Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

that is not a good cover

Tons o' recent back issues of THE PARIS REVIEW, each a buck a piece. So those'll keep me occupied.

I trip on their online interview archive. Writers are soooo into being interviewed, getting away from the desk; for PR anyway. What's wrong with the cover, Ornamental Cabbage?

Every interview intro reads like "This interview is composed of eight sessions which took place over fifteen months..."

It looks like a Harlequin erotic novel, but with extra horrible type on the blurb quotes, and the Series of Unfortunate Events font for the title/author. Very mixed messages//slapped together. Nice bum, though.

Two by Blaise Cendrars - Gold and The Astonished Man (love Peter Owen)
Pavese - The Leather Jacket
Denton Welch - I Left my Grandfather's House

The Street Of Crocodiles And Other Stories by Bruno Schulz - Penguin Classics edition! Feels/looks swank. Should arguably be named Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass And Other Stories, but can't quibble.

stopped in my two fave stores near me. grey matter and meeting house books. they are such great stores. seriously, i can't say it enough, grey matter is REALLY worth a trip if you are near boston or even new york. this is my last buying trip for a while. will not buy anything else for myself this year. i have so much stuff at home stacked up.

clifford d. simak - time & again

samuel r. delany - the ballad of beta 2

jack vance - to live forever

jack vance - emphyrio

robert silverberg - the masks of time

robert silverberg - tower of glass

rudy rucker - wetware

rudy rucker - master of space and time

james tiptree, jr - up the walls of the world

theodore sturgeon - to marry medusa

james timptree, jr - star songs of an old primate

thomas m. disch - on wings of song

thomas m. disch - echo round his bones

theodore sturgeon - the synthetic man

kate wilhelm - city of cain

kate wilhelm - the killer thing

kate wilhelm - the clewiston test

patricia highsmith - plotting and writing suspense fiction

reinhold millers - time exile

kim stanley robinson - the wild shore (book one of three californias trilogy)

I just went to the actual place so I bought Pamuk's 'Museum of Innocence'.

Read The Clewiston Test recently: quite good, if low-key.

I could never get properly on board with Rudy Rucker. Read his Ware trilogy years ago. Lots of inventive ideas, but REALLY shoddy prose.

Never had a prob w Rucker; so I have no taste, but/and really enjoyed The Wild Shore. Seemed caught up in the wide- and sharp-eyed urgency of Huckleberry Finn, which no writer should think about inviting comparisons to, but Robinson makes it work. Also kind of Twain x London, re Man in/vs. Nature.

The Line Of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
The Everlasting Story Of Nory by Nicholson Baker
Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout
My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell

As a birthday gift:

My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. I've had my eye on this for almost half a year, but I am a cheapskate.

The Long Ships is a Kindle Daily Deal today, maybe will get that. Oh wait, do we post ebooks on this thread?

An ebook meets the basic requirement of being a book.

Dow, you have taste! And you're spot-on about The Wild Shore. I really need to get and read the other two books in that sort-of-trilogy

GOt the Pete Townshend autobio last week, not looked far into it and still have a couple of books to finish before i start it.
I was half thinking of buying a William Kennedy omnibus in another shop but wound up not. Pages were a bit yellowed, been meaning to read some of him since the film of Ironweed came out. I know I did get through one of his at some time back then and meant to read more, probably was one of the titles in the omnibus, but this is now 20 or more years later.