Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

Last book I bought was Marshall Macluhan The Gutenberg Galaxy though It's probably going to take me a while to get around to reading it.

WAnt to get he Tav Falco book that has been being promoted recently. Sounds very interesting.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Amazon suddenly and inexplicably has Eno's A Year With Swollen Appendices available for purchase:

http://www.amazon.com/Year-With-Swollen-Appendices-Brian/dp/0571179959/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341165251&sr=1-1&keywords=swollen+appendices

For once, keeping something on my ridiculously comprehensive Amazon wish list for ten years has paid off!

Chistopher Priest - The Inverted World

The Stories of Ray Bradury and Something Wicked This Way Comes
PKD's The Simulacra
a chemistry textbook to go with MIT video lectures

Mostly poetry:

David St. John, The Auroras
Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars
Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City
(ILB-favorite) Michael Robbins, Alien vs. Predator

Less contemporary:

Essential Poetry & Prose of Jules Laforgue (not crazy about the selection, but v.little of his stuff seems to be available in translation...)
Rilke, The Book of Images (trans. Edward Snow)

Being going on a poetry and plays binge since finding this ebook shop, http://www.booksonboard.com, which has heaps of Faber stuff for $3-$6

To Your Scattered Bodies Go – Philip Jose Farmer
Good Morning Blues – The Autobiography of Count Basie
N<Space – Larry Niven
Music in Relation to Employee Attitudes, Piece-Work Production, And Industrial Accidents – Henry Clay Smith
The Future of Jazz – Edited by Yuval Taylor (Ratliff, Tate, Watrous, etc.)
Fifth Planet – Fred Hoyle & Geoffrey Hoyle
The Year’s Best SF 9 – Edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison
Fury – Henry Kuttner
A World Named Cleopatra – Poul Anderson
Three Worlds To Conquer – Poul Anderson
Analog 5 – edited by John W. Campbell
The Sword Swallower – Ron Goulart
Exile and Other Tales of Fantasy – M.A. Cummings
Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
Epitaths of Our Times – The Letters of Edward Dahlberg
The Pyramids From Space – Jack Bertin
Blue Note Records – The Biography – Richard Cook
Miles – The Autobiography – Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe
Change the Sky and Other Stories – Margaret St. Clair
The Inferno – Fred Hoyle & Geoffrey Hoyle
Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya – The Story Of Jazz As Told By The Men Who Made It – Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff
Pattern Recognition – William Gibson
The American Language – H.L. Mencken
The American Language – Supplement One – H.L. Mencken
The American Language – Supplement Two – H.L. Mencken
Vibrations – A Memoir – David Amram
Colony – Ben Bova
Impact-20 – William F. Nolan
Five to Twelve – Edmund Cooper
Rockets In Ursa Major – Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle
Mirror in the Sky – Dav Garnett
Echo X – Ben Barzman
The Napoleans of Eridanus – Pierre Barbet
The Dark-Light years – Brian Aldiss
Death Cloud – Michael Mannion
George Clinton and P-Funk – An Oral History – Edited by Dave Marsh
Chronolysis – Michel Jeury
N by E – Rockwell Kent
Millennial Women – Edited by Virginia Kidd
African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man - Robert Ardrey
The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations - Robert Ardrey
The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder - Robert Ardrey
The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man - Robert Ardrey

got those at the tent sale outside grey matter. one of the best bookstores around. DEFINITELY worth a trip if you live in new york or boston. all hardcovers a buck and all paperbacks 50 cents for the tent stuff. mostly old stock (that had been in storage) from the excellent troubadour book store that closed and consolidated with grey matter. some great books at the sale. got great stuff for the store and for me. had to stop. could have been there all day. this list is stuff i took home and hope to read! excited to get the two mencken supplements. never had them. and the dahlberg letters too. never see that. beautiful first edition.

http://greymatterbookstore.com/

my other favorite store in the area:

http://www.meetinghousebooks.com/

if you feel like taking a trip. easy distances between stores.

and then if you REALLY want to go nuts this is also very close to the other stores:

http://whatelybookcenter.weebly.com/

The Inferno – Fred Hoyle & Geoffrey Hoyle

This is not bad--not as good as Hoyle sr's The Black Cloud--though it very much has the idea that global apocalypse could lead to rational scientists as warlords, and this would OBVIOUSLY be a good thing, which is not argued persuasively

Went book shopping today and brought home:

The Pale King, DFW, remaindered trade paper, $9.98.
Orlando Furioso, V.2, Ariosto, tr. Barbara Reynolds, used Penguin classic paperback $4.95. I had V.1 already.
White Noise, Don Delilo, used paperback, $3.
The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country, Jan Morris, used hardcover, $1.50.

All the rest were used paperbacks for fifty cents:

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson.
The Mandelbaum Gate, Muriel Spark.
Midaq Alley: The Thief and the Dogs: Miramar, Naguib Mahfouz.
The Leopard, Guiseppe di Lampedusa.
The Love of a Good Woman, Alice Munro.
The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco.

Haven't done this in a while..

Sold a bunch for some coins plus:

Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon.
Mathieson - The Shrinking Man
Vols 2 and 3 of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Child of All Nations
Turgenev - First Love

Then 50 quid's worth of gift Amazon tokens on:

Vol. 1 of the Toer (its a tetralogy so I'm on the lookout for vol.4)
Abdelrahman Munif - Cities of Salt
Meltzer - Gulcher
Poem collections by Vallejo and Tsvetaeva
The BFI classics bk on WR - Mysteries of the Organism by Raymond Durgnat

Lately:

Tayleb Salih - Season of Migration to the North
Kenzaburo Oe - Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
Imre Kertesz - Fateless

Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (now reading)
Lethem's 33⅓ entry and As She Climbed Across the Table
Mieville's The City and the City
DFW's Infinite Jest from the kindle store

From Hammersmith Books for Amnesty Int:

Diarmaid MacCullouch's biography of Cranmer. (Very pleased, have had an eye out for a cheap copy for ages.)
Nice hardback of Frank Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England (recently picked up the two previous vols of the old Oxford History, Roman Britain and The English Settlements, felt it was meant to be.)
Minor Poets of the Seventeenth Century (Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace)

Also this:
http://c2.bibtopia.com/h/975/472/342472975.0.m.jpg
I just couldn't resist the cover. So serious!

several 99c books from a local sale

Will Birch's bio of Ian Dury yesterday.

Little Girl Blue
edith Piaf No Regrets
& Robert Mitchum Baby I don't Care
on Friday

might get something else later if new stuff's appeared, not sure it will on a Sunday.

John Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (I'm on this one now, still in the early prehistorical chapters... good stuff, very readable)
Ezra Pound, The Cantos (I don't know if I'll ever read this in any serious way, but I finished Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry a while ago and felt I'd like to have some of this poetry to consult at leisure)
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Local church had a book sale today, was really impressed w their selection. I got a 1964 edition of Memento Mori by Muriel Spark, complete with AWESOME cover design by Tomi Ungerer. I've never read anything by Muriel Spark but hear nothing but good things about her on ILX and elsewhere, am anticipating a good time.

I also got some things for my son:
Alexander's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
A Shirley Hughes book (Lucy and Tom at the Seaside) which was a huge coup since I've never seen a single Hughes book for sale anywhere in Canada, and she is the BEST
A hardcover 1965 rhyming book about BUSES with amazing retro illustrations. It's an ABC book and the entry for Q is 'Queer Buses' ie ones that families live in
Roald Dah's Revolting Rhymes

My son is still way too young for any of these except maybe the Bus book, but they were 50c each so I wasn't passing them up.

big haul from the annual y menette's book sale; i know big cities have book sales constantly, but living in a smallish town, it's a rare event for me.

Perlstein - Nixonland
Roth - Patrimony
Coetzee - Summertime
Larson - The Devil in the White City
Mantel - Wolf Hall
Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost
Waugh - A Handful of Dust
le Carre - The Honourable Schoolboy
Carr - Four Complete Dr. Fell Mysteries (of which I had read two, but hey $2)

and a crapton of sf paperbacks

Loved Anil's Ghost.

The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson
Permanent Red by John Berger
The Missing Of The Somme by Geoff Dyer
Pendennis by Thackeray

Quite fond of all except the Thackeray, which, seventy pages into, it occurs to me I will likely not finish. The Long Ships is excellent.

Some Data and Other Stories of Southern Life, by Sarah Barnwell Elliott, 1848-1927, I think. Civil War-associated trauma, but mostly avoiding antebellum sentimentality except when and how it fucks up her characters (aside from the occasional shameless hardcore Dickensian pathos, when she needed the money badly enough). More the rising tide of social realism, proto-Southern Gothic x absurd/satirical robust oatburners, prob a fan of the later Twain and sure seems like a possible inspiration for Faulkner and Welty. A sufferagette leader of the Deep South. This very posthumous collection, incl five prev unpub. is not rec to font freaks and eyestrain wusses.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Sarah_Barnwell_4465090326_ab1d962187_o.jpg

^^ wearing her superhero outfit

Made a dash to three bookstores today. I sold some books and then came home with:

Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, used trade paperback, but in very good condition, for $14.50.

Poems of Robert Herrick in a 1936 hardcover Everyman edition with a halfway decent dust jacket, $5.95. The attraction was that this edition retained the original spelling. Sadly, like all the modern editions of Herrick I've ever seen, it expurgates some of the more scatalogical epigrams. Fuck you, editors!

Beulah Land!, H.L. Davis, used hardcover, $6. This is a local author and novelist. He won a Pulitzer in the mid-30s and actually deserved it. A very minor literary figure, but one who I have enjoyed reading.

who fucking expurgates herrick?

The Greek Alexander Romance, translated by Richard Stoneman, Penguin Classics used paperback, very good condition. $5.95.

Have you gotten to this one yet? I've been wanting to check it out.

some used books I bought over the past months:

C.L Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy
K.W. Jeter, Dr. Adder & Wolf Flow
Norma Rinsler, Gerard de Nerval (hasnt arrived yet)

plus some old Penguin editions of Shakespeare's plays

Peter Hook Unknown Pleasures Inside Joy Division which I'm finding very readable and very interesting. Nice to hear an insider's viewpoint on the band and hadn't realised he went quite as far back with Barney as he does.
Would be interesting to hear other member's perspectives too, but this is good for the time being. Read about 1/3 of it since I got it yesterday.

Neil Young Waging Heavy Peace
not really looked through this yet, but looking forward to doing so.
I like Neil Young but not sure where I place him in terms of favourite artist. Don't think he's one of my core favourites but I do tend to find most of his music very listenable. Especially the heavier stuff.

at the same time I bought those I was looking at the new Pete Townshend autobio WHo I Am and the Barney Hoskyns Led Zep book, may well go back for those before long. Hope they're there at the same price still. HMV has them for something under half price.

K.W. Jeter, Dr. Adder & Wolf Flow

― skeevy wonder (Drugs A. Money), Sunday, October 21, 2012 5:37 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hadn't realised that Wolf Flow was him, mainly only know the title as a Loop BBC sessions set. Does it derive from elsewhere? I know Jeter did write several books filling in gaps of stories originally by other writers, notably H.G. Wells with the Time Machine but I think others too.

Jeter novel is 92; last one published before Noir. Loop album is 91. WF dust jacket had a palindrome from another book (with 'wolf' as first word, 'flow' as last); perhaps that's where the title came from...

Sold a bunch for pennies and a copy of Edmund White's essays (mostly bcz of an essay on Nabokov) and Pavese's Devil in the Hills.

The Greek Alexander Romance... Have you gotten to this one yet?

Not yet. It is lurking at the periphery of my To Read heap.

I should probably make a clean breast of this. Yesterday, for the grand sum of $2.50 I bought a two-volume hardcover boxed set of The Basic Writings of St. Thomas Acquinas, comprised of the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles. I am still not sure why, other than a mild curiosity.

The Bell - Iris Murdoch
The Egyptologists - Kingsley Amis & Robert Conequest
Song of the Silent Snow - Hubert Selby Jr
Corpse - Mick Farren
L.A. Noir Trilogy - James Ellroy
Citizen Kane (BFI Classics) - Laura Mulvey
Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima

Film And Feelings by Raymond Durgnat
The Three Musketeers by Dumas - The Lowell Bair translation; I feel like that may mean something or nothing to Dumas afficionados.

At a library sale, lovely NYRB edition of Belchamber by Howard Sturgis, which I'd never heard of but hey, it's NYRB.

I'd put The Egyptologists fairly near the bottom of the pile, Ward.

I suspected as much, Fizzles, but I'd not actually seen a copy before. I shall file it on the completist-spasm pile.

Not a purchase, but recovered a small pile of books from storage+ am happy to be reunited with George Saintsbury's Minor Poets of the Caroline period in 3 vols, it is one of the few handsome books I own.

Never read 'The Egyptologists'--my copy has this awful cover:
[http://pictures.abebooks.com/GDP/6774829488.jpg

This cover is at least a bit better. http://www.bondibooks.com/ILAB/2009/6/523.jpg

I rather like Panther's unfailing commitment to tackily inappropriate cover imagery.
My copy is a 1990s paperback with an unexceptional painted cover, part of a uniform series.

Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass - Bruno Schulz
Always Coming Home - Ursula K Le Guin (based on raves from ILX, this better be good)
To the Finland Station - Edmund Wilson

I rather like Panther's unfailing commitment to tackily inappropriate cover imagery.
My copy is a 1990s paperback with an unexceptional painted cover, part of a uniform series.

there was a whole series of these wasn't there? The Egyptologists gets the cover it deserves tbh, but The Green Man, Girl 20, and, to an extent I Want It Now, are considerably better books. I think there was another in fact - surely not The Riverside Villas Murder.

Ward let us know what you think of the Mishima. That should near the top of the pile.

Spring Snow is OK. I just re-bought Acts of Worship b/c I'm always giving Mishima away when people come over. After the banquet to people I like and Forbidden Colours to people I don't

I also got Eugene Onegin which I've never read
Kristeva's Tales of love which I love and lost somewhere
Iris Murdoch's The black prince, Murdoch is new to me and I heard this was a good start

Turned down an expensive Blake collection, which was hardcover and beautifully printed but was $25 and I wasn't up for it

All of Mishima's books have something for me, even the ones that don't add up to much. My personal favourite is Sun and Steel (an essay of his).

There are SO MANY I haven't read, pretty much all the recently translated stuff. I need to catch up but I typically just re-read and re-read him

Sorry, what recently translated stuff?

a '66 paperback of The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky
have tried to think where I was reading references to the book. Does Colin Wilson reference it somewere in the Outsider or something, or does it turn up in Morning of the Magicians or something of that ilk?
anyway cost €2 and binding looks pretty together.

and Theosophy by Rudolf Steiner. Hadn't realised he was connected to Blavatsky at all. Haven't read the book yet so don't know if he twisted the teachings at all. Thought he was supposed to be a philanthropist of sorts and not sure to what extent the Theosophy society was conventionally philanthropic. Thought it might actually be more mysanthropic to large sections of society, but been a while since i read much about them.

Sister Noon by Karen Joy Fowler, best known for The Jane Austen Book Club, which I haven't read. Have enjoyed Fowler's science fiction short stories, and most of her novel Sarah Canary, though it alternates frontier sightings of the diverting, anomalous title character with real solid chunks of historical commentary, tending to the lecture-y. This one is about a good daughter of old San Francisco, whose life is complicated by encounters with the historical entity previously known to me as Mammy Pleasant, though she had other names, other roles besides madam. Blurbs indcate she's a deftly flickering, flowering Fowlerian subject.

Just got this
http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312050000l/1403416.jpg