Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

Snorri Sturluson - Eddas
A couple of the Collins New Naturalist series - plants and insects. (Cheap on amazon, sort of information I like, & I do love their covers.)
Penguin and Faber books of Irish verse. (The big new Penguin one intrigued me, but I thought I should catch up, see if I'm back at the point, for the first time in an age, where I want to read quite a lot of Irish poetry. I don't think I am.)
Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (The rolling poetry thread made me realise I was really out of touch with what's going on at the mo in Brit poetry, this seemed a sensible place to start.)

Alan Garner, Strandloper. Promises to be ace.

stalingrad - antony beevor
life and fate - vasily grossman
the world at night - alan furst

Gene Wolfe - Shadow & Claw and Sword & Citadel

wow, the new twain autobiography is huuuuge.

Twain liked to write, not edit.

his (present) editors also seem fond of writing.

Hesperus books lying round the office again, did no-one else want:

Frank Wedekind - Mine-haha
Tolstoy - A Confession
Goethe - The Madwoman on a Pilgrimage

?

Are they mad?

A couple of the Collins New Naturalist series - plants and insects. (Cheap on amazon, sort of information I like, & I do love their covers.)

^ this series is mad collectable and firsts do go for good money. WIsh I had more cash to buy them as they come out...

Really like all 3 of those Hesperus. In fact, i like almost everything Hesperus puts out, but they've been missing publication dates right and left for more than a year now. Stuff due out mid 2009 is still not in print. Argh!

Reading Storm Jameson's 'In the Second Year', from 1936: set in 1942, in a Britain ruled by the Fascists. Very, very good so far.

may have mentioned in passing in one of the publishing today discussions, but am baffled as to how the Hesperus/OneWorld/Alma nexus make any money putting out slightly too expensive editions of stuff that interests 38 people. What are their bankers? Am I imagining things, or have they bought the Calder list, except for Beckett? Something really cheering abt their eccentricity. 'Kafka's Metamorphosis, with a foreword by Martin Jarvis'.

Oneworld own Calder, definitely. Hesperus is a different entity, though the people who now run Oneworld/Calder were the people who set up Hesperus, then left in a mysterious huff.

another iliad haul:

gore vidal - burr
george orwell - a collection of essays
gregory battcock, ed. - minimal art: a critical anthology
arthur rimbaud - selected poems and letters
paul auster - the ny trilogy
balzac - eugenie grandet