Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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.

So I went and saw woof there.

Picked up:

A volume of classical Russian poetry
Henry Green - Living
Richard Hughes - A High Wind in Jamaica
William Empson - Seven Types of Ambiguity

Elsewhere:

Junichiro Tanizaki - The Makioka Sisters
Walter Abish - In the future Perfect
Germaine Greer - Shakespeare
Janet Malcolm - Two Lives

The Green, Hughes and Tanizaki are great; haven't read the others (though from all accounts the Greer is completely bonkers)

Why would the Greer be 'bonkers'?!

My internet connection has been very spotty for a couple of weeks now, during which time I bought some books - exactly which ones I am now a bit weak on recalling. I do know I bought this:

The Athenian Agora, a guide published by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 1990 (the specific authors are unattributed), a used paperback for $4. It still has the Greek tax stamp affixed to the back cover.

This is the ultimate sort of guidebook for an ancient Athens wonk (such as myself). It describes, and often reconstructs, every ancient structure built in the agora from about 800 BC onwards, with aerial photos, floor plans, architectural details, contemporary references, and various artifacts found during excavation.

That book sounds rad.

more charity shop fun, god knows when i am actually going to read all of this (reading 1 book for every 3 i buy atm):

Nietzsche- Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Chekhov- A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire (best 25p I've ever spent)
Twain- Can-cans, Cats & Cities of Ash
Steinbeck- Grapes of Wrath

all together cost £2.50 - only read 1 of them though.

Why would the Greer be 'bonkers'?!

Isn't that the one full of completely made-up biographical information about Anne Hathaway? Massive amounts of detail drawn from the tiniest scraps of ambiguous information?

Ah, no, ignore me, I'm thinking of Greer's 'Shakespeare's Wife', it seems.

Buying things I can't afford and don't have time to read. Recently.

Roberto Bolaño - 2666
Roberto Bolaño - Nazi Literature in the Americas
Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

among others. Still have an entire shelf of 20 + books that I have yet to read/am partway through.

I paid my sad farewells to Borders today. I was not alone - the place was stuffed. They are offering 20% off everything for three days, presumably as a way of running down stock before closing for good.

Sadly, I was in a rush and had only a few minutes to spare, which I used for a surgical strike on the Philip Roth section, yielding:
Zuckerman Unbound
The Anatomy Lesson
My Life As A Man
The Facts
Not bad going.

Less wise was my impulse snatching of The Cambridge Companion to Roth as I left the area, which was unpriced and came in at a hefty £16 (less discount) when I reached the till. I feel like I undid a lot of good work there.

Sold a bunch for:

Ignzaio Silone - Bread and Wine
Erich Auerbach - Literary Language and its Public

am pretty curious about the facts since reading this (last few paragraphs).

Thanks, that makes it sound very intriguing. I sympathise with the author. I'm not getting the hang of the various (what's the plural of 'meta'?) metae in Roth. I love these books when I treat them as straight stories, but that's been difficult to do with the last couple I've read.

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.

Actually you can get a ton of books for free at http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page (for your Kindle and other ereaders). This includes Chesterton. I also, uh... umm.... downloaded quite a few off Vuze.

I love these books when I treat them as straight stories, but that's been difficult to do with the last couple I've read.

ha, yeah - i think this probably excludes me from enjoying like half of roth's oeuvre but i prefer the roth novels that can be read from front to back without any intertextual knowledge. this includes a few that zuckerman quietly narrates and excludes those requiring a knowledge of israeli foreign policy. but then i've never read the counterlife.

i bought that american hybrid anthology in waterstone's 3-for-2-on-all-stock offer. and two fantasy novels. sigh.

Have always bought more books than I can possibly hope to read. Recently though, I've taken out a new subscription to Granta, bought a whole load of Penguin popular classics (can't resist the clean green covers!) inc. Vanity Fair, Northanger Abbey, Tender is the Night, War and Peace (well, really!), Phantom of the Opera and others...

I paid my sad farewells to Borders today. I was not alone - the place was stuffed. They are offering 20% off everything for three days, presumably as a way of running down stock before closing for good.

I wish Borders in Australia would go out of business--they're nasty price-gougers, adding 10% to the recommended retail price of almost every book they sell.

Some of Borders' stuff is definitely overpriced here - but it was nice to have an alternative to Waterstones in Glasgow...

Londoners might want to know that Gower Street Waterstone's is on form right now. They've got about 30 NYRB titles in the remainder section (including, off the top of my head, Invention of Morel, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, some Patrick Leigh Fermor, a couple of Zwiegs, Ringolevio, lots more). Prices aren't awesome, but fair.

Also, their second-hand section is having another half-marked-price sale, which is what led me to post here: picked up lots of De Quincey, volume of How's commentary on Herodotus, Florio's translation of Montaigne, Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity. It was very good for slightly shabby old editions of odd works.

The Amnesty Int sale mentioned upthread was good, and I was sorry that I had to rush it. Picked up a few random bits and pices - Oliver VII by Antal Szerb, Keats and Embarassment by Christopher Ricks.

pkd 'Valis'
'Popol Vuh', revised trans by Tedlock, a stunning display of erudition, imo, and funny)
Thomas Pynchon 'Against The Day'
'The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon', ed Leekson (slapdash, alas)

Here's a few of my recent buys, along with the first sentence or two of each:

Rodrigo Fresán - Historia Argentina

Chivas y Gonçalves llevaban tanto tiempo cabalgando que ya no sabían dónde terminaban ellos y dónde empezaban sus caballos.

Vladimir Nabokov - Ada

“All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858).

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940

Dear Mr Joyce
Here is the latest insertion. I think it might follow the passage which treats of form as a concretion of content. I have succeeded in combining the three points in a more or less reasonable paragraph.

Who will recommend Ada to me? I'm not being rhetorical, it just has a bad reputation.

I keep on meaning to read it, alimosina, but somehow the first page or two always finds me going to something else - even during the period where all I seemed to read was Nabokov.

Much rather read his Lectures on Literature, which is something else I haven't read, although I did once spend half an hour in a second hand bookshop flicking through it (vol 1 maybe?).

I might get this myself for Christmas, in fact.

mervyn peak, 'titus groan'

almost picked up the selected hugh macdiarmid too but times r tight

Also can't hand-on-heart recommend Ada. I read it at 16, and it was a slog even with tireless energy of youth. Been re-reading it lately in bursts of about 40 or so pages between other things. There are brilliant passages, and it's so densely clever, but there's no momentum and little to actually connect with. The leads are disagreeable and its invention is suffocating. But there's always something to grapple with, almost sentence-by-sentence, and if you like N, you should probably take a shot - it's clearly his 'here is my masterpiece' book. (But not his actual masterpiece).

'Ada' is a more than a bit self-indulgent, but interesting.
Books written to be read one sentence at a time should not be speed-scanned for mere content.

Ada needs time to pick up steam, once you've eased into it and got about 40 or 50 pages in, it really gets rolling. There are some patchy moments but there are also more than enough moments of Nabokov at his mind blowingly best that obviously more than make up for it. I'd say its almost as good as Pale Fire or Lolita.

It is definitely self-indulgent, but this isn't always a bad thing especially if you like what makes Nabokov so distinctly Nabokov.

just received (early b'day gifts):

where water comes together with other water AND ultramarine, both by raymond carver: beautiful, fine condition, first editions. my carver collection looks pretty amazing, i gotta say.

generation A - douglas coupland. don't know if anyone heard but: until february you can order the book direct from the publisher (signed) and design your own dustjacket (using their parameters). my husband designed mine, and i adore it.

I got the customised Coupland cover - really nice, although they had a few delays in processing them...

mine was a birthday gift and arrived in the nick of time! i will post pics soon.

Gravity's Rainbow as a used paperback in decent shape for $1.

Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, Ferdowsi, in a recent translation by Dick Davis, as an almost-new paperback, $5. The Iranian equivalent to The Iliad.

The High Adventure of Eric Ryback: Canada to Mexico on Foot, a first person account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 1970 that inspired hundreds of teenagers to make the same journey a few years later. Of interest only to diehard backpackers such as myself. $1.

Books I received as Xmas gifts - quite a haul this year:

The Golden Bough (OUP abridged edition) by James Frazer
Straw Dogs by John Gray
1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan
Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson
The Language of God by Francis Collins
Air Guitar by Dave Hickey
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre

Got for Christmas: Georg Johannesen - Rhetorica Norvecia

Also got a couple of other books that I didn't really want, so I traded them in.
For once I'm thankful that hardcover books are ridiculously expensive in Norway, as I was able to get quite a haul for the value of those two.
All are in Norwegian, but I've provided the English title where I could find one.

Philippe Claudel - Grey Souls (aka By a Slow River)
Aasne Linnestå - Krakow
Elfride Jelinek - Women as Lovers
Kjell Askildsen - Stage sets
Tomas Espedal - Dagbok
Claudio Magris - Danube
Karl Ove Knausgård - Out of the World (While the rest of Norway reads his current autobiographical hexalogy "Min Kamp" (Yes, Mein Kampf) I figure I might as well read one of his older works instead)

A record low haul for Christmas this year, which suits me just fine. I think too many people have seen my overstuffed library this year and drawn their own conclusions. My single acquisition is:

Orhan Pamuk - The Museum of Innocence

A groovy old paperback of Gypsy Rose Lee's 'Striptease Murders' (aka The G-String Murders)

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/images/g_string.jpg

(among other things, but this was the funkiest)

i half meant to read that after reading february house, actually. is it any good?

Today I have been book shopping with a vengeance.

The Complete English Poems, John Donne, in the Everyman's Library hardcover edition of 1991, used for $12.95. I already have Donne's complete poetry in the Oxford Standard Authors edition, beautifully printed. I bought this edition for the notes and because I am a sucker for Donne's poems.

The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, as a used hardcover for $5. Again, I own the more recent edition of MM's poetry edited by Grace Schulman. This edition reflects MM's own editing of her collected poetry. And I am a sucker for Moore's poetry, too.

Selected Poems of James K. Baxter, used paperback for $9. I'd never heard of this New Zealand poet before today. I opened this, read about six pages at random, flipped around a bit more and bought it. He looks to be quite good.

The Metamorphoses of Ovid, as translated by Allen Mandelbaum, in a remaindered new paperback edition for $9. This reads much better than the Rolphe Humphries translation I gave up on a while ago, and the narrative is more fluent than the Ted Hughes versions.

The Ingoldsby Legends, Richard Barham, in an Oxford World Classics edition from circa 1910. These narrative poems were very popular in the 19th century but appear to be mostly forgotten now. They really are quite nice stuff and are written with flair.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey, used Penguin paperback in good shape for $2.

Alfred the Great, a Penguin compilation of Asser's biography of Alfred and other contemporary writings, for $3. A gleam of light from a mostly dark era.

The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister's Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap Between Science and the Humanities, by Stephen Jay Gould, in a used hardcover for $5. Gould's writing on scientific subjects is almost always satisfying.

The Wallowa Mountains: A Natural History Guide by Keith Pohs, in a used trade paperback for $5. Of local interest. The Wallowas are a gorgeous Oregon mountain range far from population centers, where I love to hike. This book is crammed with information about the area's flora, fauna and geology. Hurrah!

For Christmas I was given:

Rock Island Line and Driftless by David Rhodes, along with enthusiastic recommendations from the giver.

Tracking Down Coyote by Mike Helm, a local book by a local author about local Oregon-outdoorsy subject matter. More than that I cannot say without reading it.

That covers it for now.

Galbraith - The Great Crash 1929
Zizek - Violence
Alain de Botton - The Consolations of Philosophy