Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

Lots of amazing hauls here lately----I especially want to get xpost Tomas Transtromer - New Collected Poems. Never read any of his until he won the Nobel, when The New Yorker published a good brief intro and a set of poems great in translation.

Speaking of translation, what's happening to my English---must stop for repairs.

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black
and a book on British History since the Normans taht I think is actually for children but looked pretty nicely presented

both from a charity shop I haven't been in for ages.

Transtromer's short memoir is really lovely, too
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JUst found the Alan McGee memoir in a local Dealz for €1.50 which is nice.
Been wanting tio read taht, looks like it might be an ex-HMV copy or something since it said €11.99 on it but it was the standard Dealz price. So I presume they must be connected to clearance houses for some items

Two used books today:

Classics Revisited, Kenneth Rexroth, a New Directions trade paperback in pretty decent shape, $2. Just scrapes together various short pieces he wrote about canonical authors and books.

Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves, in a Penguin Modern Classics copy, a bit dog-eared, but readable and not falling apart, $2. His WWI and post-war memoir published in 1929, in which he shows how a loyal, public school-educated, young British officer becomes completely disillusioned with English society and decides self-exile is to be preferred.

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that's a nice edish of Savage Detectives

I'm currently reading The Savage Detectives in that same British paperback edition

I never reread but that's one I've contemplated rereading. I was p young at the time but I was positively radiating something every time I picked it up

I exclusively buy books that ppl mention on this board lol

Cynthia Ozick - The Puttermesser Papers
Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

I found a weird copy of updike's bech: a book, it is physically much thinner than the usual 1st ed (which I happen to have on my shelf)

title page does show knopf as the publisher and 1970 but the following page that would have other printing info is in Japanese or Chinese? all other text of the book is English tho

thinking its maybe some weird knockoff but idk cant really find one like it on abe

Another Side fo Bob Dylan by Victor Maymudes with Jacob Maymudes
memoir of Dylan's road manager.

The Psychic battlefield W. Adam Mandlebaum
book on military and the paranormal which looked interesting for €1.

The Bean book by Rise elliot
vegetarian cookbook based around beans like

got a copy f The Mountain Sgdow the sequel to Shantaram put aside which I might grab next week
Alongside Max Decharne's Straight From The Fridge dad book on hipster slang.

Mountain Shadow. my typing is going to pot.
also that's Rose Elliott not rise.

Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves

I have that on my to-read pile as well.

i got hold of the original version of that some time ago. the later revision is supposed to be quite different (have not yet read either though), supposedly in an attempt to expunge the influence laura riding had on its initial writing.

picked up for cheap recently:
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That jmr collection is full of good things

I know the salvation army are evil but still I was pleased to pick up a copy of ta-nehisi coates's book in their shop for 50p

also it seems that paul morley's bowie book has already started showing up in 2nd hand bookshops, but someone got to it before me in oxfam

They're evil? How so? I want to be forewarned/forearmed next time I shop there.

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Just got another copy of this groovy old fave for a groovy old friend---if image is gone, it's Tales for the Son of My Unborn Child: Berkeley, 1966-1969 Hardcover – 1971 by Thomas Farber. A library copy (his first book, and one of the few apparently be out of print), but good condition, with classic thick soft strong transparent library covering for the jacket---think I might try buying a roll of that---worked in a 90s indie book store & sold plenty of it, but never got my own supply, and the store is long gone.

"apparently be out of print," that is.

"evil" is perhaps overstating it but they are actively homophobic & we should probably divert our support elsewhere until they sort that out because it's 2016

but, so cheap!

Alexander Kluge - The Devil's Blind Spot. 173 short stories/fragments. Love his films - he is very unknown in the anglo world - and this is the find of the year for me.
Jean Genet - The Prisoner of Love.
Thomas Bernhard - Yes.

Got the free Kindle app for my lowly laptop, then got http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/images/atomskcover1.jpg as US $2.99 download, rather than pay collector's prices for very out-of-print original.
If it doesn't show, it's Atomsk, a Cold War thriller by Carmichael Smith, later Cordwainer Smith, thee science fiction cult figure. I haven't gotten very far---not crazy about prospect of reading whole novel on screen---but he already has prototype of inimitable stylistics cranking up, and this (non-SF) story has been associated by some with his (Paul Linebarger's) early CIA expertise in psychological warfare.
More here, incl. excerpts: http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/atomsk.htm

On War by CArl von Clausewitz cos it looked interesting. Hope I get around to reading it.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati roy. ditto.

Got both of those in a charity shop for €11 each yesterday.

Now been and done bought
Need More Love by Aline Kominsky crumb
and 150 Things Every Man Should Know by Gareth may
for €1 each from another charity shop.

So could be good.

got the new james kelman "dirt road" as a b-day present

don't know why I'm getting double 1s when I try to type one 1 but it was €1 not €11.
Dashed keyboard doesn't register when you hit the 1 half the time , maybe that's it.

xxpost as US $2.99 download actually I could download it, and maybe did, but opted to stash it in my portion of Amazon Cloud, read via Cloud Reader, to save disk space, was the idea anyway.

I bought two obscure novellas by Muriel Spark today, for $1 each, in used Penguin editions from the mid-1970s with cheesy covers: Not to Disturb and The Hothouse By the East River. I know nothing about them other than that I generally enjoy any work by Dame Muriel.

Maria Edgeworth, CASTLE RACKRENT

sam quinones - dreamland
elizabeth taylor - complete short stories
barry hannah - long last happy

Petrarch - Canzionere. All 300+ poems. Another top 2nd hand find (even more so than Kluge which I can't quite get into rn)

Haven't read read that Barry Hannah book, but his first novel, Geronimo Rex is frequently funny-ha-ha and funny-strange-to-scary, 50s-60s Southern Gothic living and learning, esp. in Mississippi collegetown--said to be somewhut autobiographical, which seems plausible, especially considering some of his 70s hijinks in Tuscaloosa (writer in residence and then some, at U of AL)

castle rackrent is a wonderful book, and that elizabeth taylor collection is essential

THe Wearing of the Green Tim Pat Coogan book on the Irish Diaspora.

A Canticle For Liebowitz I know the name and saw this for 25c so will hopefully read it before too long.

Roll Of thunder hear Me cry Mildred taylor book about a black family in Mississippi in the 30s.

be warned, the ending of liebowitz goes in a crazy christian direction

Will probably be a while before i get to it but hopefully going to be ready.
Unless crazy christian is actually fascinating to watch anyway.

It does go in a crazy christian way, but an internally consistent crazy christian way that doesn't actually require you to buy into it to believe the characters' behaviour

The actual way this manifested itself in Miller's life as well as other biographical details leave me kind of speechless.

Maybe i will read this after Chaos then. There are quite a few lined up for me to read. I'm way out of sync between purchase and consumption. But hopefully this won't be a long read.

Though I will hopefully have a new Ugly Things pretty soon too.

some of the books i got yesterday:

pro - gordon r. dickson

utopia or oblivion: the prospects for humanity - r. buckminster fuller

waking the moon - elizabeth hand

as on a darkling plain - ben bova

slights - kaaron warren

class six climb - william e. cochrane

the lord's pink ocean - david walker

the space swimmers - gordon r. dickson

the last master - gordon r. dickson

the harbour - ernest poole

against infinity - gregory benford

the revolution from rosinante - alexis a. gilliland

long shot for rosinante - alexis a. gilliland

the pirates of rosinante - alexis a. gilliland

the mabinogion - translated by lady charlotte guest

the devil his due - judith merril/john wyndham/thomas m. disch and john t. sladek/michael moorcock

fastyngange - tim wynne-jones

the american folk scene: dimensions of the folksong revival - seeger, farina, paul nelson, hentoff, etc.

rock from the beginning - nik cohn (kinda hard to read...but as an artifact it's...an artifact.)

the premier - georges simenon

electric rock - the rock musician's guide to electric guitars and amplifiers - richard robinson

shaggy planet - ron goulart

second thoughts of an idle fellow - jerome k. jerome

red lights - georges simenon

Never read dickson. You always see a lot of him on 2nd-hand SF sections. That Simenon is great, the Jerome good fun, and The Harbour is meant to be an excellent socialist novel, though characteristically I have yet to read my copy...

Hi Scott, what is it about Rock From The Beginning that's making it hard to read?

it just seems naive now. and the hepcat lingo hasn't aged well. a ton of snap judgements that just seem off or wrong at this late date. but hey it was written in the heat of the moment and all that. he couldn't google anything!

Isn't part of the fun seeing how perceptions have changed over the years. Not sure how much of an Everyman/shared perspective Cohn would have had at the time. Been a few years since I read him. But I did think he was at least interesting.

Wonder how something like Bob Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah will be looked back on in years to come.

other stuff i got:

a fine and private place - peter s. beagle (weird book!)

the unearth people - kris neville

michael chabon - maps and legends

ron goulart - the sword swallower

the book of philip jose farmer

three against the witch world - andre norton

secret of the lost race - andre norton

damon knight's orbit

the day of their return - poul anderson

the rebel worlds - poul anderson

the winter of the world - poul anderson

the worlds of poul anderson - three novels

world of ptavvs - larry niven

total eclipse - john brunner

the worm ouroboros - e.r. eddison

time out of mind and other stories - pierre boulle

the clockmaker/the watchmaker - georges simenon

the status civilization - robert sheckley

the mezentian gate - e.r. eddison

siege perilous - lester del rey (actually written by paul w. fairman even though he isn't credited...)

splendor in the short grass - the grover lewis reader

"Isn't part of the fun seeing how perceptions have changed over the years"

yeah, but unfortunately music writing from that time period can be really predictable. i need some insights/flashes to keep me going. something i hadn't thought about before. and also those guys can make me wince. just the guyness of it all can make me wince. i see the roots of chauvinism/isolationism/sexism/etc in music writing in that old stuff. and i see it in me too and it bums me out. that was the dominant strain for decades. the self-assured bluster and hyperbole. of which i am definitely guilty of as well.

and i'm reading all these old magazines i got and i read that mary mmcarthy piece on ivy compton-burnett and i just say hot damn! this is what i am looking for in the way of crit. inside and out appraisal of talent that is not always easy to categorize or even understand or write about and somehow getting inside that and making it understandable and also really interesting. you can find some of that in music writing/crit, of course, but a lot of the main people who built the template - here at least - weren't anywhere near as rigorous because they wanted to mimic the comic book shagadelic nature of the music in their writing and while this might have been hilarious/mindblowing at the time if you were stoned....

In groovy tymes, Cohn def came across as a contrarian, even what the jazzers call a moldy or mouldy fig, but a fun one---he got me into PJ Proby, for inst. Don't remember the hepcat lingo--prob blended in with what most early rock writers were doing---but he seemed to combine blunt, if not flat statements w *some* (not too much) flamboyant imagery. Don't know how it would look now, though. As fan testimony, could be called Rock From The Beginning To The End, considering that he said of Dylan, "And if he killed off the thing I loved---well, that was hardly his fault." Also grudgingly admitted the validity of Pepper's etc.
(In 70s, wrote text for Guy Peellaert's coffee table pre-"graphic novel" gallery Rock Dreams, which some said was way too rock-slick, if not gross[don't remember it very well], went on to write magazine feature, which he later said he'd made up: basis of Saturday Night Fever, spent time on Riker's for selling coke, turned up in New Orleans after Katrina, where he claimed to have produced Dirty South rap, don't know if any surfaced.)

Which Orbit did you get---the first one?!

Hey, I found Splendor In The Short Grass too! Mentioned upthread around the end of June:

Splendor In The Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader, edited by Jan Reid & Kip Stratton, intro by Dave Hickey. Lewis was a strong longform journo in early Rolling Stone and others---title piece started on location for The Last Picture Show---also incl. short stories, poems and excerpt from unfinished memoir. I still remember bits of the Stone work from orig. publication, and whole thing looks v. worthwhile.
Still haven't started reading it, though.

xp I would prob enjoy McCarthy on Compton-Burnett more at this point too.

Oh, and another geezer, but one def. with his own, increasingly non-chauvinist POV---have you read much Dave Hickey? Air Guitar is usually named as a peak, or maybe valley to some---he's apparently controversial in some art-crit circles. Really enjoyable quality-over-quantity music commentary and excursions back in the Noise Boys era of Voice and Creem, but don't know if it's ever been collected. I wanna read his short stories too, but that collection is pricey so far.

someone gave me air guitar once to read and i did read some of it but that was a long time ago. don't remember much.

in general, i don't read much music writing. i will read historical stuff and occasionally jazz writing which can also be really problematic and i can be picky about it. most of my music reading now is confined to oral histories/interviews or writing by musicians. i've cut out the middle man. i have a swing oral history book that i was looking at the other day and i can just read stuff like that forever. Notes and Tones by Arthur Taylor was my big epiphany. I wanted more of that. i'll take the prejudices and blind spots of musicians over jazz writers any day of the week.