Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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on it, but quickly discovered that it was from the local public library and it bore no indication that it had been withdrawn from their collection.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.

I need to reread ragtime. I read it as a teenager and loved it.

Macolm - The Journalist and the Murderer -- I suppose I already had this on the New Yorker DVDs but boy is their interface terrible. currently reading it and it's great.
Perec - Life, a User's Manual
Delany - Babel-17
Koestler - Darkness at Noon -- a resolution for this year was to read 12 books from that modern library list of 100. this will be #4, which means I'm behind schedule.
Tezuka - Buddha Vol. 1

I need to read Ragtime. I've only seen the movie. Billy Bathgate was a fave of mine as a teen, as well.

My 'Marquise of O & Other Stories' is a recent Penguin Classics, but it's the same edition as the 1978 David Luke and Nigel Reeves translation. It's 318 pages. Haven't started it yet, but after the above comments I'm febrile with anticipation.

Darkness At Noon is great btw - compulsive and hypnotic.

Koestler was a notable crank, but Darkness is an excellent novel that makes some penetrating observations on the psychological effects of ideology, using Leninism as its model.

picked up the NYRB edn. of gogol's "dead souls", as a counterpart to picking up nabokov's book on gogol rece

also, re-reading the prime of miss jean brodie game me the taste to read more muriel spark so I also bought "the ballad of peckham rye"

what does an nyrb gogol look like

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vWQJqtf5UEU/T__zxaHXAqI/AAAAAAAAHhU/nj-GZkk0l0w/s1600/nikolaigogol_deadsouls_donaldrayfield.png

^ i am reading this edition of dead souls right now, am at p. 184

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: Real Mister Kurtz(es) and much worse.

i more meant, what kind of apparatus (if any), have they reset the text, etc

haha wait 'a new translation'

it's a good translation. very readable and funny. i compared the passages nabokov translated for his gogol book to the same passages in this one and they are pretty similar, sometimes better, if that means anything. i just got sick of pevear and volohonsky and wanted a change so i bought this one.

when's theirs from? the norton is "the acclaimed George Reavey translation"

i wonder if they'll do an ed of the stories

it's really recent...2008 i think. there is no introduction or any annotations. i like the pevear and volohonksy edition of the stories, which vintage publishes pretty well. i think those two are at their best with Dostoevsky. their notes from underground is incomparably better than the norton one.

btw idk if there are any tolstoy readers here, but is the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation of Anna Karenina okay? i ordered the pevear one on amazon and got this one instead and was too lazy to try to exchange it. but i think if i am actually going to put in the time to read that book i'd like to be reading a decent translation.

there should be a comma in the second sentence of my above post after "publishes"

shelagh delaney's play, a taste of honey, is the last thing i got, cos am working on it for college.

Henry Green - Concluding.

love 'a taste of honey,' but have never been able to track down anything else of delaney's.

i suspect that P&V's rep as the 'only' russian translators you should read is kinda overstated -- like, definitely go with them over constance garnett but i feel like you should mix it up a bit with translations.

I agree but I wonder if the Maude translation of A.K., specifically is alright becsuse its from the 19th century

Phaidon sale starts today! Keeping most of my powder dry for the art books that come up on the 14th but picked up the Robert Massin and Odile Decq overviews for 75% off.

Bought the teNeues Tim Walker retrospective (which is a massive slab of a book) and the reissued vol.1 of Danzig Baldaev's guide to Russian criminal tattoos last week.

Also got Owen Hatherley's A New Kind Of Bleak, which is interesting but would probably work better if you follow his suggestion to dip in and out of it rather than read it through in one go, and Voodoo Science Park by Victoria Halford and Steve Beard.

Snaffled the new Penguin Classics 'Tales Of the German Imagination' this morning.

bought the new Dan Brown book "Inferno" because I saw it on the shelf in target when "Lucky Like Saint Sebastian" was playing on my ipod. it seemed serendipitous. the book I am reading right now is Murakami's "Hard Boiled Wonderland..." and I bought that recently as well.

Yukio Mishima - Death in the Afternoon (short stories)

*Death in Midsummer