Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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.

Yeah, my memory is that 'Cities of the Red Night' esp. was considered something of a 'return to form' - or at least, a return to some form of narrative (w/ certain generic tropes from the adventure novel and the western novel providing slightly more cohesion than in something like the hardcore cut-up-ness of The Soft Machine). iirc, 'Place of Dead Roads' in partic also has more in the way of recognisable human feeling/empathy than many of the proceeding novs.

i read parts of them at fifteen like "woah this is weeeeirrrd", always been meaning to get back to them

u shd get his cats book tho

burroughs weeping over the thought of his cats being annihilated in a nuclear holocaust has always stayed with me

yes - I associate them (tho' they're before my time -I had my 15-and-loving-the-SEXHORRORDRUG burst of burroughs in 89/90 or so) with a kind of lit establishment/broadsheet-reviews respectability coming to him in the UK - a Picador writer, not a Calder one.

just wikied, didn't realise how big the gap was since he'd done something long-form - Wild Boys 71, Port of Saints 73, then Cities of the Red Night 81.

I'd assumed he'd written a shit ton of unreadable experimental novels that I hadn't really heard of.

did he finally give up the heroin in the early 80s?

Wiki sez no

Burroughs, by 1979, was once again addicted to heroin. The cheap heroin that was easily purchased outside his door on the Lower East Side "made its way" into his veins, coupled with "gifts" from the overzealous if well-intentioned admirers who frequently visited the Bunker. Although Burroughs would have episodes of being free from heroin, from this point until his death he was regularly addicted to the drug.

a Picador writer, not a Calder one.

Yeah that's why I think he was slept on - it was much more of a narrative, much more 'literary', put off the ppl who liked Naked Lunch.

I read 'em at 20 or so.

being a drug dealer on burroughs's doorstep must have been a cushy job

The 2013 affordable edition of Ronald Johnson's Ark. Hasn't arrived yet.

Recently picked up:

Karel Capek - War with the Newts
Mircea Cartarescu - Blinding
Primo Levi - If This Is a Man/The Truce
Gene Wolfe - The Book of the New Sun
Lewis Thomas - Lives of a Cell

The Capek, Levi and Wolfe are all great.

Reading Autobiography of a Corpse, latest NYRB collection of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky stories. Very good, though the longest and weakest works are put first in the book, a bit unwisely.

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?

― woof, Saturday, August 10, 2013 12:53 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Welcome to my flat, Zibaldone

What furniture did you have to give away to make room for it?

treating it as a very firm mattress. just need a super-king duvet.

I recently was called to jury duty. A few days ago a compensatory check arrived in the mail for the sum of $13.60. Today I spent $14 on the following books:

Early Novels and Stories, James Baldwin, used hardcover from Library of America in very good condition for $4. This volume contains Go Tell It On the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, and Going to Meet the Man. I've never really delved into Baldwin and this seemed like a great opportunity.

So What: New & Collected Poems 1971-2005, Taha Muhammad Ali, a used trade paperback from Copper Canyon Press in excellent condition, for $4.

Old Money: The Mythology of America's Upper Class, Nelson W. Aldritch IV, used trade paperback for $3. The author is the grandson of a US Senator and is himself from "old money'. First published in 1988, before the ascendancy of the rich really soared to stratospheric heights.

We Sagebrush Folks, Annie Pike Greenwood, used trade paperback from U. of Idaho Press, for $3. This is a reissue of a very literate memoir first published in 1938 that looks quite interesting. The author was the daughter of the director of the Idaho insane asylum, but I don't think that is a focus of the book.

yesterday picked up a couple of recent editions of some of knut hamsun's later novels: the ring is closed & the wanderer (compiles under the autumn star/a wanderer plays on muted strings) as well as gaddis' the recognitions which i'm currently about ten pages into...

I'm really happy to see that Hamsun has made his bones among booklovers beyond the century mark. His books deserve to live. Wanderers was one of his better ones, imo.

absolutely. the same publisher has also put out some of his other work i'd never even heard of, including a collection of his short stories that looks well worth investigating (hope to one day find a translation of the book about his american experiences)

always been slightly confused by the similarities of some of his translated titles: wanderer, wanderers, wayfarers and so on