Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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.