Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

Another huge used pile, all things needed for the PhD:

Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
Timothy Findley, The Wars
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
A.M. Klein, The Second Scroll
Stephen Leacock, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night
John Stuart Mill, Essays on Sex Equality
Susanna Moodie, Roughing It In The Bush
Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
Martha Ostenso, Wild Geese
Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Willa Cather - My Antonia (Dover Thrift edition)

Took a jaunt to a thrift shop and bought:

The Third Reich, Roberto Bolano, used trade paperback in very good condition, $4. Other than knowing the author, I haven't a clue what to expect.

Creation, Gore Vidal, used mass market paperback in very good condition, $2. I read this several ages ago and I'm curious to reread it, having seen it praised lately in a context I can't recall, but which piqued my interest.

The Return of Eva Peron & The Killings in Trinidad, V.S. Naipul, used mass market paperback, in good condition, $1. Another book I've seen praised in a way that aroused my curiosity.

Joseph Roth - What I Saw (a collection of journalism from the Weimar period)
Tarjei Vesaas - Spring Night

michel tournier - the four wise men
granta - new american stories (have read a few of these already, as usual some great and a few howlers, very rare to find an anthology where i like all the stories)

Joseph Roth - What I Saw (a collection of journalism from the Weimar period)

Hofmann has also translated the imminently-to-be-published 'The Hotel Years', another excellent collection of Roth journalism

Yes James I saw this excellent excerpt of it: http://linkis.com/www.newyorker.com/bo/fyNOK

Sold a bunch for:

Carlo Levi - Christ Stopped at Eboli (total classic, read it before and then gave it as a gift, now have it again)
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice - this is the Warner Bros. film cover ("The Novel Prize-winner's great Novel of Sensual Awakening")

More 2nd hand at Judd:

W.H. Auden - The Dyer's Hand
Woolf - To the Lighthouse

At LRB Bookshop: Deszo Kosztolanyi - Kornel Esti: A Novel

there's a guy in town with a huge warehouse-like space where he sells books on amazon and it's open some days for retail. he has humongous industrial-sized cardboard tubs of books outside at all times that he buys in bulk from the salvation army. went there on sunday after playing tennis with cyrus. he had a lot more sci-fi than he usually does. everything is pretty cheap.

china mieville - looking for jake

terry pratchett - the colour of magic (never read him.)

patricia highsmith - the boy who followed ripley (didn't have this for some reason.)

thomas hardy - jude the obscure (never read it.)

james purdy - color of darkness (edition i don't have. i buy any purdy cover variation.)

henry kuttner - fury

poul anderson - the star fox

philip jose farmer - flesh

eric brown - helix

roger zelazny - damnation alley

the ultimate threshold (penguin collection of soviet SF.)

shine (recent collection of "optimistic" SF)

fredric brown - rogue in space

robert sheckley - the alchemical marriage of alistair crompton

r.a. lafferty - the devil is dead

zenna henderson - holding wonder

larry niven - crashlander

larry niven & brenda cooper - building harlequin's moon

frederik pohl - the cool war

joe haldeman - all my sins remembered

Scorsese on Scorsese.
Cronenberg on Cronenberg.
& Flann O'Brien The Hard Life
in one €2 purchase.

i've been rereading pratchett since he died, though sadly i keep buying ugly editions from amazon US instead of having the series of second-hand rediscoveries i was hoping for. the colour of magic is not a good book, i'm afraid

Liz Suburbia - Sacred Heart
Sara Marcus - Girls to the Front
Samuel Delany - Flight from Neveryon
Cookie Mueller - Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black

bought

david mitchell - numver9dream
katherine addison - the goblin emperor

yesterday

Penguin Modern European Poets: Zbigniew Herbert, Sandor Weores/Ferenc Juhasz and Vasko Popa

(Note to Londoners - there are quite a few others from both this series and Penguin Modern Poets in Any Amount of Books)

http://www.victoires.com/interieurs-design/atelier-de-creation_motifs-william-morris/
this afternoon as a sealed package, still in cellophane at least. Looked through it a couple of times and the covers come off so binding is useless. TK MAXX purchase so won't have replacement copies.
But if the pages don't all fall apart from each other, it does have a load of great images from William Morris's designs in it, with quite good reproduction so you can see detail in the image and know what it's called and when it was originally done.
Doesn't have much text to it other than that in 3 languages so could do with some more history of him.

i bought a new catullus translation, and also an oxford world's classics edition of martial

gonna get NASTY up in my library tonite

In the hopes that I will start using it more, I just loaded up my mostly neglected Kindle with:

Complete Works of Edward Gibbon, $2.51
Complete Works of R. L. Stevenson, $2.51
Complete Works of Henry James, $2.51
Complete Works of Mark Twain, $2.51
Not Quite Complete Works of H. G. Wells, $2.51

Coupled with the Complete Plutarch I bought a month or two ago, this should give me worthwhile stuff to browse in, fitting a wide variety of moods.

oh yeah i forgot i was thinking of shelling out for that plutarch once i was ~~flush~~

Reasonable prices, but you can get public domain works for free on mobileread.com and many other places. Send them to the Kindle's email address and you're done.

The company (Delphi Classics) assembles the collections, formats them and issues updated editions to correct errors, so that's worth a couple of bucks to me.

found a couple of cortázars secondhand earlier today: the winners & a change of light and other stories

One! Bloody only one Penguin Modern European Poets left in Any Amount of Books and that was the Apollinaire which I have had for bloody donkey's years. Bah. Came away with a novel by Ronald Fraser set in Andalucia in the aftermath of the Civil War and a Georgian thing by Aka Morchiladze called "Journey to Karabakh". So all is not lost.

Game fo thrones finally turned up cheaply and I almost overlooked it, must be tired today.
Also got a Jane Austen omnibus.

& earlier in the week got a thing on British rock art that reproduces concert flyers, posters and some sleeve art.

Also picked up the Tardis handbook since it was going for 50p. Looking forward to looking through that.

Beatles Tune In Mark Lewisohn it was going for €5 in a very decent copy so thought I'd grab it . Have heard it is very deeply researched so probably would want to read it at some point. Think its either the book after this or the one after that that would most interest me concerning them though. But this is going to be interesting on the formative years.

Margaret Attwood The Handmaid's Tale I saw the film a long time ago and have heard that the book was well thought of

World War Z Max Brooks I assume this is the book the film is based on. Looks like its an oral history of the time of the epidemic, and possibly some of its aftermath.

Clive Barker the Books of Blood 1-3 omnibus mainly to make up a 3 for €1.50 deal in a charity shop with the 2 immediatly above
wound up with the 3 plus a biography of the woman who wrote Lark Rise for €2

Stoned2 Andrew Loog Oldham I read the first one several years ago. Possibly shortly after it came out. Been meaning to read this since it appeared too, but lists fo to read books become ever extensive. this just turned up in a charity shop so I grabbed it.

Hope I do get through a few of these.

World War Z is great, million times better than thd boring movie

Check out the audiobook too, plays like a radio-play with diff actor's doing the vouces etc, really great

i got… another copy of wittgenstein

it's different than all the others tho

Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction

World War Z is great, million times better than thd boring movie

Check out the audiobook too, plays like a radio-play with diff actor's doing the vouces etc, really great

― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, October 7, 2015 9:25 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah looks like it could be good. I read the first chapter before getting into Stieg Larson last night. THink I'll probably read that through and get back to it. Not read him before.
But does look like if it continues how it starts out World War Z could be pretty decent.

trust me it's great

went to an annual used book sale and bought these for $1 each
Lloyd Alexander - The Black Cauldron
John Fowles - A Maggot
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans
Murakami - 1Q84
David Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity
Mick Foley - Have a Nice Day (autobiography of a pro wrestler, notable for not being ghostwritten)

then went back on their last day and they had all hardcovers at 25 cents, so I went out with a box full --
John Irving - The Hotel New Hampshire
William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors (short stories)
Arturo Perez-Reverte - The Painter of Battles (I enjoyed The Dumas Club, but The Flanders Panel was shit; I have low expectations for this one)
Margaret Atwood - Life Before Man
"Luther Blisset" - Q (already had a paperback version)
Toni Morrison - Paradise
Cordwainer Smith - The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction
Arthur C. Clarke - 2010
Ira Levin - Sliver
an Agatha Christie collection
Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff
Bauhaus (heavy coffee table book)
Simon Winchester - A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (random pick -- had a nice cover)

Haynes guide to the Millennium Falcon

Doctor Who handbook for William Hartnell, will probably want the next 3 if I can get decent copies.

Got a bunch of books for my birthday:

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

xposts: i remember a maggot as being really good. think that must have been his last published novel?

We Need To Talk About Kevin
Flappers (thing about 6 women of teh jazz ae, I already read the more general one)

& a thing on wood and woodworking since I'm doing a short woodturning course

all from a charity shop yesterday.

Vineland paperbk in this cover

http://i43.tower.com/images/mm112099411/vineland-pynchon-thomas-hardcover-cover-art.jpg

bought

david mitchell the thousand autumns of jacob de zoet

yesterday

Mary martin's Sewing Bible
a sewing bee related book that looks like it should be quite useful, nicely presented etc. But I think it covers ground also covered elsewhere. it was just in TKMAxx for partially reduced price so I thought I'd grab it.

How To Play Guitar step by step
About time i sat down and actually learnt how to play the thing.

i bought a copy of marcus aurelius, and an old modern library reader of hellenistic philosophy, and a copy of anne carson's lectures on simonides & paul celan, and also her book on eros, and maggie nelson's bluets, and maybe something else i forgot in my insane frenzy of bookbuying

oh yeah a sartre reader and that nyrb selection of his essays

Roseanna (1965) by Sjöwall and Wahlöö is the first novel in their detective series revolving around Martin Beck and his team.

Love those Martin Beck books. So downbeat and dry and oddly funny.

I agree, although there was one that I read in which the tone felt a little off, can't remember which though.

The ninth goes a bit Die Hard

Cheap paperbacks at library booksales:
Theodore Sturgeon - Visions and Venturers
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man and Virtual Unrealities
Angela Carter - Heroes and Villains
Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin
David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress and This is Not a Novel [signed and inscribed: "poetry does make things happen"]
Ursula K. LeGuin - A Wizard of Earthsea, Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore
Octavia Butler - Wild Seed
Dawn Lundy Martin - Life in a Box is a Pretty Life
Ted Berrigan - The Sonnets

General weakness of will:
Samuel Delany - Return to Neveryon
Lilith Latini - Improvise, Girl, Improvise
Tyler Vile - Never Coming Home

surprise surprise, if like me you had forgotten, sartre is like uh a masterful writer and stuff

The first volume of his WW2 resistance trilogy was also surprisingly funny. I have to read the other 2.

bought abt 5 more joyce carol oates books & trillin's abt alice, and 3 oneill plays

also bought evan hunter - every little crook and nanny -- sorta cool/weird the bottom spine has some red-dye bleed that looks like blood spatter, seems normal/unintentional i guess from the binding prob but its only the bottom spine

beckett's disjecta
wyndham lewis: on art
the novels of friedrich dürrenmatt
a couple of old penguin simenon omnibuses

For the morbidly curious, a misspent life crisis book binge (bold are read & recommended):

Alexander, William - Ordinary Recovery: Mindfulness, Addiction, and the Path of Lifelong Sobriety
Ash, Mel - The Zen of Recovery
Batchelor, Stephen - After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age
Batchelor, Stephen - Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
Begley, Sharon - Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves
Bostrom, Nick - Global Catastrophic Risks
Breer, Paul - The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will
Comte-Sponville, Andre - The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
Costa, Rebecca - The Watchman's Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction
Damasio, Antonio - Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
David Gregson, David - The Tao of Sobriety: Helping You to Recover from Alcohol and Drug Addiction
Flanagan, Owen - The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized
Flanagan, Owen - The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World
Grayling, A. C. - Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life without God
Grayling, A. C. - The Good Book: A Humanist Bible
Griffin, Kevin - One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps
Hagen, Steve - Buddhism Is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom Beyond Beliefs
Hanson Ph.D., Rick - Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom
Harris, Sam - Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
Kogen Mizuno - The Beginnings of Buddhism
Alexander, William - Ordinary Recovery: Mindfulness, Addiction, and the Path of Lifelong Sobriety
Kurzban, Robert - Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind
Lane, Nick - The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life
Leslie, John - The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction
Michel Onfray - Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam
Mishra, Pankaj - An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World
Rottenberg, Jonathan - The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
Russell, Mark - God Is Disappointed in You
S., Laura - 12 Steps on Buddha's Path: Bill, Buddha, and We
Snelling, John - The Buddhist Handbook: A Complete Guide to Buddhist Schools, Teaching, Practice, and History
Stanovich, Keith E. - The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin
Wallace, B. Alan - Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge

Holy cats!

God Is Disappointed in You looks promising.

As for fiction, I recently enjoyed (mostly as audiobooks):

Bacigalupi, Paolo - The Water Knife
Croshaw, Yahtzee - Mogworld
Faber, Michel - The Book of Strange New Things
Greer, John Michael - Star's Reach: A Novel Of The Deindustrial Future Kindle Edition
Haig, Matt - The Humans
North, Claire - The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Reid, Rob - Year Zero
Stross, Charles - Saturn's Children
Watkins, Clair Vaye - Gold Fame Citrus

All sci-fi, and besides the Haig & North (the best of this lot), mostly distopian.