Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

Just bought Céline's part thesis, part fictional account of Iguaz Semmelweis, father of antisepsis, wronged by his peers.

Now I'm sure I came across Semmelweis very recently in a completely different context, but I'm damned if I can remember where - but the coincidence, or echo, was enough for me to buy it - besides, it looks very interesting in relation to Céline.

Also got the recent Paris Review interviews for a friend.

What books have you purchased holiday edition:

Proust - The Prisoner and the Fugitive/Time Regained while browsing in a bookshop in India.

Among a bunch of stuff I'm too tired to type the titles of, THIS!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/8190605607.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

A book I never knew I desperately needed until I saw that it existed.

That pleasant young lady's thumb appears to be seriously misplaced.

It might be Diplo of me but anthologies like the one James posted are absolute buy-on-sight for me - just call something The Israeli Book Of Science Fiction or Icelandic Detective Tales and I'll gobble it up.

Celine - Journey to the End of the Night. A beaten up copy for 2 quid, but its the Ralph Manheim translation (the one on Penguin is useless)
Mishima - The Sailor who Fell from Grace to the Sea
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We
Simenon - Red Lights

Found second-hand a cheap hardback Collected Poems of Yeats, pleasant austere cream cover - lost my nice emerald green Jeffares paperback yonks ago, slightly bizarrely there's no indication of who the editor of the this one is, but I think it must be Jeffares as from memory the imprint and text seems exactly the same.

Joseph Boyden - Three Day Road
Artyom Borovik - The Hidden War
Barton Gellman - Angler: the Cheney Vice Presidency
Robert Kroetch - A Likely Story: The Writing Life
Ann Patchett - Run
Daniel Francis - Red Light Neon: A History of Vancouver's Sex Trade

David Thomson - Rosebud
Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano
Elfriede Jelinek - Women as Lovers
Leo Perutz - Master of the Day of Judgement
Lydia Davis - Varieties of Disturbance (excited to get something by her)
Victor Serge - The Unforgiving Years (a few remaindered copies at Gower Street Waterstones, if Londoners are interested...really delighted to pick this one up)

Unforgiving Years is fantastic.

Just got a book of Saki stories and A Stretch On the River by Richard Bissell

"Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion" -- Jennifer Saginor
"The Real Cool Killers" -- Chester Himes
"Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks And The Masters Of Noir" -- Geoffrey O'Brien
"Players" -- Don DeLillo
"Red Lights " -- George Simenon
"On Boxing" -- Joyce Carol Oates

What's On Boxing?

"On Boxing" is an extended essay (about 100 pages) on the sport of boxing and it's really great. Apparently, Norman Mailer liked it so much he said something like "It was so good, I thought I wrote it myself."

Roberto Bolano - Distant Star
Simenon - The Engagement
Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World
Michel De Montaigne - An Apology for Raymond Sebond (bought this as much for the intro by supa dupa scholar M A Screech)
Edward Buscombe - Stagecoach (its the BFI classics essay on the film)

Ernst Junger - The Glass Bees
Victor Serge - The Case of Comrade Tulayev
Boris Vian - Heartsnatcher
Harry Mathews - The Human Country
John Dos Passos - Manhattan Transfer

JD Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (this is a present)

Oh, and Ariel Dormfman - Some Write to the Future (bunch of essays on Latin American fiction)

a 900 page isaac asimov sf collection
coatzee - disgrace
saunders - in persuasion nation
a collection of 3 james m. cain novels

Just bought this guy's memoirs on Amazon, don't see how that can be a mistake.

More 2nd hand goodness:

Gunter Grass - Tin Drum
Rene Crevel - Babylon
Boccaccio - The Decameron
Robert Musil - Tonka and Other Stories
Chateaubriand - The Memoirs
Roland Barthes - Mythologies

John Dos Passos - Manhattan Transfer

am slowly creeping through this atm. general fiction fatigue means i might not even finish it, but am definitely enjoying the sense of crowds, smells and everything else people say about j.d.p.'s books

I drunkenly ordered The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin the other day, thinking from the blurb that it sounded rather good (hah! idiot!). Anybody know anything about it? Like whether it's actually any good.