Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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.

And some more:

William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury (I know most local libraries in the west have this but its a really nice Picador cover)

Proust - Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays
Marguerite Duras - The Vice-Counsul
Thomas M. Disch - The Genocides and Echo Round his Bones (can't wait to get round to reading these)

GR - dunno, but I've been meaning to read it for ages. Read Satan Wants Me last year & that was pretty great, half-read Exquisite Corpse & keep meaning to finish it sometime, always enjoy his non-fiction - oh and Night, Horses and the Desert is a really impressive anthology, works really hard to help you get your head round an unfamiliar literature.

Probably one of my favourite figures in the British literary world if I sit and think about it. I don't think you made a drunken mistake.

I really must finish Exquisite Corpse.

Jasper Fforde - Shades of Grey
Oliver Bulloughs - Let Our Fame be Great
Bukowski - Women
Mark Mazower - Hitler's Empire
Andrew Hussey - Paris
Eduardo Galeano - Open Veins of Latin America
Edward Hollis - The Secret Lives of Buildings

Over the last cpl of weeks:

Alberto Moravia - The Conformist (so pleased to get hold of a copy, the film is gd)
Harlan Ellison - All the Sounds of Fear/Over the Edge (short story collections)
Frank Herbert - The Heaven Makers
Philip Jose Farmer - The Gate of Time
Robert Silverberg - Hawksbill Station
Charles Lamb - The Adventures of Ulysses (his Homer adaptation aimed at children -- which is the one Joyce grew up with! -- based on Chapman's rendering...)

Harold Nicolson, Journey to Java, Doubleday 1958, still with its "With the compliments of" note from the publisher. Slightly uncanny since both the Javanese culture of the time and Nicolson's have changed unrecognizably. $2.50.

Clockers by Richard Price, ordered on basis of a throwaway mention on a Wire thread. I can never usually get into crime things, but it seemed interesting.

Selected Poems by Douglas Dunn - read him at 22 and found it unimaginably depressing; at 40 I seem to have grown into him.

Broonland: the last days of Gordon Brown by Chris Harvey - bought on the basis of an LRB review.

The John McPhee reader, finally got round to buying after about it spending about five years in my Amazon basket.

Ok so I was walking past the bookshop and saw The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, with a lovely cover and title font, and thought 'I want that. I want to read it, and I want to read it now.' So I went in and bought it, and I've read a couple of chapters and I don't regret it, even though I feel slightly bad, because I still haven't read Black Swan Green. I still kind of feel Mason & Dixon sets some kind of wow-benchmark for historical novel immersion, but I'm already getting a really good feel from this book (better, in truth, than the historical sections of Cloud Atlas).

I did exactly the same thing!

Hi fives! It really is a nice object - it's the sort of thing that I'd be delighted to have come across on a bookshelf, the title piquing my curiosity, and then reading and feeling that the slight aura of magic surrounding it was completely justified.

It happened a few times with books from my parents' bookcase (MR James maybe? I probably felt that way about Camus + The Myth of Sisyphus as well) Moments where you look at the title and the appearance (or sometimes the lack of appearance, faded boards, illegible spine) and the curiosity is completely rewarded, you find something imaginative and interesting.

Still happens even with books I've read before actually, I've just realised. I get the same feeling every time I open up my hardback, Mervyn Peake illustrated Treasure Island and read, always without being able to stop, the first half.

just cashed in a ten-dollar credit at a local used book place, picking up excellent-condition copies of:
- Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
- Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture
- Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics

Heinrich Boll - The Lost of Honour of Katharina Blum
Leonardo Sciascia - Sicilian Uncles
Denton Welch - Maiden Voyage
Ariel Dorfman - Hard Rain
Gyula Krudy - The Adventures of Sinbad
Raymond Radiguet - Devil in the Flesh

Heinrich Boll - The Lost of Honour of Katharina Blum
Gyula Krudy - The Adventures of Sinbad
Raymond Radiguet - Devil in the Flesh

Don't know about the others, but these 3 are a treat, the Krudy especially

Yes I first heard of the Krudy in the Translators thread so am quite excited to read it.

Also picked up a copy of a Penguin Edition of three Stanislaw Lem novels - Solaris/The Chain of Chance/A Perfect Vacuum

Haven't read the 3rd of those, but the other two are wonderful. I need to read more Lem.

Ah, Krudy . . If you don't like Sindbad, I don't even want to hear about it.

Haven't read the 3rd of those

Lem channeling Borges. A collection of reviews of imaginary books (including a hostile review of the book itself). Don't have it at hand - appropriately enough - but recall it was fun.