Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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