Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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.

xpost Thanks Ornamental, yeah, I've got some kind of taste, whatever it is. Right now,I too need to read the other two, Gold Coast and Pacific Rim(both which I've got)in that sort-of trilogy, plus the more recent 40 Drops of Rain (also got) and its two similarly titled follow-ups--and his new 3032 (think that's the title). In other words, I have a taste for following this theme of man screwing with Nature (thus himself as well). So just got Jon Krauker's non-fiction Into Thin Air, about a disastrously vainglorious Everest expedition. Krakauer was one of the climbers, less gullible than some, but how much less, if he was there at all? He prob asks himself that too; not one of your more pompous reporters. Really liked his unpretentious speculations and humane journo-surgical skill re the elusive, somewhat Thoreau-wannabbe tracked in Into The Wild (also a really fine movie, directed by Sean Penn).

Jon Krakauer, that is! Also will read his book on the Pat Tillman case, with the rugged terrain as actual factor and alibi (though several layers of the cover-up were constructed in the Pentagon)

A doctor appointment took me within a few blocks of Powell's Books. This can be fatal.

The Elder Edda, tr. Andy Orchard, a new Penguin classic paperback, $15.
A, Louis Zukofsky, New Directions trade paperback, new, $25.
Rome and Italy, Livy, used Penguin classic paperback, $7.

I've got that Krakauer short book 'Three Cups of Deceit' which I keep meaning to read

The Elder Edda, tr. Andy Orchard, a new Penguin classic paperback, $15.

weird thing for them to bring out! apparently it's been delayed for like ten years. what's it like - ? have you read the one in OUP at all?

I have not read the OUP edition of the Elder Edda. What's it like?

Oh, I see you asked first. The Orchard translation appears to be a fairly freehand poetic interpretation. Here's a sample taken at random (p110):

13. 'Tell me this, All-wise, since, dwarf, I suspect
you know every creature's whole history:
what the moon is called that people see
in every world there is.'

14. ' "Moon" it's called by men, but "gloe-ball" by the gods,
they call it "spinning wheel" in Hel;
"speeder" giants, "shining" dwarfs,
the leves call it "tally of years".'

damn typos:
line 5 glow-ball,
line 8 elves

that seems a little more naturalistic than i remember the er larrington being, which is the one that's in world's classics -- i recall it having a sort of half-translated feel, lots of nouns and syntax kept, which kind of suited the material somehow still. i don't know, i don't remember it particularly well -- i just remember riddling-matches and the sorts of details everyone remembers (ship made of dead men's fingernails e.g.) and never really understanding the time-frame of the voluspa

The Dog Of The South by Charles Portis
Dream Time by Geoffrey O'Brien

The Portis, after I finish this Hollinghurst, is coming next next next.

t Aimless: you're in for a treat w/ the Spicer -- I picked it up a few months ago & still feel like i've barely scratched the surface of its myriad delights

Boualem Sansal - "An Unfinished Business"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - "Fooled By Randomness"

/The Dog Of The South/ by Charles Portis
/Dream Time/ by Geoffrey O'Brien

Thanks!

'Nother one:

Monkey by Wu Ch'eng-en (but maybe not), trans. by Arthur Waley - already own this; buying another copy for a friend on his birthday.

The nature of Monkey was irrepresible

Popped into the Gower St Waterstones on my lunchbreak today, they've got a half price sale on all their second hand stuff. literally two minutes of browsing the fiction section netted me the following for £2 each:

Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman (been meaning to read this for ages. please tell me it's funny.)
Alan Heathcock - Volt (oddly enough I saw this mentioned on a 'eleven new american readers you must read' list last night and felt sad that i'd probably never get to read it (it's a collection of short stories about a stoic midwestern rural community with mccarthy style biblical darkness going on etc) so finding it there today was a real treat.
Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones (this is for the MA. Looks interesting enough)

Then got a bus back to New Cross and picked up DeLillo's Underworld for TWENTY PENCE!!!

It's very funny

If you have to ask you'll never know

got a pile of books in yesterday, 2 from amazon and 6 from a charity book sale at work.

Chinua Achebe - No Longer at Ease ($1)
Arthur Miller - An Enemy of the People ($1)
Kurt Vonnegut (Sirens of Titan, Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse 5 - hardcovers, $1 each)
Jon Krakauer - Into Thin Air
Miles Davis - Miles (this is great so far, btw)
Ursula K Le Guin - Earthsea Trilogy

Lovely new indie bookstore just opened up here, so I bought secondhand hardcover copies of

On Michael Jackson - Margo Jefferson (already read, awesome)
Amnesia Moon - Jonathan Lethem (one of the few Lethems I haven't read yet)

I was buying another item on Amazon as a gift to my daughter and threw in for myself:

Complete Poems, Basil Bunting, new trade paperback, New Directions, for a bit under $13. This edition includes Briggflatts and a fair number of Uncollected Poems as back matter.

In related news, I now officially own too many books. Sumpthin's gotta give.

I got a Selected? Collected? recently on holiday. Enjoyed Briggflats very much - bleak. Love and poetry carved out of an inhospitable environment.

I sold books today, maybe six or seven out of the dozen or so I took to Powell's Books. In return, I bought:

The Recognitions, Wm. Gaddis, as a new Dalkey Archive trade paperback, for $19. I can't say I thought the typesetting was especially attractive on this one, but it looks like a good read. Maybe this spring.

The Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar, in a used Penguin paperback. I read this ages ago in college and just recently have been reading his Civil War, so I bought the companion volume for $7.50.

Crossing The Empty Quarter by Carol Swain
The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano

Thomas Disc, The Man Who Had No Idea Stories. Never saw it before, anybody read it?

whoa I bought The Recognitions today, along with JR

All the best w/ The Recognitions - that book has defeated me twice.

Gave away about 300 books to a local charity shop at the weekend as i couldn't justify getting any more until i made a (barely noticeable) dent in the stack.

Picked up some NYRB remainders at Waterstones in Gower Street - Maude Hutchins' Victorine, Manchette's Fatale and Victor Serge's Conquered City. Also got a cool book of nature drawings Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka used to make their amazing glass models.

The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov - A new copy as my old copy is very much falling apart.
Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow, And Farewell by Javier Marias - Already read/adored this, found it cheap - why not?
Love And Death In A Hot Country by Shiva Naipaul - Haven't read this one.
Zone One by Colson Whitehead - Haven't read this one either.

really liked zone one, as went on about on rolling fantasy and one of those recent what have you been reading? threads

the instructions - adam levin
a moment in the sun - john sayles
flannery: a life of flannery o'connor - brad gooch
news from the empire - fernando del paso

Concluding - Henry Green (£1.50, battered 1964 Penguin paperback)
Blood's a Rover - James Ellroy (£2.00, signed UK H/C)
The Earth - Zola (£1.35, 1980 Penguin Classic translation)
Killer Instinct - Jane Hamsher (£1.95, 1997 US H/C - non-fiction bk abt the making of Natural Born Killers, feat. a praiseblurb on the back from Alan Moore, of all people)
The New Poetry - selected and introduced by A. Alvarez (£1.00, 1966 revised and enlarged edition, Penguin paperback with a lovely repro of Jackson Pollock's 'Convergence' on the cover)

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
Bento's Notebook by John Berger

I should mention I stumbled onto and purchased a copy of:

On the Natural Faculties, Galen, tr. A.J. Brock, as a used Loeb Classical Library volume in hardcover, good shape (a nice dust cover, even) for $3. I have only a modest interest in Galen, but I have a pact with myself to buy any and every used Loeb edition in good shape that I run across, if it is under $5.

that's weird Ward Fowler - I am going to be reading Concluding very soon indeed. We must exchange notes.

Ward - austerity-era prices. I like it ;-)

imago - cool! i am abt 50 pages in to the Green - and have opinions! see you in the 'What are you Reading?' thread

xyzzz - austerity in this case is just another word for cheapskate! All the above were from my favourite tumbledown 2nd-hand bookshop (think I posted a pic somewhere up thread) - you will have to visit! There are always bargains to be had - not long ago I got from them a pristine UK hardcover first ed of Durgnat's Mirror for England for £3.45 (i love those crazy five pences...)

Nancy Mitford - Penguin Complete Novels
Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome

I read Ethan Frome long, long ago. I was delighted to rediscover what an amazing story it is.

Just bought The Lewis Men

1. cos it was 20p in the amazon store
2. i keep seeing the ads for the third one everywhere, not in a sort of 'shit yeah i must read that' sort of way but in a
3. 'wonder what genre/airport/commute novels are doing these days' sort of way

also marcello's Blue in the Air.