Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

I carried on about Bowen's Collected Stories on a previous What Are You Reading (the current thread's title is derived from one of hers)---it's a bit uneven in the early 30s section, but overall very enjoyable. USA Trilogy has some arresting passages, but can come off like compulsive, insatiable, desperate and/or heedless activity too often, though he might say that's the point he's making about various (not all) characters and alarming American tendencies, How We Got This Way. But think I got that point pretty early. Mind you he pulled me along for the whole thing, even though I'm not nearly as tireless as his people (or him, god knows).

To continue the crosstalk with the rolling thread, Elizabeth Bowen was another correspondent of Eudora Welty.

xpost And some of those fave Dos Passos "passages" might be--up to 100 pages apiece--? Think so.

remaindered books i just bought cheap

Christopher Miller - American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny
Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live
Mara Wilson - Where Am I Now?
Joe Sacco - Journalism
Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son
John Scalzi - The Human Division
Ken Liu - The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
VanderMeers - The Big Book of Science Fiction

Just bought cheap ebook of T.C. Boyce's latest, The Terranauts. I have always avoided him and am still worried that he will turn out to be one of those award-winning authors that leave me cold. More importantly, don't see how this book can measure up to another novel mining the same material which I continue to view as a Future ILB Favorite That So Far Only I Have Read, that being Martian Dawn, by Michael Friedman.

4 for 3 euro

Alasdair Gray - Lanark
Paul McGrath - Back from the brink
William S Burroughs - Naked Lunch
Willa Cather - My Antonia

Derek Bailey and The Story of Free Improvisation by Ben Watson
Northern Sun, Southern Moon by Mike Heffley

2nd hand racks for the last few weeks:

Diana Athill - Make Believe
Elizabeth Hardwick - Herman Melville
Ann Quin - Berg (read this a long time ago - weird copy, the cover is taken from the film adaptation of it, starring Richard E. Grant)
Joseph Roth - What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33 (read this and lost it in a hotel, of all places)
U.R. Anantha Murthy - Bhava
U.R. Anantha Murthy - Samskara (really nice to score two titles in two weeks of 2nd hand cherry picking by this obscure-ish author I've wanted to read for a long time)
Janet Malcolm - Reading Chekhov
Herman Melville - Bartleby/Benito Cereno

I bought All Out War, the big book about Brexit, on the promise of its very readable style and some juicy gossip, but after three chapters I just got fed up of reading about arseholes and quit.

Also Roth's Ghost Writer, based on recommendation on another thread

Derek Bailey and The Story of Free Improvisation by Ben Watson

This is fun, good match of author & subject w the latter subverting the former. Coincidentally I just this minute picked up his art, class & cleavage for a quid at the sally ann, I'm pretty up for it. His Zappa book looks like a nightmare tho

AC&C is terrific: IMO bw's most valuable book (bcz the most openly personal)

poodleplay: i am not AT ALL a zappahead and think the adorno stuff in it is let us say a CONTENTIOUS READING of twa's face to the world… in general i think bw is much too respectful of his various chosen gurus (zappa, bailey, boulez, joyce, prynne, debord, tony cliff et al), and never really sets them free to fight one another like cats in a bagge

shamefully i haven't yet read the DB :(

(david toop is somewhat scornful in his own recent history of free improv: eg re the retelling of what the josef holbrooke trio was like, which DT sez sets FAR too much on trust in DB's retelling) (dt also admires DB a very great deal, but is better on the degree to which DB was a cranky old troll)

is better on the degree

^^ôr so i'm guessing, as i haven't actually read it :)

The DB book (I resisted talking about it as I saw it last night as its been years since I read it) is quite good and possily better for some of the grudges he takes to it - although BW might be respectful of DB he doesn't reserve that for a lot of the improv scene in general.

AC&C was great. I wonder how that would be like on a re-read. I just learnt stuff from it and everything.

BW might be respectful of DB he doesn't reserve that for a lot of the improv scene in general

this is bascially toop's problem with it = highly selective uncritical hagiography -- which does in general reflect my own issue w/BW (except where two of his gurus clash, in which instance no real indication of same)

imo this emerges from his personal negotiation of internal SWP politics (given that he was basically very much an oddity and a frustrated outlier in that benighted org)

literal conversation we once had:
bw: i wish you'd join!
ms: ben i'd be kicked out instantly!
bw: we could be kicked out together!

^^i found this exchange at once v flattering and v weird (he quit some years ago and has been its most furious critic ever since)

That's great I could never see you in the SWP.

this is bascially toop's problem with it = highly selective uncritical hagiography

His problems with the likes of AMM and what some other people get up to in that scene...to me I can some kind of method.

Then again I never got on with Zappa.

"Against Nature" was so boring. The main character was so hateful and pretentious.

I'm reading Vonnegut's "Breakfast of champions" now.

Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere (In Vivo) by Richard M. Doyle
I saw it cheap in an Oxfam so grabbed it. Not really looked at it so far.

I have to admit I really enjoyed Against Nature, but your description of the main character is spot-on

Do we have a thread about new books with cheapo, bad and blurry offprint inside?

Suppose I could spring for expensive used Turtleback copy. Or post that on $900 Grandmothers thread.

What was it?

Realising that I can't get to the book i want to look up MDMA in because the shelf above it has collapsed and the weight might bring down the bookcase which is in an awkward place to get to.
i have a few of this style of bookcase where the sides have bulged out far enough that the shelves have fallen off the little plastic brackets they sit on/ So the shelves are sitting on the top of the contents of teh shelf below.

I need to get it together to get screws into the side of each shelf and hope that will not split them or the sides of the unit.

Maybe need to develop the skills to create units like that from scratch since the walls i have here seem to be plaster so wouldn't support the weight of shelving. Just thought flatpack versions would do the work and can't get it together to customise them.

sorry wrong thread,

What was it?

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Sunday, July 23, 2017 4:45 AM

The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, edited by Hayden Carruth. It looks like they just photocopied the 1983 edition instead of resetting it. Too bad, because it seems to be a really useful book.

So it is new in the sense of recently manufactured but not really "new."

Euurrgh: what publisher responsible for this atrocity?

Bantam is the imprint. But isn't this sort of thing relatively common?

Anyway, making my peace with the slightly blurry printing.

Verso's having one of their 90% off all ebook sales for 24 hours

saw that

What else to get besides Grand Hotel Abyss?

I've been wanting a bit more variety in my pile of unread non-fiction. Today I loaded up on five non-fic used books, plus one fiction book for good measure. Now I ought to be a bit less bewildered and lethargic when trying to pick an interesting non-fiction book from the pile to caulk the spaces between my novel and short story reading.

A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor, used NYRB trade paperback, $4.
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, Laurence Bergreen, used trade paperback, $1.50.
Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Ancient Athens, James Davidson, used trade paperback, $1.00.
Brunelleschi's Dome, Ross King, used trade paperback, $1.50.
The New Kings of Non-Fiction, an anthology, editor Ira Glass, 50 cents.
Jazz Age Stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald, used Penguin Modern Classic, $1.

Elias Canetti - Auto-da-Fe
John Steinbeck - Tortilla Flat
Roberto Bolano - The Third Reich

Manhattan Transfer by John dos Passos.
I like his writing but never competed his Three Soldiers which I should remedy.
& maybe reread USA which I had a fear yesterday I was duplicating part of on buying this..

Orlando Figes book on the Crimea in a charity shop this afternoon.
I enjoyed his Russian revolution hi8story a couple of years back.
I don't know much about the Crimea so thought this might be a good place to find out.

A Walter Mosely omnibus from a different charity shop today too.

Cant take figes seriously since he used fake names to leave bad reviews of books by other Russian historians on amazon, and when he was caught out he:
1. Blamed his wife
2. Admitted it was him, not his wife, but he had been researching Stalin and was traumatised so was not responsible for his actions

C21st UK academic claiming to be a victim of Stalin because he trolled other writers is pretty feeble stuff

I don't think I was aware fo it before you mentioned it. I read A people's Tragedy after having wanted to since nearly everybody on teh Solidarity Camp had read it back in 2006 and I hadn't managed to . Enjoyed it, this Crimea looks like it could be good.

Found a Guardian article on the fracas though
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/23/historian-orlando-figes-amazon-reviews-rivals

gerhardie - futility
ableman - i hear voices
wahloo - the lorry
platonov - soul & other stories
biely - the silver dove
fassbinder - plays

Richard Barnes Mods.
Been meaning to get a new copy of this for ages

Grace jones I'll never write my memoirs
cos it was cheap in a n ew local record shop

Gerhardie: Futility is great. What's that Wahloo? One of his solo books? Doesn't ring any bells

impulse amazon buy:

peter guralnick - last train to memphis
ernest becker - the denial of death
angela nagle - kill all normies: online culture wars from 4chan and tumblr to trump and the alt-right

xpost: yeah, have been meaning to check out gerhardie for awhile. there were a few of his novels where i found that lot, but thought i'd start with his first (nice to learn it was published c/o katherine mansfield). i guess the polyglots would be the place to go after futility?

the wahloo novel is from the early sixties, based on his time in spain in the previous decade. was actually how i first came across his name via the books listed in the back of the old school picadors

That looks cool. Vintage US republished some of his other solo books a few years ago, which were really good, but that one's new to me.

Voltaire in Love, Nancy Mitford, used trade paperback in like new condition, $2. Sounds moderately interesting.

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America, Bill Bryson, used paperback, $2. This is copyright 1989 and aimed at a British audience, so it's before Bryson became established. Hard to say how much this one might deviate from his usual formulaic humor. Given its publication date, it probably describes a version of America that's dead as the dodo. I'll save it for when I need something mindless and frothy.

I've read that Bryson. It's as you say.

'several short sentences about writing' and calasso's 'art of the publisher' - books about booksssss

Art of the Publisher was entertaining but I wish it had gone much deeper

i'll throw it away then, thanks

no problem

AUGUST BOOK HAUL

Karl Schütz - Vermeer: Complete Works
Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Eye and Mind
E. H. Gombrich - Art and Illusion
Svetlana Alpers - The Art of Describing
Madeleine L'Engle - The Glorious Impossible