Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

that lessing is pretty good

Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions from the kindle store

xpost I think that's also just the novella, not the trilogy

Bought the freedarko basketball history book. Very mcsweenyesque.

over the last month or so:

ezra pound - abc of reading
pound/lewis letters
wyndham lewis - the demon of progress in the arts
original version of graves' goodbye to all that
henry miller - the books in my life
collection of interviews with borges put out by some american university
collection of interviews with john fowles as above
nathalie sarraute - the planetarium
an anna akhmatova prose collection
poets of the millennium gertrude stein selection
recent grove press edition of breton's nadja
biography of guy debord called the game of war by andrew hussey
edition of doblin's berlin alexanderplatz with a section of photos reproduced from fassbinder's adaptation
and an old thames and hudson book on the life and art of henry fuseli

Just arrived: Stefan Collini, THAT'S OFFENSIVE!

think I might enjoy this and feel some agreement with it

A few days ago I nabbed a hardcover copy of the volume 1 of Twain's recently published autobiography. It had been officially removed from the local library's collection, so it has a lot of ex-lib markings on it, and it cost $5. That book is HUGE! But I am fond of Twain, so I am sure I will read most if not all of it. Eventually.

Man, your library ditches books FAST

maybe they found out no one wanted to check it out.

personally i've only read like 20 pages of mine.

that's right, snookered by an academic press's marketing coup

Brodsky - Less than One
Tarjei Vessas - The Birds
Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet (the really nice Penguin paperback w/that lovely photograph - you know the one I mean - really good intro by Richard Zenith, and more entries than the version I previously read)
Francois Mauriac - Therese

Nice haul!

Merchants of Doubt - Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
From Hell - Alan Moore
The Mothers Mouth - Dash Shaw
Kafka - David Zane Mariowitz and R. Crumb

Dash Shaw has a new one? Wow

it's actually an old one! from 2006.

http://www.dashshaw.com/imgs/work/mothers_2.png

Clair Wills, THIS NEUTRAL ISLAND

Andy Beckett, WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT

surprisingly decent stock in the remainder shop opposite the British Library

A few more cheapos:

H D F Kitto - The Greeks
Robert Gittings - John Keats
John Wain - The Smaller Sky

I bought a copy of "From the Holy Mountain", by William Dalrymple, because I am interested in Middle East Christians and am willing to read a travel book about them.

Really scored some nice books yesterday/past week:

Selected poems by Pavese, Akhmatova (both on Penguin) and Osip Mandelatam (this one is on nyrb which inludes Conversation About Dante, not on the old Penguin ed. that I'd read before)
Leonardo Sciascia - Equal Danger
Jean Giono - To the Slaughterhouse
Horacio Castellanos Moya - The She-Devil in the Mirror. Have been looking for a novel by him for a while so excited to finally find something.

i've been on the look out for poetry collections with/by mandelstam and akhmatova (only have a collection of her prose)with no luck. any interest in the futurist/zaum type stuff? i have a collection of khlebnikov which i'm finding fairly impenetrable. all i know about giono is that he was one of henry miller's literary crushes.

bought a box of books and salvaged:

pudovkin's film technique and film acting
maya deren's divine horsemen: the living gods of haiti
a study of nineteenth century american utopian communities
and a collection of texts by the levellers

also recently picked up raymond queneau's we always treat women too well, which was a pseudonymous pulp novel pastiche he published in the forties, set in dublin with various joycean allusions throughout.

Halloween is over, so it was safe to venture into Goodwill again (for those outside the USA, this is a charity shop, but with a national reach) now that it isn't thronged with people putting together their costumes from the racks of old clothes. Consequently, today I purchased:

Pale Fire, V. Nabokov, in a decent paperback for $4.

Further Cuttings From Cruiskeen Lawn, Flann O'Brien, in a Dalkey Archive paperback edition, in very good condition, for $3.

Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change, Elizabeth Kolbert, also in a good condition paperback, for $4.

Selected Verse, Frederico Garcia Lorca, ed. Christopher Maurer, a paperback bilingual edition, for $4. I am not sure whether this will be much better, or even as good as the translations in the old New Directions that gives Lorca's brother partial credit as editor. I'll have to compare them.

Jim Newton's Earl Warren biography.

Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library, which I never finished.

Hokusai Manga
Cahiers du Cinema : John Ford
Masters Of American Comics
DeRogatis Velvet Underground book
Wonder Of The Age: Master Painters Of India, 1100-1900

pauline kael - kiss kiss bang bang
flannery o'connor - the violent bear it away
sjowall/wahloo - cop killer
henning mankell - the man who smiled & the white lioness
le carre - the honourable schoolboy & smiley's people
godard on godard
tove jansson - the true deceiver
elizabeth hardwick - sleepless nights
ernst junger - storm of steel

Simenon - Dirty Snow
Jacqueline Rose - Albertine
Dante - The New Life
Camara Laye - The Radiance of the King