Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

Hamsun is a Nobel winner, so he'll never completely disappear. Though in fairness many early Nobel winners are currently out of print in English.

The early translations of Hamsun were heavily bowdlerized and should never be read. Be warned, these are the translations they have on a Project Gutenberg.

Welcome to my flat, Zibaldone

― woof, Wednesday, 19 February 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You need to write a report on this and deliver it at the ILB conference.

I've bought a couple of paperbacks by Henry Green, Ruskin's Stones of Venice (abridged), Montaigne's Essays, Delany's Fall of the Towers trilogy.

Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors cause its about time I owned it, and about time I read the newer essay.

The early translations of Hamsun were heavily bowdlerized and should never be read. Be warned, these are the translations they have on a Project Gutenberg.

The chap who translates Hamsum for Penguin Classics usually includes lengthy outraged screeds about the shittiness of earlier translations in his introductions.

Lately:

Wislawa Szymborska - View with a Grain of Sand (Selected Poems)
Helen DeWitt - Lightning Rods
Nadezhda Mandelstam - Hope against Hope
Hazlitt - On Theatre

No way, I just bought View With a Grain of Sand myself. Go figure.

Also:
Charles Yu - How to Lie Safely In a Science Fictional Universe
Connie Willis - Doomsday Book
Italo Calvino - t zero & Cosmicomics
Robert Walser - Jakob von Gunten
JM Coetzee - Life & Times of Michael K
Anne Applebaum - Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956
John McPhee - Levels of the Game
W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1: 1929-1964
Raymond E. Brown - The Death of the Messiah
Thomas Mann - Magic Mountain
Albert Camus - The Plague

Mostly cheap used books on Amazon or local used bookstores, also some collectibles for my Nobel Prize collection.

Sold quite a bit too

Pushkin - Eugene Onegin (tr. Charles Johnston)
Bohumil Hrabal - The Little Town where Time Stood Still
Ovid - Heroides
Marilynne Robinson - Gilead
Selected Poems by Brodsky an Hans Magnus Enzenberger (the Penguin European Modern Poets series)
Herman Melville - Confidence Man (on Dalkey)

Bought shit 1st hand for the first time in years:

Peter Weiss - The Aesthetics of Resistance

And then at the LRB 10% discount night:

Celine - North
Georg Trakl - Poems (tr. Margitt Lehbert)

Emily Dickenson - Complete Poems (ed. Thomas Johnson)
Whitman - Selected Poems
Heine - Selected Poems
The BFI book on In the Realm of the Senses
Eugenio Montale - Poet in Our Time

The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems (ed Michael Hofmann)

Interested to know what that's like--Hofmann's tastes as a translator are usually pretty reliable

The are several copies of this at Judd books, 4 quid.

Read Hofmann's intro and it isn't bad as it goes.

Similar collection for Italian but not Spanish.

Had a Judd run the other day, picked up:
Poems for the Millennium volume 3: didn't know about this - more recent volume of the v 90s avant garde/internationalist anthology, this one dedicated to the 19th century.
Lineages of the Absolutist State by Perry Anderson. I am thinking/hoping that the meat of this will be better than the old-school Marxist introduction, which follows charming antique tradition of laying out FIRST THING what Marx and/or Engels had to say about your topic, because that is your starting ground for discussion and thought. I suppose that's just what books were like in 1974. All books.

marxist books are still like that, but they start doing it in chapter 3 or so after their cool anarcho-spinozistic alternative has been introduced

Earlier today I remarked to my wife about how I'd like to read a short novel for a change, because it seems lately like everything I pick up is 700 to 900 pages long. Therefore I just came home from the local charity shop with a couple of Muriel Spark novels for $1 each: The Comforters (1957 - her first novel) and Aiding and Abetting (2000 - her penultimate novel). The first is 225 pages, the second 165 pages, god bless her.

Das Nibelungenlied (tr. Burton Raffel)
Franz Kafka - The Trial (tr. by Douglas Scott and Chris Walker and lol @ "adheres specifically to the tone and the style of the original German" - but yes I do get people dislike the Muir translations)
Hubert Selby - Last Exit to Brooklyn (don't know why the fuck I sold this in the first place). Have plans to do a run on all of Selby's books.

LRB shop 10% off night:

Petrarch - Songs and Sonnets (tr. Nicholas Kilmer)
Celine - Castle to Castle

just ordered jonathan meades' autobiography which is out tomorrow

^ Excited! Soured a bit on the guy after all the reactionary stuff in his France show and the whiny "architects should be allowed to do whatever" tone of the brutalism thing, but he's an interesting dude.

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, in a used trade paperback in readable condition, for $7. I enjoyed Housekeeping and several ILBers have said Gilead is as good or better.