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.

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.)

and two travelogues:
william least half-moon - blue highways
lesley hazelton - driving to detroit

i really want to get the new atwood short stories.

'The Night in Question' - Tobias Wolff, which I've already read but I have a slight hero worship thing with Wolff and it was only $8 in hardcover.

Also Joseph Mitchell's 'Up in the Old Hotel' and Lorrie Moore's 'Like Life'. Never read anything by those two but I hear they're great.

There were several different versions; mine had some word or other in red, instead of "house" in blue. But there was a "full color" version, allegedly, though I've never seen it (not that I've really been looking so closely). I have seen the no-color version, though.

so uh i guess i gotta pretend i wasn't excited that he had a new book out. that excitement has kind of worn off now, anyway.

Most recent purchases:

Strange Piece of Paradise - Terri Jentz
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man - Henry Louis Gates
Karfka Was the Rage - Anatole Broyard
At Weddings and Wakes - Alice McDermott

Is there a "Most recently borrowed from the library" thread?

The Curious Life of Robert Hooke
Wales Half Welsh
A Traveller's History of Scotland.

I know who previous owner is!!

from the used book store
Bright Star of Exile: Jacob Adler and The Yiddish Theater

nik cohn, awopbopaloobopabopbamboom (0.97)
ellroy, the black dahlia (2.97)
ferdie pacheco, m.d., the 12 greatest rounds of boxing: the untold stories (2.97)

Also, A Child's Christmas in Wales, because I love Thomas and it was also cheap.

(also 'i thought i should own a copy' and 'i wanted to read it eventually')

I guess I fail at American cultural references.

I see I have not updated here since October of 2006. It would be impossible to go back and recalll every purchase since then, but I can mention these:

Light Verse and Satires, Witter Bynner, hard cover w/ dust jacket. $10. The master mind behind the Spectra hoax - an episode every reader of modernist poetry should be familiar with. He was also a middling fine poet in the non-satirical vein.

Collected Poetry Mark van Doren, hard cover, 1942 printing, $10. Another lesser light, but quite a worthwhile poet from the modernist heyday. More traditional, more structured and less experimental than the thoroughly admired modernists.

I am sure I bought at least a dozen others, but they are upstairs and I can't be arsed to go look for them right now.

In a few words, Bynner and a buddy decided to invent a new modernist school of poetry that satirized the imagists, futursists and other assorted "-ists" who were springing up like toadstools at the time. They got roaring drunk, wrote a manifesto and cranked out a few dozen poems under pseudonyms: Annie Knish and Emanuel Morgan.

They printed a suitably raggedy little magazine to launch the hoax and then planted copies of it among the critical sheep they wanted to shear. I forget all the details, but, like any successful hoax, it was tremendously successful embarassment to everyone who took the bait. The sweeping revolutionary triumphalism of the manifesto was especially deft.

* A whole bunch of cheap and cheerful Edwardian/Victorian ghost story collections put out by Wordsworth Editions.
* 2 NYRB Classics: Kenneth Fearing's 'Clark Gifford's Body' and a collection of novellas by Eileen Chang with a title I forget just now.
* 'Fantomas' (1910ish French pulp thriller) and 'Excellent Women' by Barbara Pym (both new Penguin Classics)
* Sheridan le Fanu's 'Uncle Silas'
* Elizabeth Bowen's 'The House in Paris'
* 2 vols of collected 'Walking Dead' comic
* 'God: A Biography' by Evelyn Waugh's grandson
* 'Waxwings' by Raban, since I liked 'Surveillance' so much

Ship of Fools, Brant, used trade paperbound, $0.50. Medieval german best seller.

First Principles, Herbert Spencer, used trade paper (in like-new shape), $0.50. Spencer was amazingly influential in the last half of the 19th century, but is fading into obscurity. I will browse this a bit out of curiosity and then sell it.

Russian Short Stories Penguin Classics. Love the cover.

Abundance of Katherines John Green. YA book the blogosphere has been fairly enthused about this author

Shriek: An Afterword - Jeff VanderMeer. Stepping out tentatively into the mindspace of another adult fantasy author.

Wallerstein -- The Modern World System I
Bloch -- The Ile-de-France
Norman F. Cantor -- Inventing The Middle Ages

-- Sterling Clover (s_clover), Wednesday, 25 May 2005 00:30 (2 years ago

How was the Wallerstein book?

Books we are in the process of unloading.

I haven't looked to see if I rag on that Norman Cantor book above, but it's... problematic.

I read it some time ago so I don't recall it in any fine detail, but why 'problematic'?

motherless brooklyn - j lethem

christopher isherwood diaries 1939 - 1960 (reading, so amazing)
christopher isherwood diaries 1960 <
germinal
absalom, absalom

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I've been avoiding this book for years until the irreverent blogger at Midnight Bell convinced me that it might be something worth spending time with.

Shit. That's me. Arethusa are you still around? Was it okay? Sorry if I helped waste your time.

My recent purchases;
Berryman's Shakespeare
ABE'd some stray volumes of the full Golden Bough.
That new selected later Ashbery.
Everyman collected novels of Flann O'Brien (faintly regret - have copies of most of them, so have paid over the odds for a nice copy of The Dalkey Archive that's too bulky really for my bag.)

I like the cut of your jib, woofwoofwoof.

Thank you Aimless. Jib admiration back at you. I'd never heard of the Spectra thing before I looked upthread (Angry Penguins is the big poetry hoax on my literary map, poss a UK/US divide?) and that is the kind of information I like to have.

Oh, Cantor has a very particular take on how history should be done, which seem a bit narrow-minded at times. When he's writing about the historians he likes, he's fine. And it's certainly an interesting way to approach the topic.

Howard Brenton: plays

Sarah Daniels: more plays

Frank Kermode: Pleasure & Change

a book on the Abbey Theatre

a book on modernist design

Home Recording Handbook!

Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum (I have never read anything by him before. Is there some sort of online reader's guide/encyclopedia like there are for some of Pynchon's books? It might come in handy.)

All the Shah's Men

Jorge Borges - Collected Fictions (I've read Ficciones several times, it's one of my favorite books. I've skipped ahead to The Aleph, and then I'm planning to go back to the beginning and go all the way through)

Always picking up on the cheap:

Everyman Paperbacks (they really look better than Penguins) of Boccaccio's 'Decameron' (Vol2) and Voltaire's 'Candide and Other stories'.

Norman Stone 'Europe Transformed 1878-1919'
Peter Mansfield 'The Arabs'
Gene Wolf 'The Claw of the Conciliator'
Joanna Russ 'The Female Man' (I can't find the ilx thread where this bk is talked about)
Moshe Lewin 'Lenin's Last struggle'
Mishima 'The temple of Golden Pavillon' (gorgeous cover from Charles E. Tuttle, def keeping this mind when looking for more from him), 'Forbidden Colours' by him also (Penguin pk)
Ursula LeGuin 'The Dispossessed', 'Left Hand of Darkness'
James Blish 'They Shall Have Stars'
Frank Herbert 'The Eyes of Heinsenberg'
Octavia Buttler 'The Patternmaster'
Chaucer 'Trolius and Criseyde' (abridged version, has a v gd looking intro that appears to go into some depth into old English)

All SF bks have the old covers, btw -- I judge bks by their covers, generally.