Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

Ursula Le Guin- The Left Hand of Darkness
Haruki Murakami- The Wind Up Bird Chronicles
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson - Film Art

Was feeling gloomy so raided my local Oxfam.

Aldous Huxley - Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist started this, was hoping for Crome Yellow wit, and yes, the aesthete is definitely in evidence, but not in a particularly good way - the short essays are curiously hard going and mannered (perhaps not a surprise). Moments of humour and light though.
Flann O'Brian - The Hard Life
Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22

flaubert - sentimental education

been really feeling like pleasure-shopping at physical bookstores lately, despite my finances, and the closest shop now is garrison keillor's, but the place is so irritatingly expensive now even on like cheap mass-market oxford world's classics, that the price almost makes me want to boycott out of spite

Charles Taylor - Sources of the Self
Amy Clampitt - Selected Poems
Pascal - Pensées

I just paid $1 (plus $10 shipping from the UK) for:

Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera
Pauline Kael, State of the Art

we dont really care about theatre do we?

i bought all these for $1.50 each, some really cool stuff & most are in really great condition

http://i67.tinypic.com/2v3ipo6.jpg

seems like some may be worth a bit like marat/sade, pippin, the baldwin.. idk, i just thought they were cool. I'm sure some yale prof died for my bounty

Nice to score a remaindered copy of Ferrante's Days of Abandonment..

^ oooh! nice

I just came home with a paperback copy of a Farley Mowat book, The Farfarers. I know nothing about it except that Mowat is a generally reliable author who wrote readable, interesting books.

Those plays look like a nice haul!

found 4 boxes of religious philosophy (mostly but not exclusively jewish philosophy) sitting on the curb midway thru walking the dog. grabbed the best looking stuff but honestly left plenty of treasures behind. my score:

http://i.imgur.com/yrWh4GL.jpg

beautiful

Wow, worth grabbing some of those for the cover art alone

Bought the Bill Kreutzmann book Deal
and the NYC music Love Comes To a Building on Fire online last week. Haven't received them yet. Hoping my mail isn't being interfered with, expected things don't seem to be appearing.

It's Monday so will probably get something from a charity shop later.
Also really want to read 1971 by David Hepworth and that Heads book.

amy hempel - reasons to live
gary indiana - three month fever
gary indiana - horse crazy

jc's and mordy's hauls are amazing. envious.

Well Deal's just arrived so going to read that shortly.
Started reading Knut Hamsun's Hunger over the last few days after wanting to for decades.

acquired nice hardback copies of:

alan burns babel: a novel
marguerite duras the ravishing of lol stein

Cicero's Letters To His Friends, volumes 1 & 2, as used Penguin Classics for $0.50 each.

The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten, as a used hardcover, $2. I owned a paperback of this about a decade ago, but sold it. Afterward, I rather missed it.

The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen, used trade paperback, $1. Essays.

I have been really enjoying "Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove".

A 1991 hardback of Magick by Aleister Crowley. A book I wanted to pick up 35 years ago.
Impulse buy but one that I'm glad I saw.

1st hand: August Strindberg - The Defence of a Madman

2nd hand:

Erich Heller - Kafka (this is study on Fontana Modern Masters)
Fernando Pessoa - Poems (on City lights)

I paid $1 for a nice used hardcover copy of New and Collected Poems 1917-1976, Archibald MacLeish, who is not my favorite poet by any means, but he probably wrote many decently readable poems and I'll troll around in this to find some of them.

Louis Comfort Tiffany Masterworks book on his stained glass designs etc. Got cheap from Postscript Books cos they have a sale on.
Also got Glam Rock by Alwyn W Turner which is a companion to a V&A Museum exhibition from a few years back. I like the music but know less about the scene than I should. Must finish Children of The Revolution too which is somewhere around the room.

I Am Alan Partridge or whatever the autobio is called. It was €1 in a charity shop and the show is good and this is by the writers and expands on the character. Not read enough to see if funny or annoying

Invisible Man Ralph Ellison.
I may have already had this but it was €1 so I grabbed it.

The General From The Jungle B Traven.
I read his Death Ship years ago and know about him pretending to be somebody else when john Huston was making the film of hisTreasure of Sierra Madre. Seems to be an interesting writer and character. I was surprised that this was a translation but that could be by another pseudonym of his.

Unforgiveable Blackness a biography of Jack Johnson by Geoffrey C Ward. Got it for 25c in pretty good nick. Coincidentally in the same week, possibly day that I saw Miles Ahead and it could be that its the Miles lp that I know his name from mostly.

Sect Appeal by Terry Gibson. The guitarist's memoir of his time in the Downliner Sect. Which I bought alongside the new edition of Ugly Things. & prompted me to get a copy of the Repertoire cd of The Rock Sect's In their 1966lp with the really early Reed/Cale cover and great droning sound.

Several others since I keep hitting charity shops. So I have a major backlog of books piling up.

Alwyn Turner has a great (thought not updated in years) site about trash paperbacks: http://www.trashfiction.co.uk/index2.html

I Am Alan Partridge or whatever the autobio is called. It was €1 in a charity shop and the show is good and this is by the writers and expands on the character. Not read enough to see if funny or annoying

the book will be funny but this is all about the audiobook. you need the audiobook, trust me.

1st hand: Pere Gimferrer - Fortuny

2nd: Dag Solstad - Professor Andersen's Night
Kenzaburo Oe - The Silent Cry
Alvaro Enrigue - Sudden Death
Denton Welch - In Youth is Pleasure
Friedrich Holderlin - Selected

bought The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin on my way home from work today

Supposedly stellar for genre fiction in Mandarin. I recommend The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski (and possibly its "prequel", Flying to Valhalla) as a harder-sci take on Cixin's "Dark Forest" response to the Fermi Paradox.

I'll check those out, thanks. Arthur C Clarke "Rendezvous with Rama" was one of my favourite books as a teen, the comparisons to that drew me in. Have you read 3BP?

a reprint of an 1853 complete Stories of the Brothers Grimm which was €1

Sanctuary by Ken Bruen since i wanted to actually read a Jack Taylor novel and this was 25c.

The Penniless Vegetarian a book of vegetarian recipes I should really work through.

réstif de la bretonne le paysan et la paysanne pervertis: ou les dangers de la ville

picked up a copy of memento mori after reading all the spark talk today. also picked up a copy of jon wyndham day of the triffids at the same store

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark
I really enjoyed teh BBC TV adaptation of this so wanted to read it. So very glad to find it as 4 for €1.50 in a charity shop today.

alongside
The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice,
remember having enjoyed those of her books I read previously so think this could be good. It has been 20 odd years since then though.

Secret History by Donna Tartt
Wait For Me by Deborah Devonshire a memoir by the youngest of the MItford sisters. Should be somewhat interesting, not sure if they were all Nazis but could be intriguing anyway.

also got a hardback 2fer of George Macdonald Fraserr's Flashman at the Charge and Flashman in The Great Game he tends to be fun een if the politics are a little dodgy.

from a book sale in a church that had the sf section listed as occult:
Iain Banks - Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons, to go with my unread copy of player of games
Nicholas Pileggi - Wiseguy, a.k.a. the book goodfellas was based on
Three by Flannery O'Connor (Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, Everything that rises...) i don't like that one flannery story that gets in textbooks, but i like the Huston movie version of Wise Blood.

Finally saw 'Wolf in White Van' in a bookshop, so have bought it and started it and am really digging it

(Bought new, I should add!)

Plus was gifted about 50kg of sci-fi paperbacks from a friend moving house, need to sort through and see what is worth keeping

I decided to clean out some books. I took a bagful to sell at Powell's Books. They bought about 40% of them, but only for $15 in trade. I used the trade slip to buy:

Rome and the Mediterranean, Titus Livius, a Penguin Classics paperback, $4.95. Penguin put out Livy's history of Rome in four volumes. This one was missing from my shelves. I had the other three, now I've the full set.

Aucassin & Nicolette and Other Tales, tr. Pauline Matarasso, another Penguin Classics paperback, $2.50. This one is slender, weighs very little (~100 grams or 3.35 oz.) and will probably end up in my backpack on a multi-night hike in the wilderness this summer, where every ounce counts.

Looking up 'Aucassin & etc' and have never heard of any of the stories in it, and it looks very appealing

Becoming Elektra a 2010 history of the label

nyrb poets ellizabeth willis new/selected, knew nothing of her but why not bc it look intersting

also the new mallarmé translations out last year, under title 'azure', by blake bronson-bartlett and robert fernandez, includes the 1899 'poesies', 'a roll of the dice…', and for about half the volume, selections from mallarmé's big uncompleted 'book' project, which tbh looks like somebody had a bad day in math class

Sold a bunch for:

Tarjei Vesaas - The Ice Palace
Thomas Bernhard - Old Masters (two of my favourite bks)

Antonio Tabucchi - Time Ages in a Hurry

Also:

Joseph Roth - Tarabas
Bohumil Hrabal - The Little Time where Time Stood Still

a dollar each:

paul klee - on modern art
anthony burgess - ninety-nine novels
james joyce - a portrait of the artist...
the fiction of samuel beckett: form & effect
theatre of sleep: an anthology of literary dreams
t.f. powys - mr weston's good wine
synge - plays, poems and prose
zola - l'assommoir
prevert - paroles
faulkner - as i lay dying
a collection of mencken criticism

I bought a couple of used paperbacks at the charity shop (proceeds go to the local public library):

The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories, Muriel Spark, in a 1961 edition, for $1.
Amulet, Roberto Bolano, but it's not a Wimmer translation, so I may find his 'prose style' a bit less familiar, for $1.

Stumbled upon a box full of Simenon at a local library's used book sale this weekend. First American editions of eight non-Maigret hardcovers, plus eight Maigret hardcovers. Kind of overwhelmed and not sure where to begin.

start with a non-maigret: give us the list and we'll guide you! (I like the maigrets fine, and am reading them all, but the nons are usually better)

Just this morning finished reading The Engagement by Simenon - good, but not as purely enjoyable as The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, imho

I've already read a few Maigrets and a few non-Maigrets and have really enjoyed everything so far (favorite is probably The Little Saint). Here are the non-Maigrets I just picked up:

The Nightclub
The Fugitive
Teddy Bear
The Girl With a Squint
The Premier
The Train
The Disappearance of Odile
Betty
The Little Doctor

Assuming The Train is the same as The Man Who Watched the Train Go By, and The Premier is The same as The President, those are both excellent. Don't know Betty or Tne Girl Witna Squint, but there seem to have been lits of different titles for various books over the years and inthe US and UK