Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

Yesterday I bought a couple of hiking guide books (Day Hikes in Mt. Rainier & Day Hikes in the North Cascades), plus Player Piano by Vonnegut and Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed -- all 4 for a total of $2.

A while back I bought a copy of Prescott's Conquest of Mexico & Conquest of Peru in the Modern Library Giant format for $3.

On another recent bookstore trip I bought:

The Far Corner, by Stewart Holbrook, used paperback, $2.

The Poincare Conjecture, Donal O'Shea, used paperback, $4.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why, Laurence Gonzales, used paperback, $4.

There are probably some others I've lost track of. For someone who isn't reading much, I seem to keep buying plenty of fodder.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs
Walking Dead - Compendium One(issues 1-48)
Asterios Polyp - David Mazzuccheli
History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
Ubik - Philip K Dick

Can we list books we tried to purchase? Because I tried to purchase Bossypants by Tina Fey but was not allowed to because I live in the wrong country. Anyway, I have Bossypants by Tina Fey.

Im considering Bossypants but the Sarah Silverman one kind of turned me off celebrity bios. That said I am reading Mary Forsberg Weiland's fall to pieces (i think thats the title?) Ok so far. Still has that im not a writer jokey sarcastic tone in it that that kind of grates.

Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea
Larry Niven - Ringworld
Jonathan Lethem - Amnesia Moon
a bunch of James Bond paperbacks for my grandmother

The Men's Club - Leonard Michaels
Goon Squad - Egan
Invention of Solitude - Auster
Exercises in Style - Queneau
Dr Jeckyl / Mr. Hyde - Stevenson
The Odyssey - Stanley Lombardo translation
Elisabeth Costello - Coetzee
Waiting For The Barbarians -- Coetzee
In The Freud Archive - Janet Malcolm
The Unconsoled - Ishiguro
Book of Common Prayer - Didion

More stuff by authors I love and not trying anything new:

Bernhard - The Loser
Moravia - Boredom
Serge - Conquered City

Selling a few paperback soon, so I'll be using what I get for that for more, hopefully.

OK, what's with the hideous hairy arms on the cover of Bossypants? Because I know fuck-all about Tina Fey, and they're freaking me out.

Realised that there were lots of cheap hardback 'Oxford Book of (x) Verse' knocking about on Amazon, so picked up a few - the old Medieval & Seventeenth Century anthologies, & Traditional Verse (fantastic).

Zones of Thought - Vernor Vinge twofer (huge and ugly Fire Upon the Deep/Deepness in the Sky twofer, should've gone for individual volumes)
Flatland - Edwin Abbott
Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem
His Master's Voice - ditto
The Blackest Streets: the Life and Death of a Victorian Slum - Sarah Wise
A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain - Tamler Sommers (interviews)

... and Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe (vol 1 i think) has just arrived at the library.