Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

tbh with story of the eye i thought eh, 1928 borderline porno, this is going to be pretty tame. but holy moley, the piss is flying left and right

standing at a swedish festival

for the longest time i thought that line went "discussing story of the year", with "year" pronounced in a ridiculous accent, and wondered why he would give props to story of the year like that

"tbh with story of the eye i thought eh, 1928 borderline porno, this is going to be pretty tame"

ahahaha

The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino
The Baron In The Trees by Italo Calvino
Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

Two bios by Paul Mariani. One of Berryman and one of Lowell.

multi-xpost — Story of the Eye is okay but Blue of Noon might actually be one of the 20th-century's best novel(la)s

Just bought 7 books, which I really need to stop doing because I'm still acquiring books faster than I'm reading them.

Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
Mo Yan - Pow!
Italo Calvino - The Baron in the Trees
Italo Calvino - The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount (really weird that R Baez just bought these two books too)
Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim
GK Chesterton - The Man WHo Was Thursday

Third Policeman is an awesome mindfuck.

I'm still working down a trade balance from a sale of books a couple of weeks ago. I used some of it to buy:

the Alphabet, Ron Silliman, as a new trade paperback, $17.98. I read a few pages in the bookstore and this seemed pretty damned interesting, although I expect that at 1000+ pages this huge poem won't really hang together so much as flow onwards, without any obvious purpose other than 'say stuff'.

just bought a couple of collected poems, Amy Clampitt + Hugo WIlliams. Not close relations of a Silliman epic.

Mrs. Redd sent me this. idgi.

http://exp.lore.com/post/46900401798/ah-yes-flowcharting-the-book-lovers-dilemma

b-but, diamonds are always used for decisions.

half price sale at the used book store in town.

kampus - james e. gunn

mutiny in space - avram davidson

the road to nightfall - collected stories volume 4 - robert silverberg

childhood's end - arthur c. clarke

they walked like men - clifford d. simak

through the eye of a needle - hal clement

gender genocide - edmund cooper

the wind from the sun - arthur c. clarke

three hainish novels - ursula k. le guin

starwater strains - new science fiction stories - gene wolfe

a knight of ghosts and shadows - poul anderson

chronopolis and other stories - j.g. ballard

a canticle for leibowitz - walter m. miller, jr

beyond this horizon - robert a. heinlein

the sheep look up - john brunner

the squares of the city - john brunner

the avengers of carrig - john brunner

son of man - robert silverberg

world's fair 1992 - robert silverberg

the dream master - roger zelazny

a short, sharp shock - kim stanley robinson

the way the future was - a memoir - frederik pohl

master of time and space - rudy rucker

city - clifford d. simak

deux x - norman spinrad

Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves, in a beaten-up paperback copy, for 25 cents.

The Pirate King, Daniel Defoe, in a nice paperback copy, for 25 cents.

the most recent books i've purchased are rontel by sam pink and john darnielle's 33 1/3 book, black sabbath's master of reality. i also went on sort of a binge a few weeks ago at this awesome discount used bookstore in my town -- the cranbury bookworm -- and got like ten books, the most enjoyable so far being an anthology of "modern poetry" released by modern library at some point in the 30s. it made me happy to see hart crane included in there and also mentioned in the intro; wasn't aware he got any love that soon after his death.

That Darnielle book is wonderful.

Just ordered Ebert's "Life Itself" (which I really should've bought when it was new), Mark Baumgarten's "Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music" and, as a gift, Jonathan Lethem's "You Don't Love Me Yet."

sweet, those all sound great. the main music book i have had on my to-read list is love goes to buildings on fire, which i got for christmas. re. scott's list: i've always wanted to get more interested in sci-fi because i love philip k dick, but i never know where to start and also, as a former literature student, always feel "guilty" reading genre stuff when i haven't, for instance, read moby dick yet. i've had this list bookmarked for a while. i'd be curious to hear what the real sci-fi readers here think of this site's canon: http://thisrecording.com/today/2010/1/18/in-which-we-count-down-the-100-greatest-science-fiction-or-f.html

pathetically, i'm still stuck on the next book i posted about somewhere in this thread or some other thread.

29. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

He was just never bad, and here he was at his immortal best with an examination of the interconnections between all that is and will be. A true classic with fantasy undertones. Like most masterpieces, its straddling of genre is part of the charm.

?

Ada is the speculative fiction novel, if anything is.

where did you find that description of pale fire?

sorry if it is on this thread or something; i couldn't find it.

I can't offer any insight into that SF list, sadly, but this list from the same site has been making my already quite unwieldy reading list even more so for the past couple years:

http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/3/10/in-which-these-are-the-hundred-greatest-novels.html

I found it in the list you linked to.

oh, lol. hm, i don't know what that is doing on the list. i haven't read pale fire though, but it's my understanding that there is a ghost involved, so maybe that is why it is fantasy?

according to the compilers of the list i mean

xp oh yeah, the "100 greatest novels list" made me feel really poorly read when i first found it, now i feel like i have made some inroads into it, without explicitly planning to. i like the idiosyncrasy of that list, rating demons over brothers karamazov and things like that. their 100 best authors was interesting too, i thought, as they put faulkner at #1, and also included walter benjamin but no other critics (??) in general, i'm a fan of reading lists like that even though i recognize the conversations they spark are not always productive.

The Collected Early Poems and Plays, Robert Duncan, U of CA Press, as a new hardbound with dust jacket, for $42.50. (makes a strangulated whimper) (remembers it was mostly financed by trading other books) (breathes again)

The Ramayana, as retold by R.K. Narayan, used paperback in good condition, $3.

Pat, re sf, have you tried rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

i've been looking at it since i last posted! good stuff over there.

A couple of days ago I was at Goodwill (a charity shop, for you brits) and saw a hardbound copy of 2666 for $5. I pounced on it, but quickly discovered that it was from the local public library and it bore no indication that it had been withdrawn from their collection. Sadly, I reshelved it due to an attack of scruples. Dammit. So close.

i feel like ethically you were on shaky ground there

unless you also contacted the library to help them chase the book thief and donated $5 to goodwill independently

should've held on to it for fingerprints imo, this dastardly purloiner is bound to strike again

went nuts and bought lotsa slightly used Harry Mathews at the wonderful Amherst Books in Amherst:

the human country - new and collected stories
the journalist
the sinking of the odradek stadium
the conversions
tlooth

(also finally bought the latest novel by one of my heroes Scott Bradfield, The People Who Watched Her Pass By, and an Elizabeth Taylor book I don't think I have? A Game Of Hide And Seek. I mean I might have it already. hard to remember what I have already sometimes.)

i'm hoping harry will inspire me cuz there is a flight of fancy I want to take.

got the following from my local library for a total of ONE POUND yesterday:

Don Delillo - Mao II
Colm Tobin - The Master
Alain Robbe-Grillet - Jealousy
Anthony Beevors - Berlin
some Penguin collection of ancient Greek literary criticism.

Quite happy with that.

Just ordered Alice Echols' great JHot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, which I've read before but felt the sudden need to actually own.

Hot

a bunch more cheap books from the sale in Easons the nationla newsagent chain yesterday
got 4 for €3.98 (2x buy one get one free purchases of €1.99)
Herman Leonard Jazz
Beatles Memoribilia
the big coffeetable book history of Fleetwood Mac
& DAys Of Hope & Dreams on early Bruce Springsteen

& today a '97 history of Apple supposedly showing what went wrong. which was 50c

but becoming conscious of quite how many books I have that need to be read. & for how long some of them have been sitting around. Grabbed a load of great biographies for 99c a pop about 6 months ago, if that and they're just sitting beside my bed.

Edward Upward - In The Thirties
Theophile Gautier - Mademoiselle de Maupin
Moliere - The Misanthrope & Other Plays
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Heinrich von Kleist - The Marquise of O & Other Stories

"Heinrich von Kleist - The Marquise of O & Other Stories"

best book.

agree

Yesterday I grabbed a used Penguin paperback copy of The Jewish War, Josephus, for $1. I think it may be the last ancient history in a penguin translation that I have not yet read. Now I can get the skinny on Herod the Great, Titus and the siege of Masada.

Robert Irwin, Satan Wants Me
Nicholson Baker, House of Holes
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity- A Cultural Biography
Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories

Which edition(a) of Marquise of O--- and Other Stories did yall find, crimplepacker and scott? I recently got the '78 Penguin Classic, trans. by David Luke and Nigel Reeves, which was way smaller than I remembered---think I might've gotten the big Faber & Faber from 1963, which Amazon lists w 318 pages, and a preface, by Thomas Mann, which I don't remember at all (read it like 20 years ago, but still). Might be the same as Criterion Books' first American edition (1960), which also incl. Mann, and credits Martin Greenberg as translator. No page number for this (and no translator listed for Faber)(good ol' Amazon)

I'm tempted to the big edition for extra stories x Mann's preface, but not if it's just bigger print of same stories in the Penguin.

tempted to order, that is.

the copy i read was older. paperback. oversized paperback. probably from the 60's or early 70's. don't know if i still have it. might have sold it in my store. would read again.

Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow, in a used mass market paperback for 50 cents. After all the praise recently, I snagged one of the (as the book's cover proclaims) "Over 2 1/2 Million Copies in Print!"

Adam, Eve and the Serpent, Elaine Pagels, used trade paperback in good shape, for 50 cents. Theological history was never so easy to read as when Pagels writes it.

Exile and Return: Selected Poems 1967 - 1974, Yannis Ritsos, translated by Edmund Keeley, in a trade paperback, middling condition, for $3. I have a soft spot for modern greek poets and this was a cheap indulgence of that.

Eyrbyggja Saga, translated by Palsson and Edwards, Penguin classics paperback in very good condition, for $5.95. I seem to read one Icelandic saga per year lately. This one is next in line.