Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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