Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

xp just ordered vol 1, hope it doesn't transmute en route to vol 2 like last time. Also ordered sebald's the rings of saturn. Decided against getting Asimov's version too.

Bought a few SF paperbacks today

http://i1194.photobucket.com/albums/aa362/Andrew_Littlefield/020_zps3jdnrvam.jpg

Also saw a happy looking bookcat

http://i1194.photobucket.com/albums/aa362/Andrew_Littlefield/019_zpsskwmrs8q.jpg

Turns out I have an earlier Panther paperback of the Spinrad; I also have a copy of The Rats, but not in that classic NEL edition.

http://cdn.mhpbooks.com/uploads/2014/10/Specimen-Days-and-Collect-225x300.jpg

tom mccarthy - c

was looking for remainder but neither my school library nor any local new or used bookstores had it. i just bought a new e-reader so i'll prob just download it. i've heard this one's not as good but no ilx rec'd author has lead me astray so far

it's been a shitty semester for reading for me. got halfway through a couple novels and lost momentum, read half of that anonymous book but completely hated the way it was written. i'll probably finish it and make an ilx post complaining about it at some point. i'm rereading piketty right now in a book club with some classmates. we're giving it the full treatment, going through the online appendix & playing around with the top incomes database. easily the best economics book ever written.

trying not to feel too bad about not reading. i'm rocking ass at school and slowly cutting down on internet use. my girlfriend insists we watch films or netflix every night, and i've basically been living at her place, so my before-bed reading is basically nonexistent, but at least it's being substituted by other good things and not just staying up needlessly late on the internet.

it's gonna be a good summer though. i'll be working purely on research and my data is in a restricted access room in the basement of the library only open 5 hours per day, so i'll have plenty of time to read. my plan is to read pynchon and a bunch of sci-fi. i wanna read robertson davies while i still live in kingston. i quit smoking weed so i expect that'll help.

I do love those panther (etc) sci fi books. Found a copy of rendezvous with rama in chiswick yesterday. Cover wasn't exceptional like those though.

This week I have been mainly buying penguin classics versions of Dickens's books - chuzzlewit, nicholby, rudge and hard times. Few more to go but the pile is already over a foot tall.

(RwR was actually a Pan copy, cover mainly text)

Spinrad's reviews in Asimov's Magazine (later collected, I think) led to me to some really good books, and fearlessly ripped into bad ones, even by Science Fiction gas giants, then went way over the top vs. Le Guin, and I got off the bus before trying his own novels. But I'll check 'em out if I come across affordables (they're long gone from the local library).
Library shop has several by Ha Jin; should I get them?

Bug Jack Barron is one of the few SF novels I can think of that has been at the centre of a moral panic, in the uk at least.

What happened?

was that the one that led to wh smiths not stocking new worlds

a very british moral panic

I've fought manfully to slow the pace of my book purchases and to read as much as possible exclusively from among the titles I've bought. Although this is always something of a losing battle, I can at least take some consolation from how little I usually pay for books, since I shop 95% of the time at charity shops.

Today I bought two used paperbacks:

Broken Columns: Two Roman Epic Fragments: The Achilleid of Publius Papinius Statius AND The Rape of Proserpine of Claudius Claudianus, translated by David Slavitt. This book has the distinction of having a title, sub-title and sub-sub-title, so who could resist? It was printed by the University of Pennsylvania Press and I paid $4 for it.

Hard Rain Falling, Don Carpenter, published by NYRB Classics for $4. It's a down-and-out, hard-bitten novel and a fair amount of the book apparently takes place in 1960s Portland, Oregon, my hometown. Again, irresistible.

dow - I can't beat the Wiki entry:

The book was serialised in the British New Wave science fiction magazine New Worlds during Michael Moorcock's editorship. Its explicit language and cynical attitude toward politicians, as well as the fact that the magazine was partially funded by the British Arts Council, angered British Members of Parliament.[2] Jennie Lee, Baroness Lee of Asheridge, then head of the Arts Council, successfully defended the book. Later, it was banned by W. H. Smith, a major British chain of bookstores.[3] Feminist typesetters at New Worlds rejected the story as sexist.

Oh yeah, all of that sounds very plausible, without having read it.[3] is plausible in that male satirists talkin' salty 'bout a liberation, especially ones who "grew up" in the 50s, could come off pretty sexist: Terry Southern, Richard Farina, sometimes Ed Sanders (not to mention college boys of the 40s, like Mailer).

Although I think irony was the usual alibi, then as later.

I don't think I've ever posted on I Love Books, but anyway A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James is the best book I've read in years, kaleidescopic view of Jamaica in the mid/late 70s, told from the perspectives of probably over 40 characters, centering on the incident where some gunmen ran up in Bob Marley's house (real life incident) but a great mix of fiction and history, reggae culture, organized crime, CIA interference, Jamaican politics, etc etc

really blown away, what a talent, his ability to write in the voice of so many disparate characters and inhabit them is stunning

read a review of that awhile ago, looked interesting.

sort of related: anyone read naipaul's novel about the events surrounding michael x's compound once he fled to jamaica from britain? reading up on the details of that story is totally bizarre.

Latest finds:

Hilda Hilst - With my Dog-Eyes
Joseph Roth - Flight Without End
Joyce - Finnegans Wake
C.P. Cavafy - Collected Poems
Ingeborg Bachmann - Three Paths to the Lake (found by Tim for me! :-))

John Darnielle, Master of Reality (replacing a copy I lent out and never got back)
John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van
Jonathan Lethem, Lucky Alan

I traded a bunch of books I already owned to finance the purchase of all the following books, so it isn't like I spent any money, right?

Novels and Stories, Jack London, used hardcover in good condition, Library of America edition, $17.95.

Collected Stories, Franz Kafka, used hardcover in good condition, Everyman's Library edition, $4.

Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin, used 1962 vintage paperback, $4.50. Jacket blurb: "The explosive bestseller by America's angry young man."

Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev, used penguin paperback in good condition, $1.

The Distant Music, H.L. Davis, used paperback in good condition, $4.95. A novel by an Oregon author who I've mentioned before on ILB.

picked these up new for cheap:

roberto bolaño - the skating rink & nazi literature in the americas
penguin's tales of the german imagination (happy to see unica zürn in there)

yet to pull the trigger (so to speak) but have been contemplating buying that 1000+ page isaac babel collection as well

What collection is that? Didn't know he'd written 1000 pages of stuff!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Z5N3ZW57L.jpg

twice the length of the collected stories, so there's quite a lot in there including plays & screenplays. not sure what else or how ephemeral some of the other contents may be. only familiar with the old penguin collection, so looking forward to checking out the other stuff.

speaking of babel and film, discovered benya krik from 1926 is up on youtube

wow, okay, i need to look at that

Me too! Where should I start with him, if I can't find that?

From the library shop (capitalization same as the covers):

Walker Percy omnibus--- I already read The Moviegoer, and that seemed great, also enough, but since this also has The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming, I'll check them out (and/or donate this back to the library). What else should I read by him?

Harriet Doer, Stones for Ibarra

Michael Moorcock, Legends From The End Of Time Supposedly the last round-up, from '99.

Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair Only one of his I ever see; what else should I read?

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost Kurtz country.

Leon Edel, Henry James, A Life "This is a masterly abridgment of the greatest literary biography of our century. Edel has not only cut, he has added---he has actually deepened his original work."---Louis Auchincloss. Joyce Carol Oates's blurb doesn't call it the greatest, but otherwise concurs.

John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood And How It Changed America

Sold a bunch for:

2x vols of Modern Euro Poets - Apollinaire and Gunter Grass
Francois Villon vol on Anvil
Roberto Bolano - Romantic Dogs
Dante - Inferno (tr. Steve Ellis)

went to a small book sale and got

jco - mudwoman $1
olive kitteridge $1
& michael lewis -flashboys $2 (sez it's a signed copy and there is a scribble on the title page ? don't authors usu sign on the page where their name is idk)

huh well it looks the same as http://www.ebay.com/itm/SIGNED-NEW-FLASH-BOYS-by-Michael-Lewis-2014-Hardcover-/251923993648?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3aa7d71430

so i guess is legit

that babel collection is terrific and essential btw. i dunno if his actual polish front diaries were in earlier collections or not but having them backtoback w the red cavalry stories is revelatory, and the plays about jewish gangsters in odessa rule.

i wrote a huge undergrad seminar paper that was basically a glorified book report on that volume (with lots of quotes from lenin's telegrams, for history.)

^the babel arrived earlier today & looks to be pretty damn impressive. now just need to find the time to read it.

also picked up 2nd hand:

rayner heppenstall - two moons
wyndham lewis - the complete wild body
céline - journey to the end of the night

the celine's an old new directions edition... with a really early translation... think the copy i used to have was the ralph manheim version...

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost Kurtz country.
>

THis was fascinating but I haven't read it in years. I know I read it amongst a load of things from the University library in the summer of 2003.
Belgium or the King of there felt it was missing out on the scrabble for Africa so decided it would claim to be trying to rid the area around the Congo of slavery. It instead created a hell on Earth for the local natives and provided then ship's captain Joseph Conrad a model for some of his writing including the up river of Kurtz. Conrad actually had dealings with the regime in being sent there to trade by the company he was working with. Or something similar.
It was all exposed by a Liverpool shipping clerk if I'm remembering rightly.
Think I have a copy of the book so I should reread it, but the to read list is pretty long.

Mark Twain wrote scathingly about King Leopold's misrule in the Congo at the time it was happening. Reading his denunciation was how I first learned of that bit of colonial history (though not at the time it was happening).

More 2nd hand madness:

Shirley Hazzard - The Bay of Noon (James do you like her?)
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls (love the Yale Uni paperbk)
Hrabal - Harlequin's Millions

Also: Tanizaki - The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto's Mother.

Found and bought a copy of Procopius' Secret History today, as a used Penguin paperback, good condition, $2. Probably the second juiciest of the ancient histories, behind Suetonius.

attended a book sale, purchased some books ($1 each)

george meredith - the egoist
thomas hardy - the well-beloved, the distracted preacher & other tales
joyce carey - to be a pilgrim
anthony powell - hearing secret harmonies
children of albion: poetry of the underground in britain
fernando arrabal - plays volume 3
chris marker - owls at noon prelude: the hollow men
antonioni - l'avventura (illustrated script, interviews, essays, criticism)

What's on the Chris Marker? Is it his on writings?!

book version of his video installation of that name inspired by the eliot poem (music by takemitsu). also has a couple of short essays by others. toured here, but didn't make it down to where i am :-/

inspired by the eliot poem (music by takemitsu)

Went to an exhibit of Marker's work at the Whitechapel (some of it his video art) and don't recall that. It didn't make much of an impression overall :-( but on paper it sounds that piece sounds fantastic.

i bought MY BRILLIANT FRIEND on mah KINDLE

it was super cheap

ferrante seems p. good so far

also bought laurie penny's last book

again, super cheap

amazon hint hint

I had to cull my library, because I was beginning to make too many piles without being able to shelve them. This led me to sell a shopping bag full today. Which then meant I was in a bookstore with some money in my fist, with predictable results.

Outlaws of the Marsh in an abridged edition of ~400pp, translated from the Chinese by Sidney Shapiro. A classic from about 1450 AD. Trade paperback, $9. I could have bought a three volume hardcover set of the full story for $30, but backed off. I may regret it, but I have too many 1200 page magna opera still to read and didn't want to commit to another.

The Abbess of Crewe, Muriel Spark, paperback, $4.50. I'll save it for later, since I'm already reading a Spark novel atm.

Sean O'Brien, COLLECTED POEMS

Shakeapeare - The Sonnets

Couple of new books:

Josep Pla - Life Embitters
Dostoevsky - Demons

bunch of 2nd hand stuff:

céline - london bridge
cortázar - 62: a model kit
pinget - mahu or the material
walser - institute benjamenta (a.k.a. jakob von gunten)
nabokov - collected stories (think i've read most of these in separate volumes)
géza csáth - the magician's garden and other stories (early 20th century hungarian décadent)

géza csáth - the magician's garden and other stories (early 20th century hungarian décadent)
and also MURDERER

nice haul, btw

i purchased a different (not different) edition of a book i already own, because i am a sick man