Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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.

Roger Zelazny - Chronicles of Amber
John Scalzi - Old Man's War (read this already over the course of a 6 hour plane flight - pretty meh and borderline offensive in places - thought it was going to be comparable to Forever War. Oh well.)
Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human
James Blish - Cities in Flight
Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum (found this in a secondhand place - didn't realise it was 3rd book in the series till I got home. Doh!)
Alfred Bester - Demolished Man
Anton Chekhov - The Lady and the Lapdog and Other Stories

stendhal - memoirs of a tourist
aleksandar hemon - nowhere man

i've read the latter but a girl i was dating "borrowed" it and never returned it years ago. it's a wonderful book, i couldn't pass it up for $3.

Exchanged a few for:

Susan Sontag - Styles of Radical Will
Manuel Puig - The Buenos Aires Affair
Vasily Grossman - Life and Fate

Found a whole bunch of wonderful Harvills from the early/mid '90s for $2 each. Got:

The Wooden Shepherdess by Richard Hughes
Girl in a Turban by Marta Morazzoni
His Mother's House by Marta Morazzoni
Take-off by Daniele Del Giudice
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marias
I'm Off by Jean Echenoz
Soft City by Jonathan Raban
Sister Hollywood by C. K. Stead

went second-hand bookshopping yesterday (surprising number of harvill editions there too) and got:

jorge luis borges' a universal history of infamy and dr brodie's report
nice big hardback copy of c.g. jung & co's man and his symbols (mostly for the illustrations)
the original account of the teachings, rites and ceremonies of the hermetic order of the golden dawn as revealed by israel regardie

also recently picked up the serpent's tail classics edition of pessoa's book of disquiet (anyone know how this translation compares to the zenith one that penguin put out, which seems to be twice the length?) and a first edition of dali's 50 secrets of magic craftsmanship.

Two excellent scores on a rare 2nd hand trawl round gower street:

Chretien de Troyes - Perceval (tr. Burton Raffel)
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace (heard about it in this silly article)

Paid a visit to Powell's Books and Goodwill today and came home with:

Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks, in a trade paperback format, decent shape. Looks very interesting, and squarely in the mainstream of the Sacks canon. $4.

Pharsalia, Lucan, in a poetic translation by Jane Wilson Joyce. The translation looks very readable and has a marked style that I found very appealing as I was browsing it. Used trade paperback out of Cornell Univ. Press. $10.

Cold Mountain Poems. Although Han Shan is given sole authorship on the cover, this also contains Zen poems by Shih Teh and Wang Fan-chih. Translator: J.P. Seaton. Shambala Press, new hardcover. I already had Red Pine's translations of Han Shan, but these ones really spoke to me, so I bought them. $10, remaindered.

Stories and Essays, H. L. Davis. An Oregon author who won the Pulitzer in the 1930s, he had one foot in the pioneer past, but a modern style. He was also a crusty curmudgeon, straight shooter and probably drank his whiskey neat. This is a paperback reprinted by Univ. of Idaho. $3.

Best in Tent Camping: Oregon, Menasha Ridge Press. New paperback at $16. This blasted book gives away everything that ought to be a secret. Half the campgrounds listed here I discovered on my own already and agree are excellent finds. The bastards!

Just purchased The Notebooks Of Captain Georges, a novel by Jean Renoir. It's an advance reading copy from 1966. Picked it up for a buck.

Picked up a $2 copy of Kafka's The Castle yesterday. Used Penguin paperback.

Not even supposed to be buying books, but I did just get the first vol. of Love and Rockets, which I had hitherto unaccountably managed to avoid. Also re-reading The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke. The description of an autumnal walk home at the beginning seemed perfect on a drizzly grey Sunday, and combined with which evoked many memories of childhood.

claimed a boxed paperback set of the alexandria quartet left out on the sidewalk

not purchased, but still

Keeping things current: I just purchased a used paperback $2 copy of Penguin's Celtic Miscellany yesterday. I added it to my stash of stuff to read while camping.

The Path to Power and The Means of Ascent by Robert Caro, which are the first two volumes of his bio of LBJ, used, for $1 and $2 respectively, because the first is in paperback and the second is hardcover. Although I do not expect these will change my overall opinion of the man, I expect they will deepen my sense of who he was tremendously.

American Cookery, James Beard, in a used hardcover, no dust jacket, from the third printing apparently, in good condition, for $1.50. I'm not sure whether I'll keep this or sell this. It is a classic, rarely available in any form for less than ten times what I paid.

Lots of YA:

Shipbreaker – Paolo Bacigalupi
Half Brother – Kenneth Oppell
Marcelo in the Real World – Francisco X. Stork
Spanking Shakespeare – Jake Wisner
Green Glass Sea – Ellen Klages
Petty Crimes – Gary Soto
Going Bovine - Libba Bray
Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have – Allan Zadoff

I found a bookstore where everything is $2 or less and went a little crazy:

American Pastoral -- Phillip Roth
JR -- William Gaddis
Ravelstein -- Saul Bellow
Selected Stories -- Alice Monroe
Housekeeping -- Marilynne Robinson
Venus on the Half Shell -- Kilgore Trout

Then I went to Half-Price Books and bought some more that were mostly $5 or under:

In The Miso Soup -- Ryu Murakami
The Hour of The Star - Clarice Lispector
The Stars My Destination -- Alfred Bester
A Sleep and Forgetting -- William Dean Howells
The Woman in White -- Wilkie Collins

Now I have to cut myself off for the rest of the month.

(oh and looks like one more: The Fire Next Time -- James Baldwin $2)

ancient and probably busted & verminous Poetical Works of Tom Moore, nine of ten volumes. Bargain price, & have been meaning to get to know him better for ages.

all for under 10 euro

william blake - "selected poems"
philip k dick - "flow my tears the policeman said"
lawrence j. taylor & maeve hickey - "tunnel kids" (about kids who live in the drainage tunnels that connect the twin cities of nogales, sonora and nogales, arizona)

I managed to piggyback a visit to Powell's Books onto some business I had nearby. I sold a fistful of books and came away with Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, as translated by Stephan Pearl, in a used hardcover for $15.

Having browsed this and the translations by David Magarshak and by Marian Schwartz, I preferred it as easily the funniest - and if you squeeze the fun out Oblomov, you present the reader with a flaccid mess.

Not even supposed to be buying books, but I did just get the first vol. of Love and Rockets, which I had hitherto unaccountably managed to avoid. Also re-reading The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke. The description of an autumnal walk home at the beginning seemed perfect on a drizzly grey Sunday, and combined with which evoked many memories of childhood.

Got this last week!

Also:

Bolano - The Savage Detectives
Bihari - The Satasai (starting on Hindu lit, anyone know much about this, or are able to recommend)
Albert Camus - Selected Essays and Notebooks
Stephen Vizinczey - In Praise of Older Women
Apollinaire - Selected Writings of...

A couple of other things I've bought, read and re-flogged 2nd hand...haven't posted in this thread in an age.

for 10 euro

Huysmans - "Against Nature"
Richard Ford - "The Sportswriter"
Richard Brautigan - "Revenge Of The Lawn"

6 Donald Westlakes,
Poetry of the Forties (Ed. Skelton),
Tension by EM Delafield,
The Governess and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig

Can someone explain to me why it's impossible to find a copy of the Some Hope trilogy for less than like $50,000? By which I mean $48?

small press, american debut of a small-market author, that's just what happens to used prices under low availability?

i bet you could get it from the uk for cheaper with the shipping:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Some-Hope-Edward-St-Aubyn/dp/0330435884/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312082206&sr=8-1

Apparently the trilogy is being rereleased in US paperback but not til Jan 2012.

btw think the book you linked is just the novella some hope, not the trilogy

ohhh. sorry. : / i figured the prices worked out, somehow.

The trilogy is available here for $12, free postage: http://www.bookdepository.com/Some-Hope-Edward-St-Aubyn/9780330435888

A few cheapos from charity shops:

J B Priestley - Literature and Western Man
Doris Lessing - The Fifth Child
Svetlana Alliluyeva - 20 Letters to a Friend
Arthur Koestler - The Sleepwalkers
Theodore Zeldin - An Intimate History of Humanity