Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

De Quincey - On Murder
A Panther collection of JG Ballard short stories
Arthur Schnitzler - Selected Short Fiction

xyzzzz: three gems!

Yeah - really pleased with the Schnitzler, James.

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/65/a9/228ceb6709a08caad8074110.L.jpg

roald dahl-my uncle oswald (for a book club i'm in)
andre gide-the immoralist (impulse buy on amazon)
john masters-casanova (also for book club)
robert musil-the confusions of young torless (finally gonna give this a go...)

Carlo Collodi - Pinocchio
Thomas M. Disch - Camp Concentration

bought a used copy of Kristeva's Powers of Horror that was in great condition, and a cheap paperback of Idylls of the King because I'm always down to read more poetry

flipping through the Tennyson at random, I loved this:

[. . . ] and Earl Doorm
Struck with a knife's haft hard against the board,
And call'd for flesh and wine to feed his spears.
And men brought in whole hogs and quarter beeves,
And all the hall was dim with steam of flesh.
And none spake word, but all sat down at once,
And ate with tumult in the naked hall,
Feeding like horses when you hear them feed[.]

^^ sweet

bought a used copy of Kristeva's Powers of Horror that was in great condition, and a cheap paperback of Idylls of the King because I'm always down to read more poetry

Aha -- I begin to see the pattern

oh fuck I have a pattern?

I have a habit of saying that.

I see the pattern emerging

lately i have bought…

david harvey, the limits of capital
porter abbott, diary fiction
a couple of post-deleuze books about… stuff, machines and such
a post-cavell study of animals and our lives with them by… someone

birthday gifts purchased for me:

dark star, alan furst - requested as a gift, since i would like to try to read his novels in order.
the nutshell studies of unexplained death, corinne may botz - looks really fascinating
armageddon: the battle for germany 1944-45, max hastings
autobiography of mark twain, vol 1
the spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, david abram

Kundera - The Joke
Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Disch, Fun With Your New Head.

What a title!

Read it a long time ago. A few of those early stories stuck with me ("Now Is Forever"), and I decided I wanted a copy.

álvaro mutis, 'the adventures and misadventures of maqroll'

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9107386@N06/5360123768/

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5208/5360123768_8079022dc8.jpg
Interesting ... VERY interesting! by bellefox rendezvous, on Flickr

7 books for 30 bucks tonight:

henry green - pack my bag
henry green - concluding
henry green - back
henry green - caught
john cowper powys - the complex vision
john cowper powys - in spite of: a philosophy for everyman
john cowper powys - mortal strife

Yesterday I was at my favorite charity bookstore (a Friends of the Library-run shop) and picked up the volumes to fill the missing four slots in my "collection" of the 20 Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian. For $1 each. Yes, I am insane to own all 20 volumes of this series. I am aware of this.

Last few weeks:

Tadeausz Borowski - This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman
Joseph Roth - The Tale of the 1002nd Night
Robert Walser - Masquerade and Other Stories

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, in a cute little used hardcover edition, $2. I've never read it. I think now I will give it a whirl.

If On a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino, like-new used paperback, $3. Again, one of the thousands of good books I've never read.

A Country Boy: Tales of Silverton, Oregon, Homer Davenport, used paperback, $2. Davenport became a political cartoonist for the Hearst newspapers, but this memoir is more of a Tom Sawyer story. Of local interest. My wife grew up about 30 miles from Silverton in another small town.

Did some more bookshop trolling while my wife was away last weekend:

History of the U.S.A. During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams, used hardcover in slipcase, Library of America edition, $18.95. I used a trade credit to buy this one. I've been curious about this book for a decade and finally spring for it.

King Harald's Saga, Snorri Sturluson, (tr. Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Palsson), used Penguin paperback, $3. The skinny on YABVK (Yet Another Bloodthirsty Viking King).

Hiking Washington's Goat Rocks Country, Fred Barstad, used paperback, $4. Oh, man, am I psyched for this summer's hiking season. This guidebook covers a great area I plan to hike in.

richard eldridge, 'on moral personhood'.

filling out the set as i read his later books and find him referring to it a lot. readings of conrad, wordsworth, and austen in a post-kantian 'wtf literature?' framework.

bought a hardcover edition of 'the habit of being: letters of flannery o'connor' a couple of nights ago. i've only skimmed it thus far and on every page is something memorable, hilarious, or biting. usually all three.

Saramago - The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
The Fictions of Bruno Schulz
Vasari - The Lives of the Artists

From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East is a 2004 book written by Middle-East historian Bernard Lewis.

has anyone read him

sort of schematic i had in mind is erudite yet reactionary

gaston bachelard - the poetics of space
harry t. moore - 20th century french literature (fairly broad overview up to the nouveau roman era)
r.c. kenedy - annabel fast (not familiar with this guy; one of those mid sixties calder books with the author portraits on the cover and blurbs using "avant-garde" and "experimental" as descriptors)
alasdair gray - 1982, janine (heads up dead c fans: bears the legend "michael morley, 1987" inscribed on the first page)

and a couple of weeks ago i found b.s. johnson's albert angelo and trawl (in the old panther paperbacks) after searching for years.

adam philips - the beast in the nursery
thomas hardy - return of the native
dh lawrence - the rainbow
timothy gould - hearing things

i have a lot of other reading to do, plus am still on 'adam bede' and enjoying it, but the other day i suddenly had a powerful urge to read other british novels (which project gutenberg/google books made stronger). i totally want to go to… the heath, whatever exactly that is.

Three Soldiers by John dos Passos 3Eur, been regretting not being able to carry my copy of his USA cos overloaded flying back after Xmas. This is interesting & I need to read Manhattan Transfer + whatever else i can get by him

The Collector John Fowles 50c charity shop purchase. Enjoyed what i read of A Maggot by him so this is in the to-read pile.

Dust 50c purchase from same charity shop. Book on historiography

True Grit film tie in reissue of '68 novel. Bought from HMV cos it was cheaper than elsewhere. Very well written.

Trying to find a copy of Homicide by Ed Burns & David Simon but seems to be gone locally.
Also thinking of getting Gunk Punk, A Dance Of Days, The Endless Trip, John Einarson's book on Gene Clark, probably a few others

picked up secondhand over the last week:

whitney chadwick's women, art, and society
writers in russia: 1917-1978 by max hayward
russian art of the avant-garde: theory and criticism 1902-1934 (part of the motherwell documents of 20th century art series)
kathleen raine's thames and hudson 'world of art' blake study
the oxford complete writings of william blake (replacing my old everyman 'poems and prophecies' collection)

Don't intend to buy, just wanted to note that
http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745330600
seems kind of daft, on the face of it.

What? A new work by the author of The Wisdom of Donkeys? And you're calling it daft? You obv have not allowed the author to weave his spell over you.

i finally gave in and bought a brand new copy of the visitation, on lamp's recc. and also the last unread j. egan, 'look at me'.

don't know the donkeys book. Just think the blurb for the Magic book looks daft.

Bought thre 4 vols of Mishima's Sea of Fertility. I've been wanting these for a while, but though I've seen lots of copies of the individual books, I wanted 4 that matched. Huzzah, success at last!

Plus the newest 3 Richard STark 'Parker' reprints, which are excellent