Books we have recently purchased

Bargain books recently purchased:

The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
some book about globalization
some book about sweatshops
Westside - William Shaw (about hip-hop hopefuls in LA)

I purchased the above books together, inadvertently making what probably looked like a ploy to impress the cute, socially-conscious-looking college girl behind the counter.

From the library's poor weed-out shelves:
Guy de Maupassant - L'Inutile Beauté and other short stories
John Steinbeck - The Grapes Of Wrath
Samuel Beckett - L'Innommable
Ivan Bunin - The Gentleman from San Francisco

nasdijj - the blood runs like a river through my dreams
elwood reid - if i don't six
jean toomer - cane
john okada - no-no boy
s.j. perelman - the road to miltown or under the spreading atrophy
anne carson - autobiography of red

today at the estate sale we went to i got 2 jim thompson paperbacks i haven't read. great stuff at the estate sale! 1000's of books! but they wanted 5 bucks for hardcovers and 2 bucks for trade paperbacks. too much for me. i am spoiled by the thrift stores here. so, i am gonna go back tomorrow and see if they mark everything down. they are gonna have to. there is no way they will get rid of that stuff otherwise. i'd never seen a dead guy with tastes so similar to my own. he was an entertainment lawyer. he worked with motown and his big client was ashford & simpson. the record store already got his records months ago. tons of sealed motown stuff.

Inferno by Dante, translated by Ciaran Carson
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
Not the End of the World by Kate Atkinson
62: A Model Hit by Julio Cortazar
The Furies by Janet Hobhouse
Envy by Yuri Olesha
The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West
The Merry Recluse by Caroline Knapp
False Papers by Andre Aciman
Three Trapped Tigers by G. Cabrera Infante
The Sandglass by Romesh Gunesekera
Going with the Grain by Susan Seligson
The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh
From Here, You Can't See Paris by Michael Sanders
Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire

trotsky 'art and revolution' on pathfinder and emmanuel todd's 'after the empire: the breakdown of the american order'.

On Photography -- Sontag (never read this, always meant to; bought it in the gift shop at the Met's Diane Arbus exhibit, because that seemed like as good a place as any to)

Crime and Punishment -- the Pevear translation (never read this either, even though Brothers K. is one of my all-time favorites; this is next on my list, once I finish 'Ghostwritten')

Collected Poems -- Wallace Stevens (just because)

Chromophobia -- David Batchelor (I think this is the first time an 'Amazon Recommends' thing has actually gotten me to buy something -- curse them. It looks good, though.)

Also, not purchased, but found in a discard pile in my building's recycling room: Life of Pi and The Golden Bowl.

some novel by John Le Carré.

I've written down the English title if I could find it quickly, for the rest I've written the original title. Names are all given in their common Norwegian spelling, as that was easiest for me.
Oh, and all of these are Norwegian translations.

A '77 collection of short stories by 16 then-current Russian authors
A collection with five stories by Pusjkin, Zamjatin, Olesja (two) and Sinjavskij
A.B. Yehoshua - Early in the summer of 1970 (& two other stories)
Albert Schweitzer - Kulturphilosophie
Aleksander Solsjenitsyn - Short stories and "prose miniatures"
Anatolij Kuznetsov - Babij Jar
Anaïs Nin - Diary 1934-1939
Andrej Platonov - Short story collection
Anton Tsjekhov - Three Years
Arnost Lustig - A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova
Branquinho Da Fonseca - The Baron and other stories
Camilo José Cela - La Familia de Pascual Duartes
Carlos Fuentes - Where The Air Is Clear
Chen Jo-Hsi - Collection of short stories
Czeslaw Milosz - The Issa Valley
Dmitry Sjostakovitsj - Memoars
Fjodor Dostojevskij - A Faint Heart
Fjodor Dostojevskij - Diary Of A Writer (A selection)
Fjodor Dostojevskij - White Nights
Francis Bull - Land og Lynne
Francis Bull - Selected essays
Francis Bull - Tradisjoner og Minner
Franz Kafka - In The Penal Colony (including an introduction by Asbjørn Aarnes)
Gabriel García Márquez - Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Gabriel García Márquez - The Autumn of the Patriarch
Gabriel García Márquez - The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother
Ivan Turgenjev - A Month In The Country
Ivar Lo-Johansson - Short stories
Jerzy Andrzejewski - Ashes And Diamonds
Johan Vogt - Det Trellbundne Sinn (& other essays)
Jordan Raditsjkov - Short stories
Josef Skvorecky - The Bass Saxophone and other stories
José Donoso - Este Domingo
João Ubaldo Ribeiro - Sargeant Getúlio
Jurij Kazakov - Short story collection
Kibbutz, Stories from Israel ('78 collection of stories by ten authors from Israel)
Leonard Borgzinner - Universets Varmedød og andre selvmord
Lev Tolstoj - Childhood
Lev Tolstoj - Sevastopol Stories
Lev Tolstoj - Youth
Lidija Tsjukovskaja - Protsess Iskljutsjenija
Lin Yutang - Three short stories
Marguerite Duras - The Lover
Miguel De Unamuno - San Manuel Bueno, Mártir
Mika Waltari - Sinuhi, The Egyptian (I did read most of this a few years ago, but at one point I got so pissed off at the translator that I gave up and returned it to the library. Whee! I'd already become annoyed by the fantasy qualities the books had been taking on though)
Mongo Beti - Le pauvre Christ de Bomba
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o - Devil on the Cross
Nicolas Born - Circle of Deceit
Nikolai Gogol - Christmas Eve Revels and other stories
Nikolaj Leskov - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Distric
Pablo Neruda - Memoars
Patrick Modiano - Rue des Boutiques Obscures
Seneca - Selected writings
Stefan Zweig - Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D
Timothy Findley - The Wars
Vladimir Tendrjakov - Short stories
Yukio Mishima - Confessions of a Mask
Ólafur Jóhann Sigurdsson - Litbrigdi Jardarinnar (err, the d's are actually those fine crossed out icelandic letters)

I feel anorexic by comparison:

Self-consciousness John Updike

Nip the buds, shoot the kids Kenzaboro Oe

As for the JU; bought out of a sense of vicarious nostalgia after my wife finally got around to reading Nicholson Baker's U & I. I was almost evicted from our bed when I'd ask her, each time she'd fail to smother a giggle, which bit she was reading. The joys of having someone you love love the book you love is incomparable.

As for the Oe: one of those occasions in which I thought, if I don't buy this now, I might not have the chance again (which I surrender to in Borders all to often). But having read only one of this guy's books (Rouse Up Oh Young Men of the New Age!), I plan to read everything I can of him.

*Grin*

Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg

Dover editions of The School for Scandal and The Way of the World

and an American first edition of Devil's Cub by Georgette Heyer

Nick Baker:
Vox
Room Temperature
U&I
The Fermata
A Box of Matches
The Mezzanine

Number 9 Dream and Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst

All of these are Norwegian translations. Hey, I'm even trying to get over my "must read English texts in their original form" silliness! Still, I ended up leaving the Bellow books because I'd rather read them in English, so I'm not doing too well.

Chinua Achebe - News from the Savannah (I'm sort of worried about how this will come across in Norwegian, particularly when/if he's using local speech like in parts of A Man In Full)
Woody Allen - Side Effects
Félicien Marceau - Creezy
Frans Werfel - The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (two volumes)

Also got "Naked Lunch", though I already own it, and gave it away as a random gift.

In The Line Of Beauty, paperback. £3.99, half price, from Borders.

If anyone sees a cheap Fitzgerald one around, let me know. Why is old Fitzgerald always so pricey?

I'm also on the verge of buying more Raymond Chandler, and some Raymond Carver stories to read as well.

It was funny, at the counter. An old fellow was giving his name for a complex transaction. 'Christian', quoth he, '... as in the religion'. That seemed quite superfluous, and I wondered if he did it, tiresomely, every time he gave his name. It was not as though the lassie could not spell 'Christian', surely. So, she asked, where did he live?

'The Old Vicarage'.

The ended up not buying anything, after all that, and heading back to the South-West.

relations in public - erving goffman
love and theft - eric lott
an anthology of 20 c. black protest thought

and less recently than those:
i and tao - translation plus commentary of martin buber's translation plus commentary of some of the chuang tze.
kierkegaard - my point of view as an author

Unfortunately it was mostly decaying copies of boring economics textbooks, but I did buy: Collected Poems of WB Yeats (£1), a book about Soviet cinema for my friend (50p), and a slightly surprising hardback copy of Watchmen (£1). Since I already have two copies at home I gave this to a friend as well though. I'm sure there were some more gems but I couldn't take the scramble any more.

And then again, I am surprised you did not already have WBY.

reward books today:

mikhail bakhtin: creation of a prosaics - gary saul morson and caryl emerson
the mirror and the lamp: romantic theory and the critical tradition - m.h. abrams
in the american grain - william carlos williams

Ficciones by Borges and Bartleby by Melville

Do you still want that Truth About Babies book? You can have it if you do.

You were right, PF, to biggie down that Smiths book. BOR-ING!

Some of you don't half buy some brainy books.

Ooh yes I think I would like 'The Truth About Babies'. I don't remember you offering it before, as I am useless. Did I offer something in exchange?

Religio Medici and Other Writings, Sir Thomas Browne, hard cover ($2.50)

Theban Plays Sophocles (ed. Greene and Lattimore), hard cover (99 cents).

Oregon Geographic Names, Lewis MacArthur, 1974 edition, hard cover ($2.99).

Aaand from today's trip to the flea market, all in Norwegian translation where otherwise noted:
Umberto Eco - The island of the day before (I've read an English translation a number of years ago, but figured what the hell)
Emile Zola - Germinal
Yukio Mishima - Snow in spring (already have this in English, so I'm planning to give this to someone)
Romualdas Granauska - a book containing "Gyvenimas po klevu" and "Jaucio aukojimas", no clue about English titles)
Dante Alighieri - The divine comedy (New Norwegian translation)
Olof Möller - Åter till jorden ("Back to earth", shitty-looking Swedish science fiction that I picked up just because Scandinavian SF is such a rare thing)
Albert Camus - The plague (read a library copy some years ago, but would love to reread it a few times)
Gabriel García Márquez - The general in his labyrinth (I think it might be impossible for me to go to cheapo sales without ending up with one of his novels)
Mario Vargas Llosa - Death in the Andes

Can't remember the authors. 3 for 2 at Stansted airport.

Martin Amis, The Moronic Inferno: better, I think, than its title.

The old truism seems to hold: whatever his flaws, Amis is a good journalist.

Joe Queenan, America: worse, come to think of it, than its title. A book that relies on superiority of attitude yet isn't terribly well-written and says things like 'America must apologize to the rest of the world for Molly Ringwald' - which is just about the reverse of my view.

i won't be running out to buy any martin amis.

yo sterl, any recommendations for high points to hit first in the prison notebooks (given that i will of course look at it for a few days then set it aside for two years)?

I have started The Rise of Political Lying. It is quite entertaining. Certainly better than its cover illustration, which freaks me out.

Still haven't read those Carver stories yet...

from the "modern prince" the "prediction and perspective" section is a fav. of mine, as well as a section whose name escapes me, but also early on, on conspiracy theories as "economism." the essays on "intellectuals" a required reading too tho ppl. normally assume he's saying something quite difft. than he is.

if you've got the newer multi-volume excerpted editions dunno where the right place to start is -- he has more on popcult in there, but its v. fragmentary & etc. I read a great book called "Gramsci's Politics of Language" recently that helps situate him w/ the linguistic debates in Italy at the time (that sorta foreshadowed the structuralism discussions actually) which v. much had to do with ideas of nation as well.

I am also reading (for work) an unfinished draft of the new Kate Atkinson. Does anyone here rate her?

----

new copy of dubliners, the viking critical library edition. (i have two others: one with the punctuation etc. annoyingly 'corrected' and one 'uncorrected' but with pages falling out)

Please also consider them added to the unread library thread.

Anyway, purchased "Teach Yourself Chess" (which is a little more beginner than I need, but I'd heard it was good), "Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry", the latest Sedaris book, and a CD of "The Art Of The Bawdy Song". All for less than $7. Not too bad.

A collection of Norwegian short stories (edited in 1967 by Edvard Beyer)
Volume 1 of a big Norwegian (Aschehaug) popular world history thing. Works its way up to year 500AD or so (I already have the full Grimberg world history set though, so I'm not quite sure I needed MORE, but what the hell!)

Chaim Potok - My name is Asher Lev
Vladimir Volkoff - Le retournement
Odd Eidem - Zikzak
C.S. Forester - Hornblower and the 'Atropos' (Not exactly #1 on my want-to-read list, but I've figured for a few years that I ought to read one or two of these Hornblower things)
Dylan Thomas - Portrait of the artist as a young dog
Eckart Kroneberg - Keine Scherbe für Hiob
Joseph Roth - Der stumme Prophet
Agnar Mykle - Sangen om den røde rubin
Agnar Mykle - Lasso rundt Fru Luna
Agnar Mykle - Rubicon
Italo Calvino - Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (I love this book, very happy to have a copy of my own now)
Johannes Thrap-Meyer - Anakreons død
Marcel Pagnol - Les eaux des collines I Jean de Florette
Georges Simenon - Lettre à mon juge
Jens Bjørneboe - Jonas
Honoré de Balzac - Far Goriot
Pierre Boulle - Le pont de la rivière Kwaï

I wonder how long it will be until the musty smell of old books is inseparable from me.

Blindness, José Saramago
Rendezvous in Black, Cornell Woolrich
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

Max Beerbohm's selected letters and a collection of his essays and two Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword books, so far.

Just got a beautiful 1st paperback edition Viking press print of Gravity's Rainbow for a buck! It's got the orange cover and just the first sentence on the back -- the same format (tho in hardcover) that I first read the book in, so major nostalgia value for me! I've only owned trade paperback editions before.

Also Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Goffman's Stigma, some collected essays of V.S. Naipaul, and a nice big hardcover of the Chicago Manual of Style.

The Master - Colm Toibin
Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates

sterl, i'm reading 'interaction ritual' now and think i can safely say that 'relations in public' can be read to great profit without having read the former beforehand. whatta book.

new boox:

oxford concise dictionary of english etymology
martin jay, songs of experience

Can't remember who it's by.

It is about boats getting stuck in the ice.

Used book trip, today.

Just started it this morning.

Most recent purchases:

A large book full of Keats's poetry and some letters.
Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy
A $1 book of Wordsworth.
J.G. Ballard's Crash
Melville's Moby Dick
A beat-up copy of Ulysses
A large collection of Hemingway short stories.

Heck knows when I'll actually read all of this stuff. Nice to know there is some good reading ahead, though.

horkheimer/adorno - dialectic of enlightnment
Isaac Deutscher- vol2 of his trotsky biog
barthelme - 60 stories

oh, there it is.

ann douglas, 'the feminization of american culture'
'german for reading knowledge'
'english grammar for students of german'
'deutsche gedichte'
'poems of paul celan', tr. michael hamburger

(have been reading braudel's capitalism and material life, & also ended up with about 20 books for free from v/a sources recently...)

i didn't even mention that i bought & read kis' tomb for boris davidovitch and that i'm waiting to buy the vollmann europe book till it's softcover and also that i bought and read baylin's "the ideological origins of the american revolution" and also wade's the fiery cross.

fucking used bookstores, i don't have room to do keep doing this.

on the other hand, my social history collection is starting to look at least slightly respectable.

vol of goethe's writings
ruskin selection (including an article on goth)

foster / krauss / bois / buchloh: "art in the 20th century"
new cookbook: "bill's open kitchen" by bill granger (very australian vogue entertaining, very good)

used

avon pb editions of "hollow lands" and "end of all songs"
granada edition of "an alien heat"!!!!

*both of those last two were ILB recommendations

josh i just reread that! its politics (? i guess) annoy me in a really undergraduate way - undergraduate on my part, i mean, not the book's.

2day:
hobbes's 'leviathan' (penguin classix)
mrs beeton's book of household management (oxford classix)
'penguin portrait: allen lane and the penguin editors 1935-1970' ed steve hare
an old penguin guide to bridge
dh lawrence 'studies in classic american literature'

Comprising Information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady's-Maid, Maid-of-all-work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly, Wet, and Sick Nurses, Etc. Etc.
Also, sanitary, medical, & legal memoranda;
With a history of the origin, properties, and uses of all things connected with home life and comfort.

By Mrs Isabella Beeton."

if you read this, you win a prize, josh. did you read janet malcom's recent piece on this book in the new yorker? great article.

it doesn't seem like -that- much of a slog to read, but unfortunately nothing i pick up these days is giving way at all to my nominal efforts at reading.

housekeeping - marilynne robinson (ha! cuz my copy is in a box somewhere and i want to re-read it. how lazy is that?)

among the thugs - bill buford

the box garden - carol shields

the bullfighter checks her makeup - susan orlean

end of a mission - heinrich boll (something tells me this will go unread for a while.)

something happened - joseph heller (talk about this book on ILB has made me look for a nice copy for a while. well, i found one.)

sound-shadows of the new world - ved mehta

houseboy - ferdinand oyono

red wolves and black bears - edward hoagland

a world of profit - louis auchincloss

The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad. Paperback. US$1.29.

Collected Poems, John Berryman. Hardbound. US$17.50. (I sold other books to buy this one.)

Columbia Literary History of the United States
to the is-land - janet frame
a fanatic heart (stories) - edna o'brien
what was literature? - leslie fiedler
chopper from the inside - mark read
The New Partisan Reader - Partisan Review 1945-1953
billie dyer & other stories - william maxwell
the life to come (stories) - e.m. forster
From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity - juan flores
The Voice: Life at the Village Voice - ellen frankfort
What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Biography - larry rivers
the sugar house - antonia white
the judge - rebecca west
dodo: an omnibus - e.f. benson
S.T.P. A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones - robert greenfield
collection: neon wilderness, the man with the golden arm, a walk on the wild side - nelson algren
beyond the glass - antonia white
a pale view of hills - kazuo ishiguro
Openers II: The Lyrics Of Roky Erickson - roky erickson
The Temper Of Our Time - eric hoffer
Stories from the 60's - edited by stanley elkin
the knife thrower & other stories - steven millhauser
the sinking of the odradek stadium and other novels - harry mathews
beyond the curve (stories) - kobo abe
The Knox Brothers - penelope fitzgerald
the wind shifting west & the condor passes - shirley
ann grau
we have always lived in the castle - shirley jackson
Going Steady - pauline kael
a slipping-down life - anne tyler
the pugilist at rest - thom jones
the sweet dove dies - barbara pym
the means of escape (stories) - penelope fitzgerald
the lonely passion of judith hearne - bryan moore
because they wanted to (stories) - mary gaitskill
the bigamist's daughter - alice mcdermott
the time of our singing - richard powers
platform - michel houellebecq
stories - muriel spark
powdered eggs - charles simmons

! for like five bucks at the used store, now i just need to fine the other seven volumes in his suhrkamp werkausgabe

I am not used to buying such expensive books. But it's beautiful.

I bet Ava and Edith would like it.

I recently prurchased a single-volume edition of William Golding's To the Ends of the Earth trilogy, and a 1972 paperback of Patrick O'Brian's The Golden Ocean. I am such a sucker for books with pictures of sailing ships on the cover.

(I am trying to be different.)

The story here is that I found a bookshop not too far from my home which hadn't yet been denuded of those attractuive Harvill editions. It has now.

I don't normally read sci-fi, but I picked his previous book up because we used to drink in the same pub.

i got 'the CRISIS reader: stories, poetry, and essays from the n.a.a.c.p.'s crisis magazine' in a library sale today. also, an illustrated biography of james joyce.

e.p.thompson 'the poverty of theory', harry partch 'genesis of a music', paul griffiths history of modern classical and a.b. spellman re-print of 'four lives in the bebop business'.

apparently i have not bought any new books since tuesdsay. hooray me.

Anthony Burgess - The Wanting Seed
Albert Camus - The Plague
Gogol - Dead Souls
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary & Sentimental Education
Burgo Partridge - A History of Orgies
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov & Notes from Underground
Jostein Gaarder - Sophie's World
H.G. Wells - The Time Machine
PKD - Valis
Kafka - The Castle, a hardback of The Trial, The Metamorphosis
Plato - The Republic
Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer
R.W. Emerson - A collection of Essays & Poems
Kierkegaard - Fear & Trembling/The Sickness Unto Death

Most used, a couple of them new. I had a birthday a week ago, so this is a pretty rare occasion to be able to get so many -- and how I love buying books!

yo sterl, i'll have a better feel for it after i read another chapter or two in which he's not just summarizing goffman or durkheim, but i'm thinking maybe collins is a bad writer. and it makes the thought worse!

BUT. there's a sentence in a later chapter that goes like so:

'this is presumably true a fortiori of "fist-fucking"; there can be no tactile pleasure in the fucker's fist, whatever pleasure there may be in the fuckee's anus.'

this doesn't make him not a bad writer, but there you go.

but his first, yknow, supposedly good one?

i hefted it in my shaky consumer's hands but opted to buy doblin/bulgakov/kirino instead!

Is that a pre-Springer's Progress book? That sounds... dubious.
Yeah, I realize that I am taking a chance. Truth be told, I didn't like Springer's Progress as much as the others, but it was interesting to see the seeds of his later style, and for what I am assuming is the autobiographical material.

(Also also: if you're interested in "AB", you might find "Heaven's Promise" by Paolo Hewitt of interest: it's largely the same story, re-written in the late '80s, rare groove into acid house sort of time.)

I bought a Citizen's Advice Bureau book for £12.

My most recent purchase: The First Penguin Book of Financial Times Crosswords, for 50p. Not that impressed, tbh.

The Book of Margery Kempe, Penguin paperback, US$1.00
Varieties of Religious Experience, Wm. James, US$3.00

italo svevo - zeno's conscience
don delillo - cosmpolis (in paperback; i once owned it in hardcover but never read it before i sold it back)
robert burton - anatomy of melancholy
tzvetan todorov - introduction to poetics

erving goffman - frame analysis
c. wright mills - the power elite
e.t. bell - the development of mathematics
some other thing i don't remember

I wish I could buy books so voraciously these days.

Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, editor. $1.29.

anyway i just found a copy of Gaddis' JR for 4$ from a street vendor.

Also I bought a buncha used history books for cheap from a closing out sale type thing along with Lasch's "Heart of a Heartless World," and an issue of Race & Class on the Tamils in Sri Lanka. The best history book from the bunch is possibly "The Devil and John Foster Dulles" but the two part Hofstader-edited documents of American history series (called "Great Issues in American History") is a treat as is James Forman's "Sammy Younge, Jr."

Wait, I don't remember noticing this before -- is this any good?

the thing i forgot above was just some dumb old david hume.

Hangover Square

At Swim-Two-Birds

3 for 2

that's some amazing book stores

I'm not sure I have bought as many books in my LIFE as Josh has in the last 2 months.

josh and my reading purchases continue to have this eerie convergence.

barthelme, 40 stories
genet, thief's journal
gaddis, frolic of his own
dfw, broom of the system
lispector, passion according to GH
lispector, near the wild heart
gurganus, oldest living confederate widow tells all
haas, praise
nye, fuel
hart, how to draw new retro-style characters

of the books i bought in the last two months:

bought: 52
read parts of: 17
read most of: 4
read all of: 2

and the one i bought a second copy of as a gift i had already read completely. : )
and one i returned in exchange for more books! but i read part of it before doing so.

some of those were reference works too note!

i tend to get back to books much later than i first purchase them, which leaves me kind of vague as to when i should be concerned about not having read them. lately all the buying has been invigorating, though.

for me i think it works partly as a very slow-acting (about 4-5 years' delay, maybe?) way of changing my horizons, then situating myself within them.

oh and:

stanley cavell - philosophical passages: wittgenstein, emerson, austin, derrida
wolfgang iser - the range of interpretation

huh, i guess the social theory belongs to the latter group too.

abebooks is great but it can be a hassle trying to lower postage by aiming to buy from the one seller

one of the great things abt abe is though that the postage you are eventually charged tends to be significantly lower than the amount you were originally quoted

The Lathe of Heaven - le Guin
The Worldly Philosophers - Heilbroner
The Unprejudiced Palate - Pellegrini
Something Rotten - Fforde
The City of your Final Destination (which I bought solely for the title) - Cameron
Remembrance of Things Paris - Riechl, ed.
Never Let Me Go - Ishiguro (signed, had to have it for my read the bookers possibly project)
Animals in Translation - Grandin (should have got this from the library...)
All Over Creation - Ozeki
When the Emperor Was Divine - Otsuka (the book for the All Seattle read thing)
Winston Churchill - Keegan
The Blank Slate - Pinker

someone sent me david grossman's 'see under: love', which i had just recently added to my amazon wishlist to remind myself to buy it sometime. i don't know this person, but this would not be the first such gift i've received, although perhaps the one from someone least familiar to me. i have not eliminated the possibility that they mistakenly tried to buy something for themselves from my wishlist page. i await an email, say, from my benefactor.

ABE generally, though I have used alibris in the distant past. I've found what you said about the postage to be true, except when things are shipping from the UK - so, true for US and Canada (I'm in the US).

I've bought a few books from eBay, but not many - a beautiful copy of Max Beerbohm's The Happy Hypocrite a few years ago was the best one. I bought a Pauline Kael 1st edition as a gift for RJM - when it arrived it reeked of cat piss.

Also, that Emergence book and M.F.K. Fischer's A Cordial Water.

bertolt brecht - hauspostille (!)
wittgenstein - vermischte bemerkungen
wolfgang iser - prospecting
g. thomas thanselle - a rationale of textual criticism
gadamer - dialogue and dialectic: eight hermeneutical studies on plato
bob dylan - chronicles (now out in paperback!)
schopenhauer - the world as will and representation, vol 1 (best prefaces ever)

julian lowell coolidge - a history of geometrical methods
euclid - the thirteen books of the elements (vol. i)
jacob klein - greek mathematical thought and the origin of algebra
bunt, jones, and bedient - the historical roots of elementary mathematics
florian cajori - a history of mathematical notations
descartes - the geometry

harold bloom, ed. - romanticism and consciousness: essays in criticism
charles olson - selected writings (new directions)
john felstiner - paul celan: poet, survivor, jew
richard hofstadter - anti-intellectualism in american life

The Strange/Norrell book
Three Men in a Boat
Simon Singh's "Big Bang"
Peter Ackroyd's new one
Emma (again)

And three others I forget.

oh, crap, and i guess there are at least a hundred or two books in my office on campus. i wish i had bookshelves like that at home!

oh and i think i might own two copies of 'the flounder' now.

timothy binkley - wittgenstein's language
bertolt brecht - die gedichte in einem band
ludwig wittgenstein - philosophische untersuchungen (auf der grundlage der kritisch-genetischen edition neu herausgegeben von joachim schulte)

am surprised to find that schulte and the other nachlass trustees decided for this edition that the traditional 'part ii' to the investigations should no longer be published as part of it (i think he sez in his nachwort that in the future it will be published together with writings on the philosophy of psychology, though i don't know which of the existing volumes of those they plan to integrate it into somehow).

also despite fancy herausgegebening there is keine index! but i don't mind too much because man it's a sexy book. i wish american books were this neat.

http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521844762&ss=exc

and is very fine. This paragraph, in particular, has whetted my appetite:

Roland Barthes says that literature is found wherever words have savour, and he tells us that the French words for knowledge and savour (savoir and saveur) have the same etymology in Latin. My scholarly friends laugh at this claim, and I don’t doubt their grounds. By my ear reminds me that in Spanish the words not only share a false etymology but are still the same – ‘quién sabe?’ is ‘who knows?’, and ‘a qué sabe?’ is ‘what does it taste of? – and so I find the connection hard to shake off. Barthes continues, ‘Where knowledge is concerned, things must, if they are to become what they are, what they have been, have that ingredient, the salt of words. It is this taste of words which makes knowledge profound, fecund.’13 The knowledge Barthes has in mind is distinctly the knowledge found in literature, and I shall return to his intricate thoughts on this topic. What is particularly interesting here, and neatly clarified by the metaphor of taste, is the proposition that things have their present and past life in words, that in words they become what they are, which is already a paradox, like slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, and also become what they have been. We could translate ‘this taste of words’ as ‘this taste for words’ and thereby shift the activating of knowledge slightly from language towards the person.

Certainly better than his book about oracles.

...But it costs £45!

The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology, tr. A.K. Ramanujan, hard cover for US$8.95. The translator is an excellent (and under-recognized) poet whose work is hard to locate.

Underworld, Don Delilo, paperback, fifty cents. I may or may not like it, but at that price I couldn't lose.

wilhelm windelband - a history of philosophy, vols i and ii
fernard braudel - the mediterranean and the mediterranean world in the age of philip ii
george sarton - ancient science through the golden age of greece

Wow, I wonder what Rosemary will learn from this! Perhaps she can tell us.

I did not know till now that the whole introduction was on line! It echoes, of course, his LRB article 'What Henry Knew'.

Poems 1925-1940, by Louis MacNeice, hard cover, Random House, US$19.95. A first American edition of this collection (unfortunately) making it a little too expensive for my usual habits, but his reputation in the USA never supported a lot of cheap editions, so I'll take what I can get. I sold some superfluous books to raise a bit of cash toward this.

Should I buy The Neutral?

The sinking of the Odradek Stadium - Harry Mathews
Father Brown - GK Chesterton
The Vesuvius Club - Mark Gatiss
Murphy - Samuel Beckett
Dry Bones - Richard Beard

for a grand total of seven and a bit quid. Musn't grumble.

yay!

sterling! happily, i have figured out where my most reliable used bookstore keeps the historiography. they have a whole shelf of it! i even found some of what you recommended me (though did not buy any today).

bruno snell - the discovery of the mind
joseph charles - the origins of the american party system
richard h. pells - radical visions and american dreams
harry elmer barnes - a history of historical writing
catherine gallagher and stephen greenblatt - practicing new historicism
charles ingrao - the habsburg monarchy 1618-1815
f.e. peters - greek philosophical terms: a historical lexicon
carl e. schorske - fin-de-siecle vienna

For some reason, Barter Books always has an advert in the Ffestiniog Railway Society Journal. Why, I have no idea, because they are several hundred miles apart.

Macular Hole by Catherine Wagner, and Your Time Has Come by Joshua Beckman, both of which I read today and enjoyed greatly.

It's slightly catchier pre-xe.com currency conversion.
Mmmm, loads of old book club books!
For some reason I'm most excited about having purchased a collction of short stories by Katherine Mansfield.
On the downside, I just realized that the copy I got of Jaroslav Hasek's "The Brave Soldier Svejk" was only volume 1. It STINKS too! Seriously, I like the musty odours of old books, but this just reeks! Perhaps they got it from some old woman who'd been dead in her apartment for three months before anyone realized she was dead.

Anyhoo, I hate it when used stores only have part of a set. I almost bought "Of Human Bondage" too, before I noticed the ominous "I" right below the title.

The copy I got of Augustin's Confessions is slimy!

I think 2/3rds of my personal library has other people's names written in the front. In some cases there are even fancy personalized plates on 'em.

God I love used books!

Schizophrenia: A Very Short Introduction (These books are perfect for carrying around in a coat pocket.)

I never buy books any more. I check them out to myself from the library where I work, keep renewing them, and then feel guilty about tying them up (though I return them if I see someone has reserved them).

Animal Farm
Go Tell It On The Mountain
The Great Gatsby
Of Mice and Men
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
A Clockwork Orange
The Master and Margarita
1984
Things Fall Apart
Poet in New York
Lolita
Heart of Darkness

It cost £12.99 and I'm amazed to find I've only read 3 of them already. At that price, I'll happily give them away.

in the campus bookstore of a lutheran college in morehead, minnesota. the former, not so surprising to find there. the latter, very.

William Golding, To The Ends Of The Earth
Malcolm Pryce, Last Tango In Aberystwyth
David McKie, Jabez: The Rise And Fall Of A Victorian Rogue

Scanning the Century for £5 in Galloway and Porter
The Chambers Book of Araucaria Crosswords Vol 2 for £6.99 in Heffers

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (New York Review Books Classics) - James Hogg; Paperback

Against Nature: (A Rebours) (Oxford World's Classics) - J. K Huysmans; Paperback

Under the Volcano : A Novel (Perennial Classics) - Malcolm Lowry; Paperback

Roughing It (Mark Twain Library) - Mark Twain; Paperback

Robert Penn Warren - All the king's men
Terry Pratchett - Going postal
W. Somerset Maugham - Of human bondage
W. Somerset Maugham - Ten novels & their authors
Philip Roth - The plot against America

And a short story collection:
"New Stories For Men"! Best title ever. Alas, not the burlesque thing I half-expected when I grabbed it from the shelf.
It looks pretty good though, and will be my introduction to a number of authors that I probably ought to be familiar with, including John Fante and James Thurber.

Two books for my mum's birthday.

I thought someone had spilled coffee on the latter. Turns out it's just am unfortunate jacket design.

I also bought a couple of 50 cent used books: The Rise of Silas Lapham by Howells and Selected Poetry of Kenneth Patchen - which I need to look at more closely to decide whether I'll turn around and sell it again. I'm not a great Patchen fan.

I THOUGHT I bought "Born to Kvetch" from Strand Books, because that's what the dust jacket says but NOOOOOO it's "Bitten: True Medical Stories of Bites and Stings"

WTF????

lawrence stone, 'the past and the present revisited'
stanley fish, 'self-consuming artifacts'
wayne c. booth, 'a rhetoric of irony'
'understanding the chinese mind: the philosophical roots'
david riesman, 'the lonely crowd'

'oulipo: a primer of potential literature'

the compendium has in fact not arrived and i think my whole clever plan will in the end be foiled.

Yesterday I bought:
three Bulgakovs (Master & Margarita; Diaboliad; Black Snow) in the nice big format Harvill editions which will eventually fill my entire flat
"Departures" by EL Grant Wilson, for the beautiful John O'Connor woodcuts
"The Quest for Dr. U by Hans Carl Altmann
"The Furies" by Fernanda Eberstadt, which I bought on the strength of her "when the sons of heaven meet the daughters of the earth".

I must grab a Compendium before Atlas run out. And Maybe a "Winter Jorneys" too.

tolstoy - the gospel in brief
bakhtin and medvedev - the formal method in literary scholarship
hertz - the principles of mechanics
schopenhauer - essays and maxims

The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard.

The Confusion (Baroque Cycle, vol 2) Neal Stephenson.

Memories of My Melencholy Whores (Edith Grossman trans, natch).

W.H. Mathews, Mazes & Labyrinths: Their History & Development
Plato, Symposium
Yasser Seirawan, Play Winning Chess (which turned out to be very beginner-focused, so I might give that to a friend)

and i think some madeline l'engle and a book called something like 'teaching new histories of philosophy'

This is the third copy I've bought. The first - after seeing it on TV when I was small - is lost, in a box somewhere. The second I gave away as a Christmas present. This one is for me to read just because it's Christmas.

Timothy Garton Ash - Free World
John Pilger (ed) - Tell Me No Lies
Laurence Ress - Auschwitz

Perhaps I shouldn't have got that last one, it may cast a pall.

burgess, 're joyce'
kafka, diaries
paulo freire, 'pedagogy of the oppressed'
johan huizinga, 'the autumn of the middle ages'
the oxford book of essays

hume, a treatise of human nature; enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals
leibniz, discourse on metaphysics and the monadology
genevieve lloyd, the man of reason
sartre, the transcendence of the ego
the philosophical writings of descartes, vols 1-2

frege, the foundations of arithmetic
dedekind, essays on the theory of numbers

oh, and my oulipo compendium finally came. it's NEATO.

descartes, discourse on method and meditations on first philosophy
plato, five dialogues, second edition
aristotle, introductory readings

these are all published by hackett and somehow they managed to arrange a particularly disgusting drab green color scheme.

also another copy of the investigations! woo.

i am still waiting on my free gay science. that sentence can be parsed in ways that are only partially unintentionally amusing.

Yeah, personally I always like thinking of Nietzsche as a "gay scientist".

The last two books I purchased were Bhante Henepola Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English, and before that, Walter Tevis's The Man Who Fell to Earth (because I found it offered for $2 in a Goodwill store).

is it really that surprising?? it's almost 2006 yo!

Barney Haskyns (ed) - The Sound and the Fury: 40 Years of Classic Rock Journalism

£1 and £3 respectively in Fopp, should anyone be interested.

Also, UNCUT, in which, to my immense pleasure, Jerry the Nipper invents the word "popumentary". Unless someone else does the headlin-y bits.

and some others, i suspect

Above the River, the collected poetry of James Wright. I've been waiting for a used copy in good shape to show up. I found one. Paperbound. $13.95.

Selected Poetry of Karl Shapiro, hard cover, $12.00. Mr. Shapiro was not a ground-breaking poet, or the leading poet of his generation, or anything else that would lead him to be included in academic survey courses or even much remembered nowadays. But he was a good poet and worth spending some hours with. His suject matter is not always, or even often, Karl Shapiro. To me, this is refereshing.

Mumonkon, trans. R.H. Blyth, paperback, $4.98 (remaindered at Powell's). A classic Zen text, with commentary.

aimless, i'm sick of poems about karl shapiro, too.

Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel
Vox by Nicholson Baker
Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolf
The Manikin by Joanna Scott

and this at another used bookstore:

The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac

and this new:

The Better of McSweeneys, Vol. 1 ed. by Dave Eggers

i also bought poker chips from the bookstore but imagine these do not count

the goodbye look, ross macdonald
the sleepwalkers, hermann broch
rimbaud: complete works, selected letters
climate of fear, wole soyinka
cross channel, julian barnes
the wisdom of crowds, james surowiecki

total tab: $6.75

3 for 2, like.

mr. mless, i'm just pleased to have all the relevant historical background and speculation laid out in one place for me.

Half price special.

then i stayed up late reading the stewart (which is kind of like a math storybook for those who already know what he's talking about).

I lucked out at Goodwill and found a mint condition copy of The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman. It was US$4.99.

Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley, paperbound, 50 cents.

I'm forgetting at least one other.

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
Can't Stop Won't Stop, Jeff Chang
Baseball Prospectus 2006

Myopic in Chicago had fairly meh selection (although a rather great collection of Teach Yourself language books -- Finnish, Hausa, Hindu, etc., which all things considered I probably should have grabbed) but OK enough prices.

Boswell: Life of Johnson (hardcover, modern library, library bound)
Marco Polo: Travels
Martin Gardner: Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers
Bill Bryson: Neither Here Nor There
and the SPX Expo 2000 anthology, which was dirt cheap, and the 2001 anthology is actually really great.

iona and peter opie, the lore and language of schoolchildren
raymond queneau, we always treat women too well
luc sante, low life
nicholsen, exact imagination, late work: on adorno's aesthetics
braudel, the mediterranean, vol ii
stewart shapiro, philosophy of mathematics: structure and ontology
gustav flaubert, bouvard and pecuchet
karl barth, the epistle to the romans
alain badiou, being and event
j.p. stern, lichtenberg: a doctrine of scattered occasions
wittgenstein flies a kite
philip kerr, the berlin trilogy
cortazar, hopscotch
a copy of walden for my sister

i am confident that i have omitted a number of books.

the opie/opie book is delightful.

alan bennett, plays 2
george saunders, civilwarland in bad decline
bernard shaw, the black girl in search of god and other pieces
frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth
julio cortazar, bestiary
conor cruise o'brien, the long affair: thomas jefferson and the french revolution
'major problems in american history 1920-1945'

not:

alex owen, the place of enchantment: british occultism and the culture of the modern
'1900'
delillo, americana

some books came in the mail today!

buchner's 'lenz'
novalis' 'novices of sais'
a book with historical sources abt fdr
and one about lbj

i think frank kogan's book will arrive tomorrow!

i love buying totally "dude in the village" books from dudes in the village.

i got a margaret mead book last time.

starting on the updike now, with the usual "i feel like i shoulda gotten to this before now" feeling and it's quite nice but terribly depressing.

reading earlier updike helps me see how he & roth & c. coulda been classed together at one point, sorta like seeing how waits and springsteen (and, was it, newman??) coulda been too.

My other recent purchases are all various 50 cent paperbacks that I am gathering to have reading material on hikes this year. I only take cheap, used paperback volumes, ones I can imagine getting dirty or water-damaged, or, if I need an emergency fire-starter, volumes I could rip pages out of to burn.

Strangely enough, there is a Powell's price-label on the back of the book. It is strange to me because one of you people who shop there might have been within three feet of this book at some point a year ago.

Proust-the Captive and the Fugitive
Time Regained
Edward Said-The End of the Peace Process
Bertrand Russel-History of Western Philosophy

Penguin Reds:
The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
Lolita - Nabokov
The Day Of The Locust - Nathanial West

and Oxford World's Classics:
Le Morte d'Arthur
The Brothers Karamazov
Suetonius' Lives Of The Caesars

In Norwegian:
Stefan Zweig - Verwirring der Gefühle
Hermann Broch - Die Schuldlosen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Albion:_Poetry_of_the_Underground_in_Britain

waiting on a very exciting book on genre in plato!

with a big ol box of blaxploitation movies!

Hold tight kids, it's going to be a wonderful summer!

here are a few of the ones i can remember:

a suzuki book on buddhism
writings by zitkala-sa
martin buber on judaism
genette's 'narrative discourse' and its sequel
a couple copies of the phaedrus
the new negro, the harlem renaissance anthology (edited by a philosopher!)
centenary editions of beckett's novels!!!!
frantz fanon, black skin, white masks
a book on the trivium by a NUN
'please kill me'
some situationist stuff
merleau-ponty's 'phenomenology of perception'
'blues people'
a couple rap books
a couple feminist thought sourcebooks
zuidervaart's book on adorno's aesthetic theory

I am constantly feeling in the mood to buy more books these days. I don't know why. I do like buying books, though.

1 of: The World Is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century [Paperback]
By: Thomas Friedman
£6.59

This parcel has been delivered... NEXT DOOR!

Speaking of used books ... The other day the weirdest little critter was crawling around in a book I was reading. I've never seen anything like it. Thin, brown, and with one end all orange-colored. Hit google to look up what "bookworms" look like, but no match there. It's dead now.
Good times.

They are very good at shipping, which is our downfall.

Meanwhile:

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk - Legs McNeil

I really like this book.

I really like this book.

Mr. Jaq read it on the train home, seemed very engrossed in it. When I asked should I tag it as music history or what on LibraryThing, he said to put it under "sleaze" :D

That'll teach work to give me a pay rise.

Limits and Renewals - Kipling (v difficult, this one, don't know why)
2 books by Shena McKay, Bowl of Cherries and The Advent Calendar (?)
Flashman by G McDonald Fraser

all from the Thames Valley Hospice "thrift store".

Finally, Jaq and I have a cookbook in common. And now also a poetry book.

but another one i got, mentioned above maybe, augustine, the reader, seems quite good.

Also availbale - Green Day notebooks, AC/DC address books.

(p.s. no colon i think)
(p.p.s. i added 'read finnegans wake' to my todo list on 43things and got auto-added to a list of people who want to read a book called finnegan's wake)

(As I recall, the apostrophized Finnegan's Wake has a soft-focused picture on the cover.)

'young wittgenstein', brian mcguinness's old biography
'the loom of human language', which seems to have some kind of corny technocratic artificial-languages-for-world-peace agenda
and who knows, some other ones probably

josh have you ever done a thing on yr blog about the various things that make up "good flow" for rappers & their fans? i went looking but your search seems to be malfunctioning somewhat.

I have signed the pledge.

I am combining it with no CDs and no DVDs.

And a diet.

what does a feminist interpretation of wittgenstein look like?

'genre'
in which i discovered a typo - in a wittgenstein quote in the glossary! - not having opened it for two minutes. tsk, routledge.

and ilx poster alex thomson's new book on adorno!

adorno is kind of a chore anyway so it's not like you would have to have read him first before reading alex's book.

the translator of 'aesthetic theory' says somewhere in the intro, i think, that that book is 'almost too interesting to read' which is actually somewhat perceptive about why it's so hard to read (though it underplays the sheer opacity of it).

i think many of the language poet types take a line on the text-form-politics-praxis nexus very much in the spirit of adorno, whether they get it right or not.

Anyway maybe it's just that I'm back in academyland, but people seem to be teaching Adorno classes -- his books are among the stacks of texts at the store -- both at my school and my friend's. There is, unsurprisingly, a big Foucault grad class going on here as well, I guess. There's also the Wittgenstein course I'm in, but we just have the one book, so it doesn't make as much of an impression at the bookstore.

i would love to teach an adorno class sometime (though it would be frightening and trying). but for now i'd settle for a course with just one wittgenstein book!

an envelope from green integer came in the mail today, with sappho, bergson, and ingeborg bachmann in it. books by them. not them. from the looks of the label on the envelope douglas messerli sends them from his basement or something!

i also got a book about designing LEARNING EXPERIENCES or something.

I have been behindhand in adding to this thread. These represent about six weeks worth of stuff. Yesterday I came very close to buying the Collected Poetry of Theodore Roethke in hardcover for $15, but it was bound upside down to the covers and I decided to let it rest a while at Powell's while I simmer over it.

:-( I'm trying to find a (Dutch) copy of this cause I want to read this to Ophelia. I really need to stock up on children's books. I already got one book; The Jungle Book, and a Japanese book (don't ask, my parents live in Japan) but nothing else. Granted she's only four months but apparently this is the perfect time to start reading to her.

image and reality in the israel-palestine conflict, norman finkelstein
down and out in shoreditch and hoxton, stewart home
writing degree zero, barthes
the function of criticism, eagleton

i want to stop getting books.

yes for the baby.

the function of criticism, eagleton

is he that zizk fan?

they replaced the superfly cover of 'minima moralia' with one of those brown ones! : (

Ernst Bloch "The Principle of Hope (volume two)"
Barthes "A Lover's Discourse"

The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Calvino)

wtf, never heard of it. i'll order it pronto.

So much for not buying any books. I needed to cheer myself up.

Medieval Latin Lyrics, tr. Helen Waddell. Nice small, clean hardcover edition for $3.

Teach Yourself French for 50 cents.

The Prince, Machiavelli, in a Penguin paperback for 50 cents.

Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler. Peguin paperback, 50 cents.

Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan, W.S. Gilbert (text only, no music). A Norton paperback edition for 50 cents.

Everything in good condition and unmarked. Whoopee!

Collected Poetry of Theodore Roethke in hardcover for $15, (bound upside down to covers). Now mine. I like my poetry in hardcovers, I do.

I am alone at work for the next two weeks so hopefully i will be in reading heaven.

How's the Sontag book? Maybe I'm wrong but I always thought that it was going to be too much like Barthes so I haven't bothered (yet).

Simple pleasures.

Already read a few of these, but misplaced/gave away my old copies.

Anyway, lots of books purchased as gifts, but those intended for me include:

In the Miso Soup - Ryu Murakami
Coroner's Lunch and Thirty-Three Teeth - Colin Cotterill
A Star Called Henry and Oh Play That Thing - Roddy Doyle
Crazyladies of Pearl Street - Trevanian (I've no idea why I purchased this, especially after being so disappointed with Shibumi
The Position - Meg Wolitzer (hopefully light and entertaining)
The Way We Die Now - Charles Willeford (so now I can finish the Hoke Moseley series)
Deadly Slipper - Michelle Wan (not sure why I bought this - in retrospect, it looks kind of pulpy - really embarrassed to discover that it's already on my shelf! [Damn, that fever's higher than I thought!])
Espresso Tales - Alexander McCall Smith (because, as silly as it seems, I really like his stuff - perfect for a day when my brain is preoccupied with other things and yet I want to read something tht's not too schlocky)
Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife - Sam Savage and Michael Mikolowski (because I REALLY want to read it)
The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane - Kate DiCamillo (who wrote three of my other favorite "young adult" books: Because of Winn-Dixie, Tiger Moon, and The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread)
The Akhenaten Adventure and The Blue Djinn of Babylon - P.B. Kerr (Kerr wrote the Berlin Noir series - these two books, though are for young adults and a part of what he's calling the Children of the Lamp series)

I am glad that Vroman's is still going strong.

The True History of Chocolate
-Sophie D. and Michael D. Coe

The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
- Catherine Millet Grove

Poet of the Appetites
-Joan Reardon

Sixty Stories-Donald Barthelme
Everything and More-David Foster Wallace
The Blue and Brown Books-Ludwig Witgenstein
Signet Classic Contemporary American Poets thing edited by Mark Strand
Basic Writings-Martin Heidegger
Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp-Pierre Cabanne
Confessions of a Mask-Yukio Mishima
Brecht on Theatre-edited/translated by John Willett
My Last Breath-Luis Bunuel
The Inland Sea-Donald Richie
In The Fascist Bathroom-Greil Marcus
Magical Urbanism-Mike Davis
City of Glass-Paul Auster
The Boy Who Followed Ripley-Patricia Highsmith

I also found a real copy of the famed Winter 1962/1963 issue of Film Culture at a church booksale for $.50!

Even better, I was going to buy Bill Buford's 'Heat', but decided against it because of the price. No sooner do I get back to work than I get an e-mail from my stepmom asking if I want her to send me a copy of the book (we had talked about it on the weekend, and she runs a bookstore)!

I would have been pissed had I dropped 25 bones on it right before getting a shot at a free copy.

gilbert sorrentino, gold fools

Erotic Love Poems from India, tr. Andrew Schilling, a new hardcover, remaindered for $7.98. This title sounds too much like one of those supremely smarmy gift books a college sophomore might buy for a sweetheart. On the contrary, it is excellent. (I'll post some examples to the poetry thread.)

The Whole Motion: Collected Poems of James Dickey 1945-1992. Used paperback for $1.00. I'm not sure Dickey and I will see eye to eye about poetry, but for a buck I can meet him partway.

Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Masters. Used paperback, 50 cents. Never had to read it for college, so I might just enjoy reading it for pleasure.

The Niebelungenlied, tr. A.T. Hatto. Used Penguin paperback, $1.29. I've been exploring post-classical, pre-Renaissance European literature again lately and enjoying it.

The Travels of Marco Polo, tr. William Marsden. Used hardcover, one of those "status-on-the-cheap" reissues in faked gilt and fake leather, with cheap acidic paper. Only $1.00, though.

I now own two Atwood books. Perhaps it's time I actually try to read one. This one has "Welcome to the outrageous imagination of Margaret Atwood" printed on the back cover though. Bleh.

The Face Is Familiar - Selected Poems of Ogden Nash. Used hard cover, $2.

The Stranger, Albert Camus, tr. Matthew Ward. Used paper, $0.50.

i got TWENTY books in the mail today. lots of that is stuff for college classes next year though, eh.

john le carre, tinker tailor soldier spy
marilynne robinson, housekeeping
vito russo, the celluloid closet
simon reynolds, generation ecstasy
taschen book on minimal art

The War with Hannibal, Livy (Titus Livius), tr. de Selincourt. Penguin paperback, used, moderately marked (ech!), $3.00.
The Poems of John Gay, hardcover, used, $2.00.
Narcissus and Goldmund, Hermann Hesse, tr. Molinaro, cheap Bantam paperback, 50 cents.
The Trial, Franz Kafka, Penguin paperback, tr. Muir. $1.29.
The Stranger, Albert Camus, tr. Ward. Paperback, 50 cents.

Methinks there already is a "What have you sold recently" thread, and I really ought to show my hand on it more often. For example, the James Dickey poetry book I so recently purchased now resides at Powell's Books, where it may become the property of someone who appreciates it better. Yet, by my buying it and mentioning it here, I may leave the impression that I sit in whatever warm glow it may reflect upon me in others' eyes. 'Tain't so.

quite an ILBish list. moderately mathtastic.

Hogg! Seriously? Hogg? Seriously?

i bought 'a void' and looked at the stuff at the back in hopes it could remind me where perec was from - having said "oh he wasn't french actually, he was um i know this wait" to my companion - and saw they had the book you mentioned. i am excited - me es exerted? - that there is an edition of the exeter text easily available, tho i think it will wait until after i read a void. likewise hogg will wait until after the academic delany stuff i'm reading. (haha the shop had a copy of the new SERIOUS UNIVERSITY PRESS edition of 'neveryona', which made me laugh, the existence of. i almost bought that, too.)