Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

the writers are artistes, the publishers are selling me books that i'm supposed to want to touch with my hands and look at with my eyes

Augustine's City of God against the Pagans in the big blue Cambridge political texts edition. What's the point of working all the time if you can't throw money at big books you don't have time to read & can't carry around?

adventurous.

I took out a Tao Lin and a Dennis Lehane from the library.

which tao lin novel? if you like it you should pick up taipei.... and read the taipei thread.

I made a run to my favorite cheap bookstores and came back with:

A Short History of Byzantium, J. J. Norwich, used trade paperback, good condition, $4. Byzantium lasted in the neighborhood of a millenium so it's hard to wrap your head around it. This book represents yet another attempt by me to do just that.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, used trade paperback, good condition, $3. If I am not mistaken, this was the book that introduced the word 'paradigm' into the consciouosness of the english-speaking world. Probably worth reading, if only for that singular feat.

What's the point of working all the time if you can't throw money at big books you don't have time to read & can't carry around?

You've distilled my philosophy of life to the essence

Yet another book-buying day today, but this time I uncharacteristically spent some real money.

Selected Translations, W.S. Merwin, as a new hardcover from Copper Canyon Press, $40. Copper Canyon designs books very well and Merwin was his own editor for this selection. I've generally admired his translations more than his original work, so this was a purchase I had to make.

Collected Works, Lorine Niedecker, as a used hardcover, U.California Press, slight interior damage to the spine, $25. Niedecker had both a keen eye and a deft touch with short imagist poems, along with a mindset I find congenial.

The Principles of Mathematics, Bertrand Russell, as a used trade paper reprint of a 1903 work, $4. BR had some impressive philosophy-of-math chops as a young man and could also write clearly enough for non-experts to follow. I'm sure I'll never read it end to end, but it looks interesting to dip into.

The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas, used trade paperback, $3. What can I say? This stuff is just great fun.

birthday used bookstore haul:

jean rhys - wide sargasso sea
alain robbe-grillet - jealousy/in the labyrinth
gertrude stein - everybody's autobiography
jeanette winterson - oranges are not the only fruit
wanda coleman - imagoes

Lots of new & newish fiction:

Jorge Amado - Tereza Batista
Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge
Richard Stark - The Seventh
Micheline Aharonian Marcon - A Brief History of Yes
Donald Antrim - The Hundred Brothers
Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape
Carole Maso - Ava
Mary Caponegro - All Fall Down

Tried to order Matt Bell's _Cataclysm Baby_ from Amazon, but after two months they gave up. Now I see they sell used copies for two thousand bucks. Apparently Mud Luscious Press shut down operations half a year ago.

Also got Terry Teachout's new Duke Ellington biography on order.

A selection of Donne's poetry..

Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford, used hardcover in good conditon with dust jacket, Everyman's Library Edition, for $1.50. The entire quadrology of WWI era novels, 900pp. It has a good reputation and I had $1.50 to spend, so... maybe I will be spending some weeks this winter seeing what FMF has to say about his England of that time.

just posted the picture on fb but

more than this - patrick ness
flora and ulysses - kate dicamillo
bleeding edge - thomas pynchon
republic of thieves - scott lynch
madaddam - margaret atwood

also

shanameh, epic of the persian kings, which is basically incredible, and everybody should own a copy

http://theepicofthepersiankings.com/

http://www.levantinecenter.org/files/images/shahnameh4.img_assist_custom.jpg

http://iranian.com/data/images/2tzqw33lacgy.jpg

Finally got my own copy of Robin Wood's Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond. My life is somewhat closer to complete now.

used book sale! everything $1 or $2

Plath - The Bell Jar
Delany - Dhalgren
Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago 1
Richard Feynman - What Do YOU Care What Other People Think?
Pynchon - Vineland
Morrison - Jazz
Roger Ebert's (ed.) Book of Film
David Mitchell - number9dream
Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
David Grann - The Lost City of Z
also some Agatha Christie collections which I will probably read first

$1 and $2 books are the very best kind of books ever

Sold a bunch for:

3 vols of Chretien De Troyes tr. Burton Raffael - Yvain/Cliges/Eric and Enide (only Lancelot now left, had a copy of Perceval for an age)
Elias Cannetti - 3 vols of his autobiog
Nadezhda Mandelstam - Hope Abandoned

Yesterday I found a $3 paperback copy of A House for Mr. Biswas in ok condition, so I bought it and I expect I will eventually get around to reading it.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL.

dude starts off being hilarious but around the 50 page mark it becomes dull, i think. i don't know if this is because i got a bit tired of his schtick by that point or if it's because the material isn't as good... i suspect it is the latter, actually. still, the purchase was worth it for the first chapter, "B and I". i am going to read to the end just to see if it gets as good as that again.

dropped 50p on each of the following

the Granta 'Biography' issue (contains stuff by Saul Bellow (and then an essay on Saul Bellow), Marquez, Erdrich and John Banville.
Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

I am buying books by Nobel Prize winners (1st English editions, where affordable) for an antique bookshelf we have in our new home.

Bought:
Bjornstjerne Bjornson - A Happy Boy
Jose Echegaray - Mariana
Henryk Sienkiewicz - Quo Vadis
Giosue Carducci - Poems of Giosue Carducci
Jacinto Benavente - Four Plays
Gunter Grass - The Tin Drum

I just bought all three volumes of Shelby Foote's Civil War history, as used hardcovers, in a 1958 printing, for $7.50 total.

They're in pretty good shape, except the printing on their spines is nearly illegible, so you can't easily read the title, author or volume numbers. That's immaterial to me. I'm pretty sure I will never summon the will to read all 2500pp of these, but these are truly classic stuff and I'll never see any copies this cheap again, so I nabbed them.

great purchase!

charity shop serendipity

I would like to officially curse the Nobel Prize committee for giving the award to so many ridiculous obscure poets who have virtually no books available for sale over the years.

Anyways, just bought
Sigrid Undset - Kristin Lavransdatter
Halldor Laxness - Independent People

OK. This is getting a bit ridiculous, but it was my birthday today and I went book trading / book shopping, bcz reading books is one of my few serious hobbies. I traded several books away to help finance:

The First Poets, Michael Schmidt, used hardcover in excellent condition, $10.95. I read this guy's Lives of the Poets a while back and liked it a lot. This one's about ancient greek poets. I suspect this wasn't on any best seller lists. I've never seen a copy of it before today.

Complete Collected Essays, V.S. Pritchett, used hardcover, 1300pp, for $5. The title is a piece of silliness, but when a book has 1300 pages and weighs over 4 lbs, the redundancy of "Complete Collected" almost fits.

Medieval Song: An Anthology of Hymns and Lyrics, translated by James Wilhelm, as a used trade paperback published in 1971, for $6.95. A bunch of troubadors, trouveres, minnesingers and such like. I am always surprised at how sparsely this area of poetry is covered in English translation. I guess there's no college textbook market for this stuff and it's a total non-starter with general readers. This copy is somewhat marked up, which usually would deter me, but because beggars can't be choosers... I own it now.

happy birthday! a 4 lb book, well done!

the success and failure of picasso by john berger. i've read it before but still, it's a really engaging art history book.

oh, also the collected stories of lydia davis. has anyone read this? i am going to start it as soon as i get the chance because it seems like the kind of thing i'd like.

I've got it Treeship, tend to just dip in and out when I want to kill 5/10 minutes and don't want to look at the internet, its wicked.

Sold more for

- a copy of GR
- Szerb: the Pendragon Legend
- Joseph Roth: The Antichrist and The Hundred days
- Henry James: The Madonna of the Future and Other Early Stories

there's a 3 for 2 sale on in the bookshop at the university I work at so I got the following Penguin Great Ideas for a tenner:

Hannah Arendt - Eichmann and the Holocaust
John Berger - Why Look at Animals?
Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Suffering of the World

Cheery stuff!

Really big haul of Nobel Prize winners over the past couple of weeks:

Derek Walcott - Omeros
Joseph Brodsky - Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems
Jaroslav Seifert - Maminka
Ivan Bunin - The Gentleman from San Francisco
William Butler Yeats - Poems
Frans E. Sillanpaa - The Maid Silja
Odysseus Elytis - The Sovereign Sun
Patrick White - Voss
Mikhail Sholokhov - And Quiet Flows the Don
Orhan Pamuk - My Name Is Red
Francois Mauriac - Therese
Maurice Maeterlinck - The Blue Bird
Harry Martinson - Aniara
Claude Simon - The Flanders Road

The company that was supposed to send me Maminka accidentally sent me a joke book called "50: The Age of Wheezin'" instead. Pretty much the same thing, right?

Labyrinths by Borges because I gave my copy away years ago and never got it back. I don't think I've ever fully forgiven the friend who admitted to me that Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius left her cold.

Sim Lipsyte - Home Land
Paul Theroux - The Pillars of Hercules.

Dipped into the Theroux as bedtime reading, sucker for travel stuff so I'm enjoying his wanders round the Med.

reprint of cavell's 'new yet unapproachable america'

vol. 2 of sontag's diaries

been an extreeeemely thin year for books, i don't really feel totally myself :/

Also waiting for Gene Wolfe's The Land Across, but don't have a date for it.

― alimosina, Thursday, 5 January 2012 16:51 (11 months ago)

Just came out and I grabbed it.

Used Christmas money to buy the following:

Knut Hamsun - Mysteries
Knut Hamsun - Growth of the Soil
André Gide - The Immoralist
Johannes V. Jensen - The Fall of the King
Herman Hesse - The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)
Harry Martinson - Chickweed Wintergreen
S.Y. Agnon - Twenty One Stories
Nadine Gordimer - July's People
Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here
Yukio Mishima - Spring Snow
Isaac Babel - The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
Imre Kertesz - Fatelessness
Czeslaw Milosz - The Captive Mind
Elias Canetti - Auto-da-Fé
Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Tadeusz Borowski - This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Primo Levi - The Drowned and the Saved
Primo Levi - If Not Now, When?
Assia Djebar - Women of Algiers in Their Apartment
Mircea Cartarescu - Nostalgia
Luigi Pirandello - One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand
Samuel Beckett - Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

i read the babel collection recently and really liked it, kind of preferred his stories about the jewish gangsters and reminiscences of growing up in odessa to the cossack material. hamsun's mysteries is amazing, growth of the soil not so much

probably bought less than ten books in the last year (actually having the time to read what i already have lying around may have had an impact on that), but used the money i was going to spend on new work boots to pay for an 1813 edition of the anatomy of melancholy (previous owner standish ths. o'grady, 11 princes st, cavendish sq, london) and it was well worth it (despite my exposed socks)

I've heard that Growth of the Soil isn't that good, but I'm collecting books by Nobel prize winners and the Nobel citation specifically states he won it for that book.

Growth of the Soil is not in the same vein as Hunger, Pan, Mysteries, or Victoria. It belongs to a later period where Hamsun's romanticizing tendency was focused less on youthful passions and more on work and the daily struggles of rural folk. It is still romantic in its way, but it's more the romance of a beefy, taciturn man digging boulders out of his fields and being clumsy around women.

...also dropping trees on himself.

late period hamsun i've liked would include the women at the pump and wayfarers, which i think was the first part of an ongoing saga.

books given and bought:

frank norris - mcteague
rob young - electric eden
georges perec - species of spaces and other pieces
henri michaux - emergences/resurgences
robbe-grillet/magritte - la belle captive
edward quinn - max ernst (massive art book incorporating some of ernst's autoiobiographical writing)
illustrated edition from the seventies of fitz hugh ludlow's the hasheesh eater
and a book about the architecture of the sf moma

yo has anyone read william s burroughs' red night trilogy? there are beautiful copies of the first two, cities of the red night and the place of dead roads, at the bookstore near campus for pretty cheap and i'm very tempted to pick em up

yes, and I really liked them, tho i think i'm perhaps in the minority? messing around with time, character, narrative and sexual boundaries, mainly via the mediums of the sex and death urges. yes they get messy, but i liked the mess.

More that its from the 80s, way after Burroughs wrote his more 'transgressive' lit. My impression is that people decided not to bother out of laziness.

Malaparte - Kaputt
Kafka - Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Had Brod complied with his wishes this paperback is all we would've had as far as the fic.

i reread a chunk of Cities of the Red Night a year or two ago, really enjoyed it. I always thought they had a pretty decent rep.