'd be interested to hear what you have to say on him, xyzzz__.

Nice buy, ledge!

Recently bought a cheap copy of Gaiman's The Graveyard Book at the library bookstore - very good, I think it's my favorite novel of his. Also picked up a copy of Saint Joan.

Read Day of The Owl so far Gamaliel, and it had more than enough in it for me to go back for more. He talks in the after word of The Day... of his need to 'prune' (I think most, if not all of his books are 150 pages at most) but what seems to be as vital is his need to highly concentrate. The crimes as described in his books are a symptom of a wider disease and the inability of people to overcome whatever it is he is diagnosing -- which is what I'm still trying to decode.

The above might be a bit obscure at the mo but I'd also say his books do travel further than their Sicilian setting.

so i've started working in this second hand internet bookseller in a retail park in oxfordshire. i'm trying to be strong. i did buy a first edition of fowler's usage, though. but it was a slip up. it won't happen again.

side effect: going into oxford, walking into second hand bookshops, thinking O GOD NO, walking straight out

I think it would take a very strong constitution for a booklover's love to survive prolonged contact with the bookselling business. It must be time to revive What's it like working in a bookshop?, so you can dish us some dirt.

My "eternal distant hopeless crush" worked in a series of bookstores and most of them closed. She claims she's a bookstore jinx, but it's probably the times we live in.

Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man.

I loved working in a bookshop. Plenty of reading - almost as much as at university - could order whatever I wanted pretty much. People coming in with snatches of poetry (including memorably the Jamaican cleaning lady who came up to me once and recited four or five stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - a testament to the Scottish modelled Jamaican education system she said).

With the shelving, dusting and stocking you got to have a spatial awareness of the history of literature.

Another memorable moment was when a chap came in to ask if I had anything on And Quiet Flows the Don, and its disputed authorship. Funnily enough, I had been dusting in a rather gloomy corner, a small section rather hazily referred to as Critical Methods, whose books I had been hoping in a vague way to disperse amongst other sections, and noticed one of those books, always intriguing, whose spine presents no information. I pulled it out and saw that it was A Statistical Enquiry into the Authorship of And Quiet Flows the Don.

I took the chap to the place and presented the book to him, and he was delighted. Turns out he was a statistical analyst. It didn't have a price so I sold it to him for what I think was a nominal fee. Couple of quid I think.

Of course those slightly unusual pleasures were rare, but I always enjoyed helping people who didn't know what they want but wanted, or the endless queues of people lining up for a copy of Khalil Gibran's The Prophet. Can't stand bookshop snobbery.

Michael Foot used to come in as well, looking for his edition of Gulliver's Travels. He was delighted if we had it, and often bought a copy (for a friend he used to say), but was equally pleased if we didn't have it, as it meant we had sold out (I never pointed it out that it also showed I had failed my job as I had neglected to re-order it in time).

Completely unhealthy god that's cheap, really Amazon clicking fortnight. Couple of volumes of Burke's selected works (bonus: the slightly uncomfortable feeling I get when I buy something published by The Liberty Fund), Waugh's Letters and Diaries (nice old hardbacks, matching), Sir Philip Sidney's Major Works, Doting by Henry Green, and at last a copy of Shaftesbury's Characteristics (still waiting on this, probably fairly rough considering it was <£10).

I would say I am unlikely to read all of these cover to cover.

Nice hardback of Kenneth Koch's Collected Poems, too, that was in Judd 2 books on Marchmont St (Serious q: is there a better remainder shop in London?)

I never got anywhere with Waugh's letters/diaries. They were less, er, sparkling than one anticipated.

Also the ppl I work for are pretty neat so far! Maybe if I grow jaded and bitter about it I will post to that thread.

Ha woof I think I saw that Henry Green at Judd but I already had enough with me.

Now I got an idea for a book shopping ending with FAP :-)

Not a lot better than Judd. I like the couple of books around Charing X road and Skoob - any others apart from yer Charity shops? I guess not much more will emerge - unfortunately I never get around to Amazon.

skoob are actually owned by the same people as the place i'm working.

over this past weekend:

morante - history: a novel
frame - a state of siege
stead - the man who loved children
stead - dark places of the heart
john cowper powys - wolf solent

Nice little haul!

frame - a state of siege
stead - the man who loved children
stead - dark places of the heart
john cowper powys - wolf solent

yeah!

Would be interested on any thoughts when you get round to the Morante, omar.

b.f. skinner - 'walden two'
althusser/balibar - 'reading capital'
theodore h. white - 'the making of the american president 1960'
michael chabon - 'the final solution' (american edition i've wanted for the cover fr aaages)
james kelman, alasdair gray, agnes ownes - 'lean tales' (1st ed.)
british medical association - 'the medical effects of nuclear war'

The Epistles of Horace: Bilingual Edition, trans. David Ferry, used paperback, good condition, $9.50.

Su Tung-P'o: Selections from a Sung Dynasty Poet, trans. Burton Watson, used hardcover from Colombia U. Press, 1966, $9.95.

Insurgent Mexico, John Reed, used paperback, $1. Firsthand account of Pancho Villa's guerrilla war, by the author of Ten Days That Shook the World.

will do!

xxp

Thomp, yes, Waugh's diaries aren't much fun; the letters, though, I found very readable: like there's a lot of the shitty side of him (grumpy foul Catholic snob bigot), but it's fun enough when he sharpens up for writing to Nancy Mitford, also all the letters to other writers where he's sort of indifferent-critical about the book they've just sent him. Still, wouldn't exactly recommend above reading actual Waugh novels.

& xyzzzz, always on for bookshopping and pint. I'll sometimes do a circuit of Gower st Waterstone's, Skoob & Judd 2 of a weekend. Maybe see if used-to-be-Osborne's has fluked something interesting. I've never really got to know Charing X for second hand - I just imagine that every shop is full of ancient reptilian dealers waiting to gouge me. I don't really know about other second-hand and remainder places. The South Bank book tables can have pleasant surprises, I guess. And if I pass an Oxfam bookshop I'll drop in.

But I should slow down, since I've just been back to the Liberty Fund for Hume's History of Britain in six volumes.

I really wish I knew which Oxfam shops were nearby where I work, and yeah Southbank is always worth a browse. And I do the Judd-Skoob-Gower Street Waterstones thing too.

Avoid Cecil court off Leicester Square - that's where all the expensive 1st edition booksellers reside, although I wouldn't avoid the music score shop once in a blue moon - they have a music books section that might be worth a browse. I would go into the Esoteric bookshops if I knew what I was looking for. That stuff needs to be more on my radar than it is (interested in histories of mysticism etc)

Anyway - cool, I emailed you woof. Hope you got it ok.

Last bought:

Antal Szerb - Journey into Moonlight

Ed McBain -- Nocturne
Mandarin The Easy Way

Love that Szerb! Yes, got the email thanks, have (I hope, if the webmail works) replied.

Just remembered the Book & Comic Exchange in Notting Hill. Sometimes it's a bit dull, but it can come through with real surprises and f***-me bargains. Also enjoy that 50p book graveyard in the basement. There's something breathtaking about all those books no-one, not even me, wants.

that's the only bookstore i particularly know of and like in london, the exchange

stuff on desk at present:

'the rime of the ancient mariner' - illust. by mervyn peake
'the stuffed owl: an anthology of bad verse', eds. d.b. wyndham-lewis and charles lee
'the first clerihews' - e. clerihew bentley - with illustrations by g.k. chesterton
'diary of a nobody' - 40s hardback reprinting original illustrations

also today:

max apple, 'the propheteers'
max apple, 'free agents'
nicholson baker, 'the mezzanine'
nicholson baker, 'room temperature'
donald barthelme, 'sixty stories'
donald barthelme, 'forty stories'
donald barthelme, 'the king'
borges and bioy-casares, 'six problems for don isidro parodi'
borges and bioy-casares, 'chronicles of bustos domecq'

hrm.

Thomp, yes, Waugh's diaries aren't much fun; the letters, though, I found very readable: like there's a lot of the shitty side of him (grumpy foul Catholic snob bigot), but it's fun enough when he sharpens up for writing to Nancy Mitford, also all the letters to other writers where he's sort of indifferent-critical about the book they've just sent him. Still, wouldn't exactly recommend above reading actual Waugh novels.

i am actually going to pick up the unread copy of brideshead i've had for years from my parents' house this weekend, might pick up the letters as well. i might try and locate scoop and flags first, though ... scoop's where i left off, last time round. (though i did read the loved one and what i could stand of pinfold, which wasn't much.)

Haven't visited the exchange in an age.

Yes, got the email thanks, have (I hope, if the webmail works) replied.

Didn't get it. I'd forgotten that email I signed up to ILX with doesn't work anymore. If you click on my name I list my other email address (obv replace the 'at' and 'dot') and try again.

today's charity shopping got me 'Don Quixote', Alice Munro's 'Runaway' (I'll credit that one as an ILB recommendation, since I'm not sure I'd be aware of her if not for the talk here) and Perec's 'Life: A User's Manual'. All for just £3.25! Pretty good. This buying five books a week thing when I only really have time for academic reading is probably a bad idea. I recently bought Eco's 'The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana' and can't imagine being bothered to read it at any time in the next, say, ten years.

I finally sold my unread copy of Don Quixote. It had acquired an accusatory look.

Just bought a bunch of cheap Folio Society books on ABE, having recently interviewed one of their illustrators and got a taste for big, nicely-designed illustrated hardbacks in slipcases that are probably too huge to read in bed.

JM, Folio Society today, next thing you know it'll be calf-bound first editions.

bookstores in berkeley sell heritage club books usually for around $10-$15 a piece... it seems like such a good deal, since paperback copies of the same books are only a couple dollars less.

JM, Folio Society today, next thing you know it'll be calf-bound first editions.

I know--this could be the end of me.

Those Heritage editions are lovely but I can't help but want the proper, signed Limited Editions Book Club editions when I see them. I have a couple (the awesome Edward Bawden-illustrated Salammbo being my favourite; I have it without the beautiful slipcase but it was a gift...).

First editions are a mug's game. Really well-designed books are great, though.

Charity shop fun times, hopefully a fiver well spent:

Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment
Nabakov Pnin (finally reading Lolita; this fucking guy.)
Zola The Kill
A book of Dylan Thomas poetry.
Wilde The Happy Prince & Other Stories
Hollinghurst The Swimming Pool Library

Crime & Punishment is worth way more than a fiver on its own.

Yeah--that and the Nabakov alone and you're well ahead of the game!

xp to tim - i'm in the same boat... i have a couple limited editions club books, and they are way nicer than the heritage ones.

a trio of $1 purchases:

territorial rights - muriel spark
weymouth sands - john cowper powys
ocean of sound - david toop

I did some poetry grubbing over the weekend. You'd think I'd have enough by now, but no... I had some trade credit at Powell's Books and it was burning a hole in my pocket.

Collected Poems of Muriel Ruykeser, used paperback in good condition, $10. I usually veer away from women poets, just because they tend to handle language in ways that don't quite sit right with me. I don't really know why this is. But I am willing to be persuaded about Ruykeser's work.

Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems & Translations, Sam Hamill, new (remaindered) paperback, $8. He's better known these days as a poetry editor, I think, but he's a local PNW poet and we share many influences.

Making the Scene: Selected Poems, Kenneth O. Hanson, new paperback, $7. A local poet, locally printed, and (again) has many of the same influences.

Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation, Sherod Santos, used (like new) hardcover, $5. I must own six or seven of these anthologies of Greek poetry in translation by now, both plain and fancy. This is one of the fancypants ones, but well done in that style.

I keep buying books that I already have because I don't think to check the shelves.

Have done a load of book shopping in the last week - due to being too ill to crawl to my computer I post about about my efforts now:

Last Sunday a nice bout of book shopping w/ILB head woof which doubled as FAP

Tibor Dery - The Story of a Dog
Jiri Grusa - The Questionnaire
Hrabal - Closely Observed Trains

I wonder if ever Czech novel released in the West has an intro written by Josef Skvorecky, whom I've not read.

Then walking by Lower Marsh street later in the week (there is a 2nd hand bookshop there) I saw that Crockatt & Powell Bookseller was closing that very day and clearing their stock with everything at 50% off so i got:

Knut Hamsun - Hunger
MR James - Casting the Runes and Other ghost Stories (on Oxford classics - good to finally get something by him with an OK cover, as good as I think you can get at the mo)

Finally: Mishima - Death in Midsummer and Other stories (read Patriotism off it so far and its so good that I don't whether there is any point in reading any of the others, but of course I will)

MR James - Casting the Runes and Other ghost Stories (on Oxford classics - good to finally get something by him with an OK cover, as good as I think you can get at the mo)

Publishers do love their John Atkinson Grimshaw for ghost stories - I can think of five books offhand that have his pictures on (Oxford Book of Ghost Stories, Oxford World's Classics Through a Glass Darkly, Wordsworth Collected MR James, Oxford World's Classics MR James, er.... make that four - I know there's more.) Rightly so - he's excellent, but it does become a little predictable.

Also, I must admit, xyzzzz__, I abhor that edition of MR James (Michael Cox I believe - who edited the Oxford Book of Ghost Stories I think). For a start, enough with the asterisks in the text already! So much of a good ghost story requires a gradual removal of both the reader and the main character (often willed in his or her case) away from mundane and material reality, to be jolted out two, three or four times a page in most cases is a gross imposition. You feel uneasy ignoring them, but all too often when you turn to the back you find it's to define something you could look up in a dictionary (if, indeed, you don't already know it) or some chatty bit of facetiousness or opinion. (Including one note that simply stands 'I have not managed to locate this quotation').

Nothing wrong with having them as end notes that you can turn to after finishing the story (unless your memory is exceptionally porous, you should be able to remember enough of the details to make reading such notes a relatively simple business), but they can't decide whether they are notes for the imbecile or notes for the scholar, and please, stop interrupting! I'm trying to read here!

Sorry to have missed you the other day, I had work, curses, but glad to hear you got a good haul.

Yes it is Michael Cox. I guess when I look for a nice paperback I think of the 'feel' of the page, the font, that the words aren't horribly squeezed in and the cover - that it has a picture that is intelligently selected for how the book might make you feel (I have read and know bits about MR James, but haven't read him so this is guess work.)

I get at what you mean re: asterisks (didn't notice them at the shop). But I never go back unless its something I feel I have to know at this minute, but very rarely - it does stop the flow, true. Footnotes are way more important when reading something like Marx.

What ed of his Ghost Stories do you have Gamaliel?

(It was a good day and you were missed; I saw a copy of Montherlant's The Girls at Skoob. Anyway, there will always be another time.)

Ah, you are stronger willed than me! And it's not so bad really. I've got a number of editions in fact, not through any desire to collect them, but for some reason when the will to read him comes on me, which is at least annually, I never seem to have a copy about me.

The Collected Wordsworth edition (before he went back into copyright) was very good, although lacked some of the extras containing as it did only Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories, and A Warning To the Curious (I think).

I've also got individual Penguin copies of GSOAA, and GSOAA + MGS. If I every buy any of these again I like to think it would be in a pre-1939 hard cover edition. There's a wonderful early edition of Le Fanu's Through A Glass Darkly with lovely spacious wide-leaded text, which I covet for the same reason - you can sink into their atmosphere so much more easily, on cold winter days, with a glass of something sustaining next to you.

I haven't read The Girls, I'm quite often in Skoob so I'll have a butcher's the next time I'm down there, cheers for the tip.

btw, Gamaliel, have you seen this discussion of M R James stories (ILX was created by the people who run Freaky Trigger)? Many of the contributors were/are readers/post on ILX, still.

You may find it of interest.

Cheers xyzzz__, I'm doing a bit on ghost stories at the moment, so this is excellent.

"Three Nights In Havana: Pierre Trudeau, Fidel Castro, and the Cold War World" by Robert Wright
"City of Quartz" by Mike Davis
"A Perfect Spy, John le Carre
"Balkan Ghosts," by Robert Kaplan
"The Great Game: the Struggle for Empire in Central Asia," by Peter Hopkirk
"Will You take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period" by Michelle Mercer

A quarto book on Flemish painting, second hand from Oxfam, with quite beautiful reproductions and from what I could tell from a couple of minutes' skimming, decent text as well. It was still £25 though and I'm currently feeling mildly guilty, guilt that I am assuaging by telling myself that because I seem to be coming down with a filthy cold, it's a worthwhile investment for holing up indoors for the next few days and poring over.

If I get restless later, I might pop out and find a copy of Ada or Ardor, a Family Chronicle. I tried reading this years ago, when I read loads of Nabokov, but couldn't get into it. I'm feeling like I want to now.

That probably means I'm going to put The Apple in the Dark by Claric Lispector on the back burner for the moment.

Clarice. I'm blaming the cold.

this month's deductions:

eric ambler, 'dirty story'
lillian ross, 'picture'
beryl bainbridge, 'the bottle factory outing'
a.l. lloyd, 'folk song in england'
various, 'economics: an anti-text'
marshall jevons, 'the fatal equilibrium'*
liu shao-chi, 'on the party'
donald moore, 'far eastern journal'
jean rhys, 'wide sargasso sea'
nabokov, 'pnin'
'guy debord and the situationist international: texts'
pound, 'the cantos'
eugene ionesco, 'the hermit'
'musical instruments of south east asia' (old oxford asia series thing)
graham greene, 'a burnt-out case'
stendhal, 'memoirs of an egotist'
pound, 'selected prose'
samuel delany, 'tales of neveryon'
anthony powell, 'afternoon men'
oct 1963 issue of analog
feb 1964 issue of galaxy
2 x penguin modern painters

at this rate i'll be out of pocket to work here /:

* one of the worst books i have ever read btw

Hilarious title though, thomp. What's that folk song book like? I strongly recommend Reg Hall's I Never Played To Many Posh Dances, if you haven't read it.

In fact, is that Bert Lloyd's book? I meant to read it ages ago, but never got hold of it.

I have also bought today, The World of Jonathan Swift, with essays by Pat Rogers, Irvin Ehrenpreis and Geoffrey Hill, for £5 and The Judas Window by Carter Dickson for a friend who's just had a baby and who was requesting detective fiction of that period while she's on maternity leave. £3.

Must stop.

got mildly drunk last night and was thinking about how old goriot was such a great book imo and why don't i read more balzac. so i got these three cheap on amazon: colonel chabert, cousin bette, the wrong side of paris.

I gave a large part of my library (in reality less than 10%, and probably quite a bit less) the boot last weekend. Paul McCartney's Many Years From Now arrived yesterday, which I have assured myself is to be the last new arrival this side of Christmas.

As the other participant, must say the London book-shop + pint expedition was a good Sunday afternoon. Came away with a slim volume of Swinburne (didn't have a portable selection before), The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden and the best of Elizabeth David (driven by slightly delusional logic: 'I like cooking. I should cook more. This'll bring an inspiring element of literary snobbery to kitchen, then I'll cook more.' RONG. )

Gilbert Highet, Poets in a Landscape. Boring title, great book. I see NYRB will bring out a new edition this spring, but I bought the amazingly solid, built-like-a-tank 1957 Knopf edition, the kind they don't make anymore.

Incidentally, having mentioned John Atkinson Grimshaw upthread - three of his paintings are in the window of Robert Green, a fine art dealer on Bond Street, if you're in London and happen to be passing.

it is the bert lloyd book, and i haven't read it yet. ho hum

"Uranium Frenzy: Boom and Bust on the Colorado Plateau" by Raye Ringholtz
"The Boat" by Nam Le
"In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire," Mike Davis
"Complete Short Stories," Graham Greene
"Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle east, and the Caucasus" by Robert Kaplan
"The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia" by Lutz Kleveman

charity book fair!

harvard classics: plato, epictetus, marcus aurelius (i doubt i'll ever read this) and don quixote part 1
balzac - lost illusions
dorothy l sayers - 4 novel collection
stephen king - nightmares and dreamscapes
franzen - the corrections
the civilization of the middle ages
stephen jay gould - the mismeasure of man

I really, really enjoyed The Corrections. I thought it might be a struggle at first, but it turned into a real pleasure.

Dropped in on Portobello Road Oxfam Shop over lunch. Zoom by Simon Armitage, Earthquake Weather by August Kleinzahler.

Sold a bunch and bough for Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales (plus half a pint's worth of beer money), which sounds way more appealing than Gulag Archipelago, although yes I'll probably end up reading a volume and hating myself...

hating myself...

It goes with the territory, amirite?

I enjoyed The Gulag Archipelago, though it had turned into a bit of a slog by about page 500. Persevered, and then couldn't believe it when I got to the end only to find out it was the first part of a trilogy.

Office haul of free books: We, Three Tales by Flaubert, Essays of Elia (awful feeling I have two copies of this already, but this is a prettyish Hesperus thing), Pushkin's Tales of Belkin, a small biography of Pushkin and Kitty Hauser's Bloody Old Britain, about pioneer of aerial photography.

Popular Fallacies was excellent, off that, I should get Essays of Elia out of the library again.

I went in the LRB bookshop and saw lots of NYRB titles at 20% off, so I got Platonov's The Foundation Pit : the ed has a detailed intro, an appendix with translated passages deleted by the author and 10-15 pages of extensive notes. Love the cover.

Georgics, Virgil, translated by David Ferry, bilingual edition, new (remaindered) paperback, $7.

Office haul of free books: We, Three Tales by Flaubert, Essays of Elia (awful feeling I have two copies of this already, but this is a prettyish Hesperus thing), Pushkin's Tales of Belkin, a small biography of Pushkin and Kitty Hauser's Bloody Old Britain, about pioneer of aerial photography.

What wonderful office is this? At mine the free book table is an old Dan Brown and 'Moonwalk: the Michael Jackson Story'.

What wonderful office is this? At mine the free book table is an old Dan Brown and 'Moonwalk: the Michael Jackson Story'.

I do the sub-editing for (job-keeping circumlocution time) the customer magazine of a major British bookshop chain. Lots of books come in, but they're mostly of the Brown/Moonwalk variety. This was a good batch.

(I've been tempted to start an ILB thread where I post extracts of unedited shit from the magazine, but professional principle wins out against office boredom & cheap lols.)

Probably wise, but if you ever give in, I look forward to those cheap lols.

Bght a Kindle! I think I'll order all the books by Dostoyevski first. For about 4 dollars. :-)))

Allow me to crow a bit. A year ago I bought a copy of Infinite Jest for $1. It was pretty banged up, so by the time I finished reading it, it was quite literally falling apart in my hands. Today I bought a replacement copy that is in good shape... for $1!

latest ones (prolley a month ago):

Balzac, The History of the Thirteen
Balzac, A Murky Business

I'm facsinated by Richard Nixon: Alone In The White House (by Richard Reeves). I'm at the part where, in 1969, Pres. Nixon begins to aggressively woo "the politically powerful white middle class" by attacking those "who oppress( ) them with high taxes, spiraling inflation and enforced integration, while rewarding the very poor and very rich." I'm sure this strategy isn't unique, but Nixon -- by actively pursuing George Wallace's constituency -- seemed to raise these wedge-issues into an art form (in ways the GOP has successfully exploited over the next 30 years):

Three days later on October 19, at a $100-a-plate Repulican fund-raiser in New Orleans, Vice President Agnew, delegated by the President but reading words he has mostly written himself, began the hard-hitting rhetorical phase of Nixon's dividing of America, saying "The recent Vietnam Moratorium is a reflection of the confusion that exists in America today . . . A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals."

* * * *

The next night, at another $100-a-plate dinner that drew twenty-four hundred guests in Jackson, Mississippi, (Agnew) continued, this time with help from Safire and Buchanan back in the White House: "For too long the South has been punching the bag for those who characterize themselves as liberal intellectuals . . . We have among us a glib, activist element . . . nattering nabobs of negativism . . . snobs for most of them disdain to mingle with the masses who work for a living . . . . Americans cannot afford to divide over their demagoguery -- or be deceived by their duplicity -- or to let their license destroy liberty. We can, however, afford to separate them from our society -- with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel."

I imagine Agnew meant to say "For too long the South has been a punching bag . . .," but what's quoted above is the way his words appear in the text. The book is a cold look into policial expediency and calculation.

For my kindle: Dostoyevski (entire oeuvre), Chesterton (same),... Oh and Charlaine Harris

Getting an e-reader looked quite tempting when I was browsing Amazon for Chesterton books and got a damn "lol on kindle u can get his complete works for a buck o_O" message. Of course, it'd be free on other readers.

Err, anyways, my most recent purchases:
Thomas Berger - Who is Teddy Villanova?
Christopher Benfey - American Audacity: Essays North and South
Leonardo Sciascia - Equal Danger

Free on Kindle too if you go to manybooks.net.

i bought books for myself today! i never do anymore cuz i'm always just buying stuff for my store. but the used bookstore around the corner is having a three day sale (50% off everything!) and i thought i'd load up on some sci-fi. their sci-fi section is really big.

here's what i got. a mix of hardcovers and paperbacks:

the ice people - rene barjavel (hardcover)

an alien heat - michael moorcock (hardcover)

the hollow lands - michael moorcock (hardcover)

masters of atlantis - charles portis (hardcover. really wanted this! don't think i would have thought to look in the sci-fi section for it.)

earthworks - brian w. aldiss (hardcover)

satan's world - poul anderson (hardcover)

2 big fat softcover phil k. dick short story collections - the eye of the sibyl and second variety

space tug - murray leinster (paperback)

talents, incorporated - murray leinster (paperback)

the man who ate the world - frederik pohl (paperback)

destiny doll - clifford d. simak (paperback)

and two penelope fitzgerald trade paperbacks that i haven't read: innocence and the beginning of spring

35 bucks for everything. i was happy.

man, if you are ever looking for some andre norton paperbacks that store is the place for you. they must have over 50 norton paperbacks. pretty crazy.

love the aldiss cover

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3444/3370635777_a1010506b4_m.jpg

Everyone I know who loves Charles Portis hated Masters Of Atlantis but maybe you will lead the way to a new appreciation, skot.

hmmm, we will see. i just never see it anywhere and i'm always looking for his books.

Haha, I have a copy of that Aldiss book, but with THIS unfortunate cover: http://i27.tinypic.com/33f5no8.jpg
Hoo-boy. I haven't read it yet. Come to think of it, all my Aldiss books have dreadful covers. Most ludicrous must be Who Can Replace a Man?. And then there's Greybeard! (Notice that the bird has a MOUTH! Cuzza atomic testing, y'see)

Oh, but that's certainly large enough.

Holy cats! 'Who Can Replace...' has at least a certain demented style to it, but that 'Greybeard' cover is woeful. Although mine just has a generic hover car flying through a desert on the front.

awesome charity book sale at my university saw me score 18 v. high quality books (only one with any kind of annotations inside, for example) in the general area of continental philosophy for £23. Total new Amazon price: £450. Shit yeah. Choice cuts include Lyotard's 'Signed, Malraux' (hardcover), Eric Blondel's 'Nietzsche: The Body and Culture' (also hardcover, and a 7100% saving on Amazon's price), and, more sentimentally less value-wise, nice old Penguin classics editions of 'Beyond Good and Evil' and Augustine's 'Confessions' and a cutely shaped Stanford University Press edition of Derrida's 'Of Hospitality'.

Ha, I had that same edition of Earthworks as a lad. For some reason English sf paperbacks were plentiful in my city at the time.

finally bought wise blood!!!

dickens - great expectations (for the winter, which around here is = 50 degrees)
alan furst - red gold
jg farrell - troubles (read halfway through a library copy, it felt like a keeper, so i bought a copy for myself)

Elsa Morante - History: A Novel (de-fucking-lighted to get hold of this one)
Dave Hickey - Air Guitar
Jocelyn Brooke - The Orchid Trilogy
Genet - Querelle of Brest (have read this, but who could resist the novel in the Panther ed. cover in really good condition?)

Come to think of it, all my Aldiss books have dreadful covers.

I believe it was the NEL edition of The Airs of Earth that had a cover that I liked. I can't find it on the web though.

Ah yes here it is.

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/ciu/65/8a/2d55c27a02a0daf65e135110.L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber
Thank you Library of America for giving me an alternative to brutally priced copies of Negative Space.

I thought Negative space was available for, like, 10 quid or so?

But I read about that collection and it seemed way more comprehensive.

Hey! London! And especially SOuth East London! Which may mean only xyzzz and me at the moment but WHATEVS: I dunno if I can make this because I have to be at a GAME OF FOOTBALL in ESSEX but this has been good before and I see no reason for it not to be good again and with all that goodness sloshing about it's a good cause too: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/events_details.asp?ID=1402 (Blackheath Amnesty Book clearance, this coming Saturday, for those of you who are click-averse).

Oh that sounds excellent, Tim! In case you can make it let me know and we can meet up.

Thanks for the tip.

Oh, that does sound good. I need to figure out what my Saturday looks like, but I might be able to make that. If so, a drink def a possibility Xyzzzz, if not earlier in the week. Gamaliel, you about?

Negative Space used to be about £10, but went oop & has been £30-50 2nd hand on Amazon/ABE for the last year at least. May have been searching badly, and never got lucky in a bookshop. But yes, the new volume is a more-than-adequate replacement.

Bloody working again innit, otherwise I'd be along like a shot. Also, got to recruit myself for The Fall in Oxford on Sunday. A book binge might have proved too much for my frail constitution.

So I went and saw woof there.

Picked up:

A volume of classical Russian poetry
Henry Green - Living
Richard Hughes - A High Wind in Jamaica
William Empson - Seven Types of Ambiguity

Elsewhere:

Junichiro Tanizaki - The Makioka Sisters
Walter Abish - In the future Perfect
Germaine Greer - Shakespeare
Janet Malcolm - Two Lives

The Green, Hughes and Tanizaki are great; haven't read the others (though from all accounts the Greer is completely bonkers)

Why would the Greer be 'bonkers'?!

My internet connection has been very spotty for a couple of weeks now, during which time I bought some books - exactly which ones I am now a bit weak on recalling. I do know I bought this:

The Athenian Agora, a guide published by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 1990 (the specific authors are unattributed), a used paperback for $4. It still has the Greek tax stamp affixed to the back cover.

This is the ultimate sort of guidebook for an ancient Athens wonk (such as myself). It describes, and often reconstructs, every ancient structure built in the agora from about 800 BC onwards, with aerial photos, floor plans, architectural details, contemporary references, and various artifacts found during excavation.

That book sounds rad.