Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

Whimper.

How far away was this? Why was I not told?

this is on martha's vineyard, chris! i believe you are as far as jaq, no? and yeah, i made out like a bandit today when everything was free. and i was in such a book fog that i completely forgot about the art/architecture/photography section at the front of the gymnasium! oh well. next time. i'm not greedy. much.

Well, no, I am in NYC for the summer.

ah, a mere stone's throw away!

dennis cooper - try

if you haven't read this yet you're in for ahem a "treat" the rockcritic character is beyond perverse. on the whole I found this book profoundly moving and utterly twisted...long after I thought there were no taboos left to be violated "try" proved me wrong (again)

nice haul scott. i love brian moore, haven't read that one tho.

In between library runs lately I've bought a few used paperbacks.

patricia highsmith -- the blunderer

kingsley amis -- i like it here

bruce chatwin -- on the black hill

shiva naipaul -- north of south: an african jounrey

Latest batch is:

<I>The Procedure</I>. Harry Mulisch.
<I>Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books</I>. Marcel Benabou.
<I>After Many a Summer Dies the Swan</I>. Aldous Huxley.
<I>Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing</I>.
<I>Snake Catcher.</I> Naiyer Masud.
<I>Crooked Little Vein</i>. Warren Ellis.
<i>Curses</I>. Kevin Huizenga.

Not sure if i'm in the mood to read any of them right now though. (Except Curses.) Too fickle.

The Brian Moore (Colour of Blood) is really good - read it on the weekend.

That Benabou book is one of my favorites.

It is of course mentioned in Bartleby & Co, by Enrique Vila-Matas which I recommend to you, Chris. I tried to take it out of the library, but they only had another called something like Get Rid Of This Book Quick!, so I reserved that instead.

Eager to read that Benabou. It'll be my first of his.

Yes, Bartleby & Co. is fantastic. Montano's Malady i'm still working on, as i don't want the two books conflated in my memory. The friend who recommended it is not so keen on it as he was on the first. He's slathering for Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Anyone have any idea when that Borges biography by Bioy Casares is going to make it into English translation? although i picked up the Williamson one, i have no intention of reading it. Him hanging with Bioy Casares and Ocampo slagging everyone seems more fun... at least in small doses. The TLS review interested me.

I bought one of those Aberystwyth detectivey stories. I imagine it will sit in my book mountain until I donate it to Oxfam.

From neighborhood junk store:
Jean Cocteau - Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film
William J. Schnell - 30 Years a Watchtower Slave
Anna Deavere Smith - Fires in the Mirror
Atul Gawande - Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
C. Vann Woodward - The Strange Career of Jim Crow

'no one belongs here more than you' by miranda july. just arrived and i can't wait to start reading it.

online book-buying will be the death of me:
spitting off tall buildings - dan fante
the heart is a lonely hunter - carson mccullers
the magus - john fowles
mister dog: the dog who belonged to himself - margaret wise brown

the last one is a long-lost childhood favourite. i didn't realise they were still printing it, till i mentioned it to a friend and he searched it out on abebooks for me.

I sold some books to Powell's Books in July and had amassed a whopping $33 in trade credit, so today I went down and overspent it. My purchases were:

Poems and Translations, Ezra Pound, in the hardcover American Library edition. This has the works: 1200pp of poems, including his uncollected chaff, plus a chronology, notes and index (those indispensible aids to time wastage). It was in great shape for a mere $32. Now I can sell my paperback edition of Personae and recoup a couple of dollars on this extravagence.

The Journal of Cardan: Together with The Quest of the Opal and The Probelm of Form, J.V. Cunningham, for $5.95. A hardcover with dust jacket, most probably a first printing, because Cunningham is presently so obscure. These are essays by a mostly-forgotten, but quite good poet.

Collected Poems in English, Joseph Brodsky, 'first edition', hardcover with dust jacket, in excellent condition for $9.95. Flipping through this he seemed to have some interesting licks - good enough to justify the Nobel he won.

Collected Poems, Stevie Smith, in an xlib hardcover with dust jacket, Oxford U. Press, for $7.95. Not a solid favorite poet of mine. She wavers between the faux-naive and the genuinely charming. The price sold me on this one.

I made some other thrift shop purchases lately:

Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, V.S. Naipul, hardcover, dust jacket, $6.00.

One World, Ready or Not, Wm. Greider, trade paper in good shape, $4.00. I've read it already, but I kind of bought it as a tribute to Greider, who I still think has sussed out the tenor of the times better than far more celebrated pundits.

The Shaping of a City: Business and Politics in Portland, Oregon 1885 to 1915, E. Kimbark MacColl, trade paper, $1.00. This is a local history of our highly venal and typically American founders.

my order for 'mister dog: the dog who belonged to himself' just got cancelled :(

That Pound dealie includes the Cantos?

That's not a bad price on that Portland book.

No Cantos included. You need 45 more box tops for that. But it has his translations of Confucius and Sophocles and the Noh plays, etc.

Oh hey even better really. 1200pp without the Cantos? Damn!

Why do I get myself into these situations?

Anyway, I just bought another 1150pp. of scintillating prolixity that I shall someday feel obligated to read: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West, in a massive Penguin paperback edition that would choke an anaconda, for $5. Shoot me now.

Also, I bought Collected Poems of James Joyce, a much slimmer read, for $1.29.

Presumably you have finished the Joyce poems by now, at least.

I keep seeing that Rebecca West book! I had never heard of it, but it keeps popping up in bookstores. I suppose $5 would have been pretty tempting.

I met up with Ned in Powell's yesterday but we did not stay long enough for me to be tempted to buy anything. This is probably a good thing!

It seems odd to me that the foremost inventor of twentieth-century modernist fiction wrote poetry as a pastiche of Elizabethan lyricism and Celtic Twilight romanticism. It's hard to say where he would have gone with it, had he stuck to poetry. He wasn't terribly bad at it, but I suspect he made the right choice in abandoning it.

Book purchase or no, I imagine Ned beamed upon you. Being as he is the patron saint of ILE, I imagine Ned beams aplenty upon his flock. I have been the recipient of one or two electron-composed nedbeams. May he live and prosper.

Poems: New and Collected: 1957-1997, Wislawa Szymborska, hard cover, $17.95. (I can't decide if it was a remainder or a used book in like-new condition.) I admire her wit. She manages to be both astringent and cheerful.

I found a 1983 Pocket Penguin edition of Edmund Crispin's Fen Country for $2 on Friday. Yay.

i bought "the art of alex gross" (signed) for my best friend and; he bought "the raw shark texts" for me.

I just bought a copy of David Peace's Tokyo Year Zero, based partly on teh Britishes rave reviews of The Damned Utd in the archives.

david markson's detective novels. (the cashier told me he also wrote a western, albeit one that is out of print. he also gave me a copy of something called 'context: a forum for literary arts and culture', my curiosity about the topic of out-of-print markson novels apparently having qualified me as someone who would be interested in such things.)

the frank miller designed edition of gravity's rainbow.

'modern dramatists: gilbert and sullivan', by charles hayter.

psmith journalist and all omnibuses containing it seem to be out of print. bah.

I don't think I'm ever going to get around to finishing Markson's Down In Mexico novel, so I haven't bothered going near the detective novels.

Isn't Context an organ of The Dalkey Archive?

I treated myself! A good hour of browsing in a lovely dusty old second-hand-bookstore turned up the following:

A Frolic of His Own - William Gaddis
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
Summer in Baden-Baden - Leonid Tsypkin
The Barracks Thief & Selected Stories - Tobias Wolff
Authority & the Individual - Bertrand Russell
Mr Palomar - Italo Calvino
Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar

Plus a $3 copy of Antony and Cleopatra since it's my favourite and I did't own a copy.

The Psmith omnibus is in print in the UK, I believe.

I have been buying books for school. They are schoolish. But "The World's Major Language" looks pretty hot.

dirk gently compilation Adams

hhg2g hardback Adams

thousandfold thought l scott bakker fantasy

Watchmen graphic novel

god delusion Dawkins

made in the USA Bryson

to kill a mockingbird

all cos i got to go book shopping in london and i needed to get presents.

A Mencken Chrestomathy, selected writings of H.L. Mencken, in a hard cover edition from its first printing, back in 1952. Approx 650 pp. I paid $6 for it. Now I'm set up for life for all my miscellaneous Mencken needs.

Mark Twain's Speeches; it's an orphaned volume from one of those Mark Twain's Works Authorized Edition sets that reproduce his signature (none genuine without it!) on the front cover. This one has a pale yellow cover with marroon and phony gilt decorations. I paid $2.99. He was a fantastic speechifer, by all accounts.

We Pointed Them North: Reflections of a Cowpuncher, by E.C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott. A cowpoke's memoirs, issued in a nice hardcover edition from The Lakeside Press in 1991. I paid $2.99 for this, too. Americana, you know. Like the snuff boxes in the Senate.

Byrne, Anthony Burgess, new(?) hardcover copy for $7.95.

The Exclusions of a Rhyme, J.V. Cunningham, excellent condition paperback for $5.95. This book of poetry serves as Cunningham's 'collected works'. He was best known as an epigrammatist, but all his poetry shows a condensed and compact form, with a sharp intellect behind them. I may toss one or two onto the poetry thread for inspection.

Aimless, didn't you already read Byrne, and report on it across several threads?

Some used books yesterday:
Frank Norris - McTeague (thanks to the old ILB, innit. The random pages I read didn't look too hot, but I'll give it a proper whirl)
Conan Doyle - Tales of Unease (It's got "twilight excursions" from "Doyle's vivid imagination for the strange". Gotta be good)
Maxim Gorky - On Literature
Benedetto Croce - Aesthetics (A Norwegian translation that only includes the theory part)

And some new stuff last week:
Tommy Bernhard - Cutting Timber: An Irritation
Donny Barthelme - Sixty Stories & Forty Stories (The foreword by Dave Eggers reinforces the impression that I must never read Eggers' books)

I just bought McTeague as well.
Also:
Patrick Marnham - The Man Who Wasn't Maigret
William Carlos Wiliams - The Doctor Stories
Richard Yates - Young Hearts Crying.

JR (&tb), yeppers.

I bought a 1947 Teach Yourself Russian book. It is kinda gorgeous. I do not really plan to learn Russian but I hang out with all these Slavicists and actual Russians and I felt, you know, obliged. Except then one of the actual Russian profs laughed at its old-skool pedagogical technique, which I think might actually be better suited for someone like me.

Although then I noticed that it waits until lesson, like, 10 to give you verbs, and then it gives you the entire verb system at once, seemingly. So maybe it is a bit crazy.

Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch in a brand new, remaindered hardcover copy that I found on Alibris for $11.00, which price includes the shipping.

Selected Satires of Lucian as translated into English by Lionel Casson, hardcover, no dj, unmarked, for $8.95 at Powell's.

Rising Up and Rising Down: Some thoughts on violence, freedom and urgent means ny William T. Vollmann. This is a one volume abridgment of a seven volume work, as a remaindered trade paperback, for $7.95 at Powell's.

Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer by Andy Russell, used hardcover, $1.00. This is just some random book I ran across in a used book store, published in 1971, when wilderness wandering books were enjoying a small vogue.

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975, used paperback in fairly decent shape, $8.95.

The Writings of William James: A comprehensive edition, edited by John J. McDermott. New trade paperback, 850 pp., for $16.95. I just felt the need to have more Wm. James available on my shelf to read when I want a brilliant and practical writer to spend time with.

My copy of Chomsky's "At War With Asia" (ordered from Haymarket Books, no less) arrived with the parcel package ripped open. Does that mean I'm under surveillance?

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

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

Sometimes you just hafta pay for yer books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For birthday/Christmas:

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