Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

Tadeusz Borowski - This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Unconsoled
Heinrich Böll - Group Portrait with Lady

i picked up american gods for almost nothing at the car boot on sunday.

Also my mission to obtain all the hitchhiker galaxy series from a car boot is on track. picking up the third in the series from a chap who ended up being upset that it was the only thing he'd sold all day and the only book he didn't really want to sell. i got it for 30p

Hey corey I'd be interested in your thoughts on The Unconsoled when you've read it. I've heard so many competing opinions on it, and I think it sounds like the kind of thing I'd love.

I both sold and bought books today. What I bought:

The Crying of Lot 49, Th. Pynchon, used paperback, good condition, $3.

The Erotic Elegies of Albius Tibullus, translted by Hubert Creekmore, bilingual edition, used hardcover with dust jacket, published by Washington Square Press in 1966, $10. Calling Tibullus's elegies "erotic" in the title was purely a marketing ploy, but the translations are pleasantly fluent.

Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975, ed. by a committee, Library of America, used paperback, $4.

Garden of the Brave in War: Recollections of Iran, Terence O'Donnell, used paperback, $3. A travel memoir of several years living in rural Iran.

The Yellow Admiral, Patrick O'Brian, used paperback, $3. Heaven help me, I now own 16 volumes of the Aubrey/Maturin series. At least there is an end in sight.

The Rise and Fall of Athens, Plutarch, a selection of lives in a Penguin paperback from 1969, $2. A more modern, more readable translation than the Dryden/Clough version I already own. I read a similar Roman selection of lives last month while camping.

Chances are good I will make another used bookstore run to Powell's tomorrow.

Klaus Mann (Thomas's son) - Mephisto
Raymond Queneau - The Blue Flowers
Raymond Radiguet - Count d'Orgel

I'd never heard of Radiguet before, but the cover mentioned the foreword was by Jean Cocteau. Apparently Count d'Orgel is one of only two novels he finished before he died at the age of 20.

Did visit Powell's this morning. I came back with:

Collected Poems: 1924-1955, George Seferis, translated by Edmund Keeley & Phillip Sherrard, bilingual edition, Princeton U. Press, ex-lib hardcover from 1967, for $7.50. Calloo-callay!

Selected Non-Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, hardcover with dust jacket, $12.50.

Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett, remaindered paperback, $9. I checked this out of the library about a year ago, read a chunk, faltered, and returned it. Now I must live with it.

From Amazon:
Queneau's Exercises in Style
Gilbert Hernandez's The Troublemakers
A Gilbert & George exhibition catalog that had been reduced to $3 and change

At the New Museum shop, spent way too long browsing and forced myself to select just one book:
Artaud's Watch Fiends & Rack Screams

which I then proceeded to whisper and stutter through purchasing from the intimidatingly awesome girl working the register (I go all melty for androgynous girls with shaved heads, whatever that says about me) while my dad badgers the front desk staff about where he can get a Diet Coke on the Bowery.

Over the past 48 hours I have perfected the "I do not know this man, who are you, cranky middle-aged tourist, and why are you following me around" face.

Raymond Radiguet - Count d'Orgel

I'd never heard of Radiguet before, but the cover mentioned the foreword was by Jean Cocteau. Apparently Count d'Orgel is one of only two novels he finished before he died at the age of 20.

His other one, 'The Devil in the Flesh', is really ace. I liked d'Orgel too, but Devil is better.

Werner Herzog - Conquest of the Useless
Eric Clapton - Clapton
Yann Martel - Beatrice and Virgil
Clarice Lispector - Hour of the Star
Clarice Lispector - The Foreign Legion
Roberto Bolaño -Monsieur Pain

Aidan Higgins - Langrishe, Go Down
Hannah Green - The Dead of the House
César Aira - Ghosts
John Mcgahern - Barracks
Edward Dahlberg - The Carnal Myth
Edward Dahlberg - The Sorrows of Priapus

a book by claudio magris about istria

So I went to Baggings Books in Rochester today. I quite liked the High street even more (especially on a sunny afternoon). The build up from one bookshop (can't remember name now) to an Oxfam to Baggins was sorta exciting and the shop itself doesn't disappoint in that's its a maize (make your own fun!) but, sad to report, not got much out of the browse. Only found:

Harry Mathews - The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, for 2 quid.

Other things in the past month:

Anna Banti - Artemisa
Tagore - The Home and the World

oh, and:

Cesare Pavese - The Political Prisoner

Fooled away a couple hours in bookstores today and bought:

Poems, William Dunbar, ed. Kinsley, a used hardcover in the Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series, Oxford Press, $4.95. A middle english makar who could be rather witty.

Collected Shorter Poems: 1946 - 1991, Hayden Carruth, used hardcover with dust jacket, very good condition, Copper Canyon Press, $12.95. I was not especially enamored of Carruth in the one poetry book of his I've read, but he has the admiration of poets I admire, so I will give him a good run and see what I find.

Short Stories: volume 2: Friendly Brook and Other Stories, Rudyard Kipling, used Penguin paperback, $2. Kipling's okay by me, when he's not propping up the empire.

The Golden Bowl, Hank James, used Penguin paperback, $2. I expect nothing less than the secrets of the universe from this. YOU HEAR ME, HENRY?!

riddle of the sands - erskine childers

Closing time - joe heller

Yiddish policemans union - michael chabon

Expect good things from all, also

Samuel Beckett - How It Is (Grove Press)

I seem to be in book buying mode atm. Yesterday I found:

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin Abbott, used hard cover, ex-lib 1963 edition, $1.50. The book that provided ILX's Abbott with her nom-de-net.

Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It, Julia Keller, used trade paperback, $4. YABWASLTYA (Yet Another Book With a Subtitle Longer Than Your Arm).

Pierre Boulez - Notations

Yiddish policemans union - michael chabon

I picked this up too. Also:

Freedom - Franzen
The Slap - ?
Voodoo Histories - David Aaronovitch

alan furst - spies of the balkans (mainly because the storyline is eerily similar to my wife's father's exodus from greece during WW2 and takes place largely (from what i can gather) in Salonika, which is the city where he lived prior to and in the early days of ww2 (he's 80 years old, or so we think...his information was all lost during the war.)

I got 2 bookstore gift cards for my birthday and ordered the following:

August Rodin, Rilke
The Wine-Dark Sea, Sciascia (a rec from here I think?)
The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa

Loved that Furst.

Mother gave me some money for my b-day so I bought myself a present at the book store (mostly French moderns of course):

Brecht - Galileo
Beckett - Words & Music, Play, Eh Joe
Céline - Castle to Castle
Sartre - The Age of Reason
Gide - Strait is the Gate
Heidegger - What is Called Thinking?
Queneau - The Last Days

Collected Longer Poems, Kenneth Koch, new (remaindered) hardcover, $13.

I also saw that Powell's Books has the Library of America hardcover edition of John Ashberry's earlier poems, up through circa 1980, now remaindered for $19. It's a nice edition, and I will probably pick it up sometime this month.

Are you in Chicago, Aimless?

charity book fair:

4 mark twain hardcovers
dreiser - sister carrie
don delillo - libra
portable hawthorne
le carre - tailor of panama
5 james bond novels in one book

corey, I am in the Portland, OR area and visit Powell's City of Books bookstore about 10-12 times a year. It is one of the greatest things about living here.

Ah I see. There's a bookstore here called Powell's, but it's on the South side so I don't often get to go there. The bookstore near me is great though. I always find something I'm looking for whenever I go.

A 2nd-hand/remainders haul:

4 Wodehouses (2 Mulliner, 2 Jeeves/Wooster)
2 H G Wells - Christina Alberta's Father, The Brothers
Jean Genet - The THief's Journal
Sam Lipsyte - The Ask
Waugh - The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (already have this, but this was a 1st edition with nice cover, very cheap)
TH White - The Once and Future King

The Golden Bowl, Hank James, used Penguin paperback, $2. I expect nothing less than the secrets of the universe from this. YOU HEAR ME, HENRY?!

Rereading this for a project, I'd forgotten how the old aphoristic magic was still in evidence; the introduction of Adam Verver is masterly.

Is that Genet prose or drama?

Prose. Pretty good.

4 books for $14 at bookfinger:

gertrude stein - the autobiography of alice b. toklas
sigmund freud - three case histories
patricia highsmith - the talented mr. ripley
wallace stevens - the palm at the end of the mind: selected poems and a play (edited by his daughter)

so, like, when you go there, how hard to you try to resist the urge to be all, booook FIIIINGAAAAHH? because i can't see how that would not become a regular habit for me if i were anywhere near such a store.

Where did you get those? New York's Sneaker Culture, 1960-1987
Mall Maker : Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream
Media Ethics : Cases and Moral Reasoning
A New Life : Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South

Continuing to accumulate books faster than I can work up the interest to read them:

Alfred Bester & Roger Zelazny, Psychoshop- After noticing that Vintage's Bester paperbacks are going out of print and the novels have started to demand stupid prices, figured it was time to pick up the last one I didn't already have.
Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel and Asleep in the Sun- Thanks to the NYRB thread. I've been a Borges obsessive for ages, knew Bioy Caseares was a real person and not just made up for "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius," and yet never thought to just stick his name in google or wikipedia or wherever and find out, hey, he was also a writer! Derrr. Also, as much as I like the idea of weirder/more eclectic lit getting popular exposure, it kind of saddens and annoys me to see that The Invention of Morel has already joined my beloved The Third Policeman as part of Lost's little book club. Okay, people are reading Flann O'Brien and buying books from the Dalkey Archive, awesome, but god dammit, don't do it to try and find clues to where the fucking polar bear came from.

...okay, that got a bit off track. ANYWAY

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories- Teenage obsession with the Brothers Quay; read Jakob von Gunten, never got around to Schulz. Rectifying it now.

Johnny Ryan, Prison Pit vols. 1 & 2- argh blood spunk decapitation poo etc

wallace stevens - the palm at the end of the mind: selected poems

One of my essential books: it's on my bedside table, where the Bible should be.

Lost or no Lost, Morel is grebt and you owe it to yourself to read it

'The Warmth of Other Suns' - Isabel Wilkerson

Morel v enjoyable: wd agree. Less, I found, because of any Lost parallels, but the disembodied aesthetic and interesting approach to love the situation engenders.

I also liked that it was totally unlike anything Borges wrote and yet simultaneously casts light on the shared literary milieu of the two writers; which is to say, you can see why they were friends, and why Bro-ges dug this book.

Yeah, the Borges connection is why I'm looking forward to the two ABC novels, not at all the Lost thing. I haven't read Morel yet, so I can't vouch for it (though I do trust Borges and company), but it's the same feeling I got about the Third Policeman namedrop, which I also only found out about way after the fact- annoyance that a brilliant novel is being lazily appropriated to lend some significance to a so-so TV show. On the one hand, it is getting wider exposure, and some people will no doubt read it for the right reasons who wouldn't have heard of it otherwise, but the thought of some douche with a highlighter in one hand and a "Philosophy of Lost" book in the other going through The Third Policeman makes me livid.

i never watched 'lost' so i didn't even know about this until recently, when i recommended the book to someone and they replied, "oh i've heard of it!" i thought that was actually rather cool, considering its relative obscurity, until they went on about how it was in 'lost' and apparently there were clues buried in the book. that slightly bummed me out.

paul bowles - the sheltering sky (new directions paperback version)
halldor laxness - independent people

Mario Vargas Llosa - Death in the Andes
H.W. Brands - American Dreams: The United States Since 1945

for MY nobel shopping i got 'conversation in the cathedral' and… a later one that i can't remember which hasn't shown up yet. maybe also 'death in the andes'.

prolonged brokeness has kept me from buying any books recently, but I just had a birthday and got:

Erich Auerbach - Mimesis
Mikhail Bakhtin - The Dialogic Imagination
Giovanni Arrighi - The Long Twentieth Century

dope!

Got a lousy stinking cold and quite wanted to get slowly drunk in an armchair reading an adventure story this evening and was looking either for Kolymsky Heights or The Rose of Tibet by Lionel Davidson. Both out out print (oh, f'ing Faber Finds for the former, no thanks) but got a couple of his others in Oxfam - Making Good Again (Germany) The Chelsea Murders (er, Chelsea).

Also picked up The Legendary Novel of Mystery and Romance, Fantômas by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. Probably most of you had heard of it, but I hadn't, which even before admitting it, I'm feeling slightly embarrassed about ('Fantômas, and the 31 sequels which followed it, was a phenomenon', oh.) Encomiums from Blaise Cendrars, Cocteau, Ashberry and Apollinaire on the back.

infinite jest. Looks formidable.