Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

I like Holub. Recently bought the expanded Poems, Before and After myself, along with a Szymborska selected and um something by Enzensberger (probably the Penguin MEP, it's in the post) and something else by Zbigniew Herbert. Just hit a euro-poetry mood.

Holub was good, but I don't know - found myself thinking his verse is too free.

I saw Herbert's Complete Poems and also a collection of Umberto Saba's stuff at Judd btw. Really need to control myself, breathe and get round to it slowly.

ikwym, he can feel a bit loose or thin or something - like it's an idea rather than a poem.

I've seen a couple of things that have been uncertain about that Herbert, & think the trans is a step down from the older ones. I haven't really looked at it – I've only read the Carpenters' versions.

I went to see Holub read, once. He gave every impression of being a delightful fellow, and finding his handsome slim Penguin Modern European Poets volume in a manky little bookshop in Sidmouth in the mid '80s got me started on collecting that series.

"Augustus," John Williams
"The Peregrine," J.A. Baker
"Gilead," Marilynne Robinson
"The Complete Poems of Cavafy," C.P. Cavafy
"The Complete Short Novels," D.H. Lawrence
"The Art of Worldly Wisdom," Baltasar Gracian
"Inner Voices: Selected Poems," Richard Howard
"A Time to Keep Silence," Patrick Leigh Fermor
"Light and Shade: New and Selected Poems," Tom Clark
"The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie," Agota Kristof
"Night Games: And Other Stories and Novellas," Arthur Schnitzler

The intro iirc had a few arguments with what Holub said/the attitudes, i.e. that reading poems should be as normal an activity as reading the paper or going to a football match, which is fine and yet if you said so out randomly..

The series seems highly regarded as translations. I saw a piece on Ungaretti which said that the versions by Patrick Creagh seemed superior (and I've got that on order at my library). Penguin should try and re-issue the series but er, you couldn't 'monetize' it. xp

Michael Jackson's Dangerous, Susan Fast (33 1/3)
Burning Daylight, Christine Fellows (poetry collection/new album combo)

"A Time to Keep Silence," Patrick Leigh Fermor

― cakelou, Tuesday, October 7, 2014 11:41 AM"

I read this recently, its excellent.

Collected Poems, Dorothy Parker, used paperback, fifty cents.
Cool, Calm & Collected: Collected Poems, Carolyn Kizer, ex-lib hardcover, fifty cents.

Veena Das - Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary
Nancy Scheper-Hughes - Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

I'm excited about the Scheper-Hughes. The anthology excerpt I've read is some haunting writing.

her best collection imho xp http://www.amazon.com/Portable-Dorothy-Penguin-Classics-Edition/dp/0143039539

i should post here more often. my recent purchases:

Shooters: The Toughest Men in Professional Wrestling, Jonathan Snowden
The Wizards of Armageddon, Fred Kaplan
Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham
The Jewish Writings, Hannah Arendt
Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

The Archimedes Codex: How A Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing The True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist, R. Netz and W. Noel, used hardcover in excellent condition, for $3. Apparently, the title:subtitle is so long that it required two authors! But it was cheap and the subject seems intriguing, so...

Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia
by Julio Cortázar
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1584351349.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

semi-fictional novella Cortazar wrote after finding out that he, Susan Sontag, Alberto Moravia and others had been written into bizarre 1970s Mexican superhero comic Fantomas

Ha! I may seek that out.

Are the multinational vampires pro book burning or anti book burning?

Very pro

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51rbHLxrSjL._SL500_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-big,TopRight,35,-73_OU01_AA300_.jpg

The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservativism, and the Transformation of American Politics

I remember Wallace from my childhood, I think a lot of Tea Partiers don't. How have I missed this one?

charity book sale

nonfic
Kurlansky - Salt: A World History
Anscombe - introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I know the main problems of Tractatus but I never read it closely enough to even get the arguments.
Hofstadter - I Am A Strange Loop. I enjoyed GEB as a 20 year old. His intros in The Mind's I were annoying. Not sure if I'll still like him.
Atwood - Survival

fiction
Chabon - Gentlemen of the Road. I think this his only novel I haven't owned or read before.
Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude. had it from the library before but didn't finish it.
Gaddis - JR
Tolkein - Fellowship of the Ring. tried it as a teenager, got fed up around 150 pages in where the hobbits go to yet another random place and meet yet another random hobbit who doesn't contribute to the plot.
Marai - Casanova in Bolzano. tried Embers before but didn't finish it. should get back to it.
Ngaio Marsh - Omnibus volume 2. read one of her short stories before and didn't like it. But I like classic mysteries, so why not.
Munro - Runaway

Marai - Casanova in Bolzano.

Seriously, go straight to the source, Casanova's own memoirs. Such an amazing book

Having said that, Arthur Schnitzler's 'Casanova's Return to Venice' is a beautiful book.

Hofstadter - I Am A Strange Loop. I enjoyed GEB as a 20 year old. His intros in The Mind's I were annoying. Not sure if I'll still like him.

Just ordered Interrupting My Train of Thought, by a certain someone.

Robert Burton - The Anatomy of Melancholy. Finally found a cheap copy of the NYRB pb! Made a crappy end of week better.

let us know when you're done with it, haha

Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau. Have wanted to read his Chiendent/Bark Tree/Witchgrass for decades. This turned up in a local shop yesterday so had to grab it.
Want to see the film too.

let us know when you're done with it, haha

― j., Friday, October 24, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Don't see a problem if I get into the prose and have a window of time.

:-D

one of my teachers read it in school, out of a resolve to have done so; she said it took her the whole summer iirc

Spent my monopoly money off the Notting Hill book exchange on:

Tibor Dery - Story of a Dog. Read it before, great to have a copy of this classic at home.
Jim Thompson - The Grifters. Ditto. (I think I have about ten of his now so might do a little project of reading them all in a go)
Natsume Soseki - Botchan.

I should not buy books between now and my next interstate move, but:

Eimear McBride - A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
Ben Lerner - 10:04
Walter Benjamin - Radio Benjamin
Henri Lefebvre - Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1
Jackqueline Frost - Young Americans

I love Jim Thompson but have never read The Grifters.

Last week I went to the bookstore looking for Christmas presents for my kids, and ended up getting two Georges Simenon mysteries and George Saunders' latest collection, all for myself. I did get one picture book also, but still felt a bit guilty.

i read his book about the bennedetti in college + really liked it, so i picked up Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms to read

i got some simenon too, though in my case it was a ten novel omnibus, which i'm about halfway through: finding him ridiculously addictive.

algernon blackwood - john silence: physician extraordinary (sort of an anti-sherlock holmes in that he "solves" his cases through sympathy/intuition rather than science/deduction)

thomas pynchon - gravity's rainbow (been feeling the urge to reread this lately since it's been over a decade since i first read it and ended up lucking into a nice cheap copy of the first uk paperback edition)

rené daumal - le contre-ciel (poetry) & pataphysical essays

dover edition of the drawings of william blake

J. H. Elliott - Imperial Spain: 1469-1716
Oscar Lewis - The Children of Sánchez
Claude Lévi-Strauss - Tristes tropiques

And a book on Islamic pattern design that I bought as a souvenir in Granada.

A few more, because I have no self-control.

Clifford Geertz - The Interpretation of Cultures
Nancy Scheper-Hughes - Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland

Flannery O'Connor - 3 by Flannery O'Connor

i am waiting for a used copy of BRECHT ON THEATRE to arrive at my domicile

A used hardcover copy of Lethem's You Don't Love Me Yet because I gave my old one away.

Went apeshit at online remainder shop Bookoutlet.com, bought about 50 books, am wondering how to explain the boxes to my wife when they arrive.

well you can't carry that many books without boxes

Wow, that site has the Zibaldone at $13.99. Crazy.

well fuck, didn't even think to look there and paid four times as much last week after reading about it in Tim Parks's new book of essays

Take it back.

Gotta love the pun in that site.

(I really liked Tim Parks' writing on Zibaldone and I think he might have introduced me to Pavese who is all-time)

After reading that, I looked at bookoutlet but had to flee. Far too dangerous. I'll go back when I don't have a wedding to pay for.

Or maybe I can invite fewer people

Gotta love the pun in that site.
Read-iculous?

Sarcasm, etc.

the zibaldone is mine along with too many other books, thank you/fuck you for the heads up ILB

Time for new screenname