Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

^ nice one

Sold a bunch and found:

Homer - The Odyssey (tr. George Chapman)
Heinrich Von Kleist - Select Prose (great timing as I was reading a story of his in a compilation and that really stood out) (on Archipelago)

Castle to Castle - Céline. I must not start buying books again.

Well if you're going to buy one thing new, might as well be quality.

The LRB are doing 10% off nights for the next three weds and I am not sure how I'm going to avoid going to one of these.

I say earn pin money for book purchases by selling cigarettes and booze down at the schoolyard. Alternatively, you could sell your surplus books. But not at the schoolyard, they'd never find a buyer there. Maybe try Amazon.

THE TASK OF THE CRITIC: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue

as readable a book as I can imagine.

I, er, stole some old used copies of Dickens's Hard Times, Alice Munro's Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You and Robertson Davies's "Deptford Trilogy" (The Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders as I was packing up my office today for the end of the semester. Lest anyone think me a hooligan, they had clearly been sitting there unread for years (I'm assuming they belonged to one of the office's prior occupants) and I left behind some books that I don't need anymore, so fair trade, right?

post-christmas round-up:

jack black - you can't win
neil young - on the beach songbook (includes a section of rick griffin art)

i bought a copy of claudia rankine, CITIZEN

i am teaching a class this spring, i might assign it

Sidney Mintz - Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

Looking forward to this one.

Oh geez bookoutlet got me

Levi - Survival in Auschwitz / The Reawakening (a.k.a. If this is a man / The truce)
Hitchens - The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Apostolos Doxiadis - Logicomix

Dybek - Paper Lantern
Banks - The Sweet Hereafter
Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven
Gene Wolfe - Sword & Citadel
Felix Gilman - The Half-Made World

merry christmas to me

LEFTIST SHOPPING ALERT

Verso's doing 90% off all e-books.

I have a cart full of things with 'Capital' in the title.

Willing Slaves of Capital
Cultural Capital
A Companion to Marx's Capital
Representing Capital

May check bookoutlet, cautiously (sure). Think I mentioned way upthread had good exp w Abebooks, network of indie sellers: got some rarities for nice prices (signif better than Amazon Dealers, for inst)

Abebooks is owned by Amazon...

Got some of those old Hitchcock anthologies.
http://i.imgur.com/0GtI4Zql.jpg?1

"I am curious (bloody)"!

Stories That Scared Even Me and the original Stories To Stay Awake By (see you've got the sequel there) are often really good too. Helps greatly that Hitch fans' needs for "psychological suspense" touch tasty twisters from various subgenres/genres.
xpost Koogs: evidently it's the good Amazon.

that looks like a great gift

Christmas gifts:

Walter Benjamin, RADIO BENJAMIN - text of his broadcasts

R.F. Foster, VIVID FACES which I have just about finished reading.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard - Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande
Michael Young - Malinowski's Kiriwina: Fieldwork Photography 1915-1918
Colin Turnbull - The Forest People
Mary Kingsley - Travels in West Africa

Received from my wish list:

The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century
by Jürgen Osterhammel

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
by Bryan Stevenson

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
by David Hackett Fischer

I also got Radio Benjamin for Christmas, pf!

Went to the LRB 10% off night, had cheese and wine and got:

Josef Winkler - De Natura Morta

2nd hand:
Rimbaud - Complete (really nice paperbk too)
Hubert Selby - The Room

I found this 1961 hardcover book, published by Hutchison of London, at my local charity bookshop for $4. It looked too interesting to pass up. And yes, it is non-fiction.

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7565/16280412802_02b9b2c080_z.jpg

Today I bought a paperback copy of Patti Smith's Just Kids for $3. It seemed to be well-received in the couple of reviews I read, so I am hoping it is well written enough that one doesn't need to be a fanboy of hers or Mapplethorpe's to find enough interest in it.

No fanboy-ism required--Just Kids is a lovely piece of memoir.

Cheap and 2nd hand:

Claudio Magris - Danube
Marquis De Sade - The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings
Joseph Roth - Perlefter: The Story of a Bourgeois
Samuel Beckett - Mercier & Camier (nicer edition than the one I have)
Nadezhda Mandesltam - Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned (again, nicer edition)
Pushkin - The Captain's Daughter (NYRB classics, found it just after reading a copy I borrowed from the library)

I'd love to hear more about the Mao book!

I am still enmeshed in the toils of the Civil War, circa June 1864, with ~750pp yet to digest. But the Mao book will happen this year, I am fairly certain.

Joseph Roth - Perlefter: The Story of a Bourgeois

Didn't know this was available in English! Must get!