Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

this month's deductions:

eric ambler, 'dirty story'
lillian ross, 'picture'
beryl bainbridge, 'the bottle factory outing'
a.l. lloyd, 'folk song in england'
various, 'economics: an anti-text'
marshall jevons, 'the fatal equilibrium'*
liu shao-chi, 'on the party'
donald moore, 'far eastern journal'
jean rhys, 'wide sargasso sea'
nabokov, 'pnin'
'guy debord and the situationist international: texts'
pound, 'the cantos'
eugene ionesco, 'the hermit'
'musical instruments of south east asia' (old oxford asia series thing)
graham greene, 'a burnt-out case'
stendhal, 'memoirs of an egotist'
pound, 'selected prose'
samuel delany, 'tales of neveryon'
anthony powell, 'afternoon men'
oct 1963 issue of analog
feb 1964 issue of galaxy
2 x penguin modern painters

at this rate i'll be out of pocket to work here /:

* one of the worst books i have ever read btw

Hilarious title though, thomp. What's that folk song book like? I strongly recommend Reg Hall's I Never Played To Many Posh Dances, if you haven't read it.

In fact, is that Bert Lloyd's book? I meant to read it ages ago, but never got hold of it.

I have also bought today, The World of Jonathan Swift, with essays by Pat Rogers, Irvin Ehrenpreis and Geoffrey Hill, for £5 and The Judas Window by Carter Dickson for a friend who's just had a baby and who was requesting detective fiction of that period while she's on maternity leave. £3.

Must stop.

got mildly drunk last night and was thinking about how old goriot was such a great book imo and why don't i read more balzac. so i got these three cheap on amazon: colonel chabert, cousin bette, the wrong side of paris.

I gave a large part of my library (in reality less than 10%, and probably quite a bit less) the boot last weekend. Paul McCartney's Many Years From Now arrived yesterday, which I have assured myself is to be the last new arrival this side of Christmas.

As the other participant, must say the London book-shop + pint expedition was a good Sunday afternoon. Came away with a slim volume of Swinburne (didn't have a portable selection before), The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden and the best of Elizabeth David (driven by slightly delusional logic: 'I like cooking. I should cook more. This'll bring an inspiring element of literary snobbery to kitchen, then I'll cook more.' RONG. )

Gilbert Highet, Poets in a Landscape. Boring title, great book. I see NYRB will bring out a new edition this spring, but I bought the amazingly solid, built-like-a-tank 1957 Knopf edition, the kind they don't make anymore.

Incidentally, having mentioned John Atkinson Grimshaw upthread - three of his paintings are in the window of Robert Green, a fine art dealer on Bond Street, if you're in London and happen to be passing.

it is the bert lloyd book, and i haven't read it yet. ho hum

"Uranium Frenzy: Boom and Bust on the Colorado Plateau" by Raye Ringholtz
"The Boat" by Nam Le
"In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire," Mike Davis
"Complete Short Stories," Graham Greene
"Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle east, and the Caucasus" by Robert Kaplan
"The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia" by Lutz Kleveman

charity book fair!

harvard classics: plato, epictetus, marcus aurelius (i doubt i'll ever read this) and don quixote part 1
balzac - lost illusions
dorothy l sayers - 4 novel collection
stephen king - nightmares and dreamscapes
franzen - the corrections
the civilization of the middle ages
stephen jay gould - the mismeasure of man

I really, really enjoyed The Corrections. I thought it might be a struggle at first, but it turned into a real pleasure.

Dropped in on Portobello Road Oxfam Shop over lunch. Zoom by Simon Armitage, Earthquake Weather by August Kleinzahler.

Sold a bunch and bough for Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales (plus half a pint's worth of beer money), which sounds way more appealing than Gulag Archipelago, although yes I'll probably end up reading a volume and hating myself...

hating myself...

It goes with the territory, amirite?

I enjoyed The Gulag Archipelago, though it had turned into a bit of a slog by about page 500. Persevered, and then couldn't believe it when I got to the end only to find out it was the first part of a trilogy.

Office haul of free books: We, Three Tales by Flaubert, Essays of Elia (awful feeling I have two copies of this already, but this is a prettyish Hesperus thing), Pushkin's Tales of Belkin, a small biography of Pushkin and Kitty Hauser's Bloody Old Britain, about pioneer of aerial photography.

Popular Fallacies was excellent, off that, I should get Essays of Elia out of the library again.

I went in the LRB bookshop and saw lots of NYRB titles at 20% off, so I got Platonov's The Foundation Pit : the ed has a detailed intro, an appendix with translated passages deleted by the author and 10-15 pages of extensive notes. Love the cover.

Georgics, Virgil, translated by David Ferry, bilingual edition, new (remaindered) paperback, $7.

Office haul of free books: We, Three Tales by Flaubert, Essays of Elia (awful feeling I have two copies of this already, but this is a prettyish Hesperus thing), Pushkin's Tales of Belkin, a small biography of Pushkin and Kitty Hauser's Bloody Old Britain, about pioneer of aerial photography.

What wonderful office is this? At mine the free book table is an old Dan Brown and 'Moonwalk: the Michael Jackson Story'.

What wonderful office is this? At mine the free book table is an old Dan Brown and 'Moonwalk: the Michael Jackson Story'.

I do the sub-editing for (job-keeping circumlocution time) the customer magazine of a major British bookshop chain. Lots of books come in, but they're mostly of the Brown/Moonwalk variety. This was a good batch.

(I've been tempted to start an ILB thread where I post extracts of unedited shit from the magazine, but professional principle wins out against office boredom & cheap lols.)

Probably wise, but if you ever give in, I look forward to those cheap lols.

Bght a Kindle! I think I'll order all the books by Dostoyevski first. For about 4 dollars. :-)))

Allow me to crow a bit. A year ago I bought a copy of Infinite Jest for $1. It was pretty banged up, so by the time I finished reading it, it was quite literally falling apart in my hands. Today I bought a replacement copy that is in good shape... for $1!

latest ones (prolley a month ago):

Balzac, The History of the Thirteen
Balzac, A Murky Business

I'm facsinated by Richard Nixon: Alone In The White House (by Richard Reeves). I'm at the part where, in 1969, Pres. Nixon begins to aggressively woo "the politically powerful white middle class" by attacking those "who oppress( ) them with high taxes, spiraling inflation and enforced integration, while rewarding the very poor and very rich." I'm sure this strategy isn't unique, but Nixon -- by actively pursuing George Wallace's constituency -- seemed to raise these wedge-issues into an art form (in ways the GOP has successfully exploited over the next 30 years):

Three days later on October 19, at a $100-a-plate Repulican fund-raiser in New Orleans, Vice President Agnew, delegated by the President but reading words he has mostly written himself, began the hard-hitting rhetorical phase of Nixon's dividing of America, saying "The recent Vietnam Moratorium is a reflection of the confusion that exists in America today . . . A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals."

* * * *

The next night, at another $100-a-plate dinner that drew twenty-four hundred guests in Jackson, Mississippi, (Agnew) continued, this time with help from Safire and Buchanan back in the White House: "For too long the South has been punching the bag for those who characterize themselves as liberal intellectuals . . . We have among us a glib, activist element . . . nattering nabobs of negativism . . . snobs for most of them disdain to mingle with the masses who work for a living . . . . Americans cannot afford to divide over their demagoguery -- or be deceived by their duplicity -- or to let their license destroy liberty. We can, however, afford to separate them from our society -- with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel."

I imagine Agnew meant to say "For too long the South has been a punching bag . . .," but what's quoted above is the way his words appear in the text. The book is a cold look into policial expediency and calculation.

For my kindle: Dostoyevski (entire oeuvre), Chesterton (same),... Oh and Charlaine Harris

Getting an e-reader looked quite tempting when I was browsing Amazon for Chesterton books and got a damn "lol on kindle u can get his complete works for a buck o_O" message. Of course, it'd be free on other readers.

Err, anyways, my most recent purchases:
Thomas Berger - Who is Teddy Villanova?
Christopher Benfey - American Audacity: Essays North and South
Leonardo Sciascia - Equal Danger

Free on Kindle too if you go to manybooks.net.

i bought books for myself today! i never do anymore cuz i'm always just buying stuff for my store. but the used bookstore around the corner is having a three day sale (50% off everything!) and i thought i'd load up on some sci-fi. their sci-fi section is really big.

here's what i got. a mix of hardcovers and paperbacks:

the ice people - rene barjavel (hardcover)

an alien heat - michael moorcock (hardcover)

the hollow lands - michael moorcock (hardcover)

masters of atlantis - charles portis (hardcover. really wanted this! don't think i would have thought to look in the sci-fi section for it.)

earthworks - brian w. aldiss (hardcover)

satan's world - poul anderson (hardcover)

2 big fat softcover phil k. dick short story collections - the eye of the sibyl and second variety

space tug - murray leinster (paperback)

talents, incorporated - murray leinster (paperback)

the man who ate the world - frederik pohl (paperback)

destiny doll - clifford d. simak (paperback)

and two penelope fitzgerald trade paperbacks that i haven't read: innocence and the beginning of spring

35 bucks for everything. i was happy.

man, if you are ever looking for some andre norton paperbacks that store is the place for you. they must have over 50 norton paperbacks. pretty crazy.

love the aldiss cover

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3444/3370635777_a1010506b4_m.jpg

Everyone I know who loves Charles Portis hated Masters Of Atlantis but maybe you will lead the way to a new appreciation, skot.

hmmm, we will see. i just never see it anywhere and i'm always looking for his books.

Haha, I have a copy of that Aldiss book, but with THIS unfortunate cover: http://i27.tinypic.com/33f5no8.jpg
Hoo-boy. I haven't read it yet. Come to think of it, all my Aldiss books have dreadful covers. Most ludicrous must be Who Can Replace a Man?. And then there's Greybeard! (Notice that the bird has a MOUTH! Cuzza atomic testing, y'see)

Oh, but that's certainly large enough.

Holy cats! 'Who Can Replace...' has at least a certain demented style to it, but that 'Greybeard' cover is woeful. Although mine just has a generic hover car flying through a desert on the front.

awesome charity book sale at my university saw me score 18 v. high quality books (only one with any kind of annotations inside, for example) in the general area of continental philosophy for £23. Total new Amazon price: £450. Shit yeah. Choice cuts include Lyotard's 'Signed, Malraux' (hardcover), Eric Blondel's 'Nietzsche: The Body and Culture' (also hardcover, and a 7100% saving on Amazon's price), and, more sentimentally less value-wise, nice old Penguin classics editions of 'Beyond Good and Evil' and Augustine's 'Confessions' and a cutely shaped Stanford University Press edition of Derrida's 'Of Hospitality'.

Ha, I had that same edition of Earthworks as a lad. For some reason English sf paperbacks were plentiful in my city at the time.

finally bought wise blood!!!

dickens - great expectations (for the winter, which around here is = 50 degrees)
alan furst - red gold
jg farrell - troubles (read halfway through a library copy, it felt like a keeper, so i bought a copy for myself)

Elsa Morante - History: A Novel (de-fucking-lighted to get hold of this one)
Dave Hickey - Air Guitar
Jocelyn Brooke - The Orchid Trilogy
Genet - Querelle of Brest (have read this, but who could resist the novel in the Panther ed. cover in really good condition?)

Come to think of it, all my Aldiss books have dreadful covers.

I believe it was the NEL edition of The Airs of Earth that had a cover that I liked. I can't find it on the web though.

Ah yes here it is.

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/ciu/65/8a/2d55c27a02a0daf65e135110.L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber
Thank you Library of America for giving me an alternative to brutally priced copies of Negative Space.

I thought Negative space was available for, like, 10 quid or so?

But I read about that collection and it seemed way more comprehensive.

Hey! London! And especially SOuth East London! Which may mean only xyzzz and me at the moment but WHATEVS: I dunno if I can make this because I have to be at a GAME OF FOOTBALL in ESSEX but this has been good before and I see no reason for it not to be good again and with all that goodness sloshing about it's a good cause too: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/events_details.asp?ID=1402 (Blackheath Amnesty Book clearance, this coming Saturday, for those of you who are click-averse).

Oh that sounds excellent, Tim! In case you can make it let me know and we can meet up.

Thanks for the tip.

Oh, that does sound good. I need to figure out what my Saturday looks like, but I might be able to make that. If so, a drink def a possibility Xyzzzz, if not earlier in the week. Gamaliel, you about?

Negative Space used to be about £10, but went oop & has been £30-50 2nd hand on Amazon/ABE for the last year at least. May have been searching badly, and never got lucky in a bookshop. But yes, the new volume is a more-than-adequate replacement.

Bloody working again innit, otherwise I'd be along like a shot. Also, got to recruit myself for The Fall in Oxford on Sunday. A book binge might have proved too much for my frail constitution.