Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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.

True Grit by Charles Portis, because I really want to read it again.

The Free Southern Theater: A Documentary of the South's Radical Black Theater, with Journals, Letters, Poetry Essays and a Play Written By Those Who Built It Starts with an account of an NYC fundraiser, hosted by Harry Belafonte, then back to the often-dangerous boondocks, where this Mississippi-founded troupe brought the shows--- audiences were really on top of Waiting For Godot, for instance. Things get suitably complicated (and stay somewhat perilous) in New Orleans, where we also get the most microscopically detailed descriptions of everyday people in the 60s I've ever seen. Actors should always have to go out and write this stuff down; every composition student should. These guys weren't students, just staying sharp, on a working afternoon off. Then on to Planet Texas....really an amazing cache of testimonies, written as or soon after it all happens.

"Radical Black" is a late tag for this initially integrated company and repertoire. Always necessarily adaptive, The FST was transformed as outside pressures came to include those of/from the increasingly besieged Civil Rights-to-Black Liberation struggle.

Ironically, as part of my project to divest myself of some of my books, I took five volumes away to sell and ended up coming home with:

The Changing Light at Sandover, James Merrill, used hardcover with dust jacket in very good condition, for $20. After trading the other books, that came to a $3.50 cash outlay. I was intrigued by the recent comments about it on ILB and, magic peacock notwithstanding, I decided to take it home for a spin.

"Monoceros" by Suzette Mayr, after attending her reading this morning. Excerpts she read sounded incredible; sad that it'll be a few months before I have time to read it.

I found a readable used copy of Independent People, by Halldor Laxness, for $1. Of course I bought it.

Helen Vendler's Emily Dickinson book.

John Ashbery, "quick Question"

Just starting Jhumpa Lahari's "The Namesake" a few years after buying it off a remainder table.

Just having one of those bored-at-work amazon-browsing overdoses.

Charles Simic's selection from Thomas Campion
Invisible Republic, Greil Marcus

After hunting round "The Faber Book of" for 'used and new from £0.01':
The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry
The Faber Book of Soccer

A Theologico-Political Treatise and a Political Treatise by Spinoza, have wanted a copy of this around for a while.
District and Circle and Electric Light by Seamus Heaney. Thought I'd check in with him & again these were 'used & new from £0.01'.
Biographia Literaria, bcz I decided it was VITAL I reread this. Haven't picked it up.

I should stop now. That's enough books.

Read this from the library, now got my own: Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed The World by David Maraniss. Title is a bit bombastic, and maybe backwards, but anyway this Olympics was pivotal, and the book is multidimensional as hell, yet no probs w clarity. Also, doesn't try to explain too much, so there are def subjects for further study. Why was weightlifting anathema, with Cali Olympics aspirants resorting to secret workout sessions and homemade weights?

i'm broke rn but found a 2$ copy of christine delphy: a materialist analysis of women's oppression

For a long time, conventional wisdom said that weightlifting, for athletes other than weightlifters, would cause one to become "musclebound" and as inflexible as a fire hydrant.

I should've thought of that, thanks (maybe why the author didn't bother to explain it)

Apex Hides The Hurt by Colson Whitehead - ZO has set me off on a Whitehead spree, I imagine ('cept THE INTUITIONIST, cuz I've already read that one).
Gould by Stephen Dixon - This was free. The blurb on the back mentions Calvino. Anyone wanna rep it?

My younger brother brought his twin brother Muscle by Samuel Fussell for his birthday, about the professional bodybuilding world. Looked quite good.

I like the author/title rhyme. Unusual.

I traded in some books yesterday and came home with:

Collected Poems, Yvor Winters, in a well-thumbed but readable paperback copy with a few pencil notations, for $4. A modest collection, but every poem reflects Winters' concern with clarity and concentration. He obviously was a relentless self-editor.

The Bab Ballads: With which are included Songs of a Savoyard, W.S. Gilbert, in a lovely, fully illustrated 1950 hardcover printing, for $8. The fruit of a piercing wit and a worthy mind.

shit dudes i went to the mit bookstore on friday and looked t a bunch of shit. i want to get the new-ish zizek, less than nothing, but it's mad expensive.

not really a purchase but: http://www.amazon.com/Shallow-Rewards-Commentaries-2005-2012-ebook/dp/B007AMN8OG

(it's free right now)

I feel virtuous. My bookshelves actually have a tiny bit of open space once more. Today I sold about 25 books and only bought two:

Troilus and Crisyde, Geoffrey Chaucer, in a used hardcover from Everyman's Library, good condiiton, for $5.50. This is not a modernized version, but the middle english with plentiful marginal notes for easier reading of the thorny bits.

Psmith, Journalist, P.G. Wodehouse, in a new hardcover marked down from $13.95 to $8.95. One of his better efforts, imo.

Envy you, reading that for the first time

Noticed Faction Books while on an errand yesterday - loved it, old school piled-high collections of books, comics, vinyl etc. Had no time to properly root around, but quickly picked up:

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/ciu/c4/92/bcd5c27a02a0382641a88110.L._AA300_.jpg

and a 70s copy of The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel, that is). Also heard about the owner's UFO encounter.

Aimless, Friday, March 2, 2007 6:52 PM (6 years ago)

This thread is now middle-aged, in dog years.

Glenn Patterson - "The Mill for Grnding Old People Young"
Margaret Atwood - "The Handmaids Tale"

Third in a series of xp books read early, purchased lately: following Sarah Barnwell Elliot's Some Data and The Free Southern Theater's The Free Southern Theater (plus Maraniss's Rome 1960), finally got Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture, with consideration of his fellow Goon Show fans the Moors Murderers, for inst, amidst the mists of hang-time w RD Laing, Alexander Trocchi and many others, as the 60s get 60s-er, skoob towers and all.

Thought my bank card have been declined because I was skint so I rushed home from Tesco and panic bought the following to see if I was solvent:

The Faber Book of Reportage (792 pages for a penny! wow!)
Richard Ford - Independence Day

Turns out that NatWest has just gone into meltdown again. Phew.

Roderick Hudson

Louise Glück - A Village Life
Derek Walcott - White Egrets

two recent books by older/established poets with whom I'm not really familiar—haven't spent much time with either yet, tho I skimmed the Walcott enough to notice the poem dedicated to Obama & entitled "Forty Acres" (!)