Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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.

With IJ you just have to wade in slowly, then roll with it. In return, it takes you places.

Back in London, so did the rounds - Charing X rd, Gower St Waterstone's, Judd 2. Resisted till the last of them - a nice hardback of that history of the Dark Ages, The Inheritance of Rome for < paperback (looking forward to not finishing it), and John Burrow's History of Histories. Been reading old history lately (Hume, the Greeks, bit of Macaulay), and some Burrow (his little book on Gibbon), so seemed made for me.

LDN ilxors might like to know Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark is in Judd - nice hardback, £7.95.

Amazoned recently – cheap Gene Wolfe hardbacks (Nightside of the Long Sun, Soldier of the Mist), an Oxford Study Bible. Been buying cheap Ballard paperbacks too, sometimes of stuff I've read already – can't resist the ones with exciting covers.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3054/2844070189_de0e23c53c.jpg

Report back on Fantomas gr - I've been meaning to read it for ages, but I'm afraid it might not be as much fun as it looks (is that the penguin edition with the John Ashbery intro?).

David Thomson makes the films sound amazing - think I have a copy of one of them around here somewhere, maybe I'll watch that now.

Journey Without Maps, Graham Greene, used Penguin paperback in marginal condition, 50 cents. His 1936 book about traveling in Liberia. Supposed to be good.

Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory, in 2 volumes, ed. Janet Cowen. These are used Penguin paperbacks in good condition, with modernized spelling to assist the thoroughly modern reader. $2 each. I like to read about parfit gentil knights from time to time, their being so different than modern heroes it tickles me.

Fantomas is fun stuff.

And 'The Chelsea Murders' is pretty great, too, though the first 10 pages or so were a bit disorienting, from memory.

A reader located the likely model for the concrete island. If I ever get over one day there I'll make the pilgrimage.

today's haul, from iliad books:

gwf hegel - a philosophy of history
ludwig wittgenstein - tractacus logico-philosophicus
e.h. gombrich - art and illusion
james purdy - in a shallow grave
oscar wilde - portrait of dorian gray and other writings
sibyl moholy-nagy - moholy-nagy: experiment in totality

PICTURE of dorian gray, durrrr

As part of my continuing quest to fill the gaping hole in my life with Stuff (and fill in gaps in my education):
Alasdair Gray, Lanark
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (Read this ages ago and loved it, but I lost my copy and I'm not sure which translation it was. This is the Vintage Burgin/O'Connor translation. I'll probably end up picking up the Pevear/Volokhonsky on Penguin soon enough, since it looks like it was received fairly well)
Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch

i keep forgetting to email you the name of that oulipo compendium, gah! i will try to remember tonight!

No hurry- I'm guessing it's the Mathews/Brotchie Oulipo Compendium.

(It's worth checking out the rest of Atlas's catalog if you don't know them already; they've got some great stuff from Jarry, Bataille, etc, and a Satie book that I really wish was still in print...)

yes that's the one (the special edition)!

nyrb is reprinting bruce duffy's the world as i found it! (a novelized version of wittgenstein's life and thus also the lives of bertrand russell and g.e. moore.)

i'm taking out my old copy now—i had never made time to read it before because it repeated so much of the actual biography that i knew (though it was written before the monk or mcguinness biographies)—and it's a very weird sensation. anyplace the narrative doesn't delve too much into a novelistic perspective on characters or on a dramatic scene, it's very hard to distinguish from the received versions of the intellectual history of the period that fill out nine tenths of any work in philosophy about these guys.

Very little in the last couple of months:

Mishima - The Sound of Waves
Celine - Guignol's Band

About it I think

Was up in Buxton, wandering the Peaks. There's an amazing second-hand bookshop there, Scriveners, five floors.

http://theidiotandthedog.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/img_0158.jpg

Anyway, picked up two Barry Malzbergs (I enjoyed Underlay so much) -

The Falling Astronauts

from the blurb -

Martin is effectively put under wraps, until the pilot of a moon capsule, loaded with nuclear weaponry, goes beserk (sic) and a nightmare developes, threatening to engulf the world - a nightmare that only Martin could end

and

The Men Inside

Earth's Elit - Or Its Outcasts?

For a selected, genetically-fitted few among the teeming millions of the twenty-first century, to become a Messenger for the Hulm Institute is to escape the prison that is life, that is earth

A MESSENGER IS NOBLE!

A MESSENGER IS ONE OF THE CHOSEN!

A MESSENGER IS A FORERUNNER OF A TIME IN WHICH FEAR AND DISEASE WILL DISAPPEAR FOR EVER

And inside a Messenger's head is murder, impotence and despair.

Some lolz to be had switching out 'messenger' for 'ilxor' there.

Also a small volume of Browning's poetry (i've only got large volumes, and an Italian facing page translation edition) and the first part of AJ Ayer's autobiography for g/f, but it looked interesting, so I might nab it.

Elit Elite

just the instructions, which is keeping me going, due to being the same size as a rabbit -

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4088/5096923270_36ae057793.jpg

:-D

Great photo!

my nyrb 'the world as i found it' has arrived. it has a new intro by some dude but has dropped the old post-face/interview by the author.

it has a new intro by some dude

!

not that dude. just some other dude.

specifically, david leavitt.

Great photo!

― buildings with goats on the roof (James Morrison), Friday, 22 October 2010 00:15 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

not mine sadly, i just stole it from the internet

Mentioned infinite jest upthread: found the size daunting but as a read it's thus far a joy and not a tough slog at all. About 150p in.Not that I'm averse to a slog on occasion, if the hard work is rewarded.

<3 infinite jest so much + agree that it's not a slog at all

Lions Club Book Shed haul...

Evgenia Tur - Antonia
Yury Trifonov - Disappearance --- a couple of interesting-looking Russian novels
Stephen Benatar - Recovery - 2 novellas
Raymond Williams - Loyalties
Geoffrey Household - Rough Shoot