Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

josep pla, 'the gray notebook'

seems nice, choice

The Recognitions, Wm. Gaddis, used trade paperback, Penguin Modern Classics, like new condition, $2. I tried reading this one before, several years ago, but failed at ~150pp into it. For this cheap I can probably recoup my investment if I abandon it yet again.

The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, Th. Mann, in a used cheap Signet paperback edition in readable condition, 50 cents. I really ought to give Mann a whirl some time and this seems like one of his more accessible books.

I wish I loved Josep Pla - like the idea of him - Life Embitters didn't leave much of an impression.

1st:

Antonio Di Benedetto - Zama

2nd hand racks:

Marguerite Duras - Yann Andrea Steiner
Muriel Spark - The Abess of Crewe ("A wicked satire on Watergate" made me groan but I like the cover and its short)
Muriel Spark - The Hothouse by the East River
Geoffrey Hill - Selected
Lazlo Krasznahorkai - War and War

calvino, six memos for the next millennium

Some used children's/YA lit at a local second-hand shop. The two well-known titles I grabbed because they were lovely editions:

S.E. Hinton - Rumble Fish
Ron Koertge - Boy Girl Boy
David Levithan - Boy Meets Boy
Johanna Spyri - Heidi

I found this for $2 at the library. I was pleased.

https://pictures.abebooks.com/NORMANKERRBOOKS/md/md14977445905.jpg

I just hauled in seven used Penguin paperbacks by P.G. Wodehouse for fifty cents each:

Carry On, Jeeves,
Very Good, Jeeves,
Leave it to Psmith (a stone classic),
Uncle Fred in the Springtime,
Quick Service,
The Luck of the Bodkins,
The Heart of a Goof

In addition, also for fifty cents: Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain

LOl Tolhurst's memoir Cured:The Story of Two Imaginary Boys
which is a pretty good read and i think covers at least most of the era of the Cure that i'm interested in

Christopher Isherwood My Guru and His Disciple
Not started this yet. I enjoyed Goodbye to Berlin earier this year and wanted to read some more of him.
I'm assuming some of the same qualities will appear in this book despite the pretty different subject matter.

Oh & The Sixties House by Catriona Gray a book on Sixties interior design that was going cheap in TKMaxx yesterday and I've had my eye on for a while.

& I bought the Vernon Joynson book A Melange of Musical pipedreams and Pandemonium.
Mainly bought because of the African section but I'm finding that the input on the actual African bands mentioned is not that great. I think he may be better on the white bands from the continent but I was looking for something good on African rock.
Would be great if somebody did a similar tome specifically about the native African rock and electrified music produced in the 60s, 70s especially and possibly up to date.
Though thi sdoes also have section son Australia and NZ oh and Turkey/Middle East though not sure how good that bit is either.

Uncle Fred in the Springtime
Even more antic than the Jeeves books I've read: the fearless Uncle Fred is himself of the upper crust Wooster World tirelessly mined by Wodehouse, and he only wants to help!

Donald Antrim - The Emerald Light in the Air

beautiful good-as-new used copy for 9$

wyndham lewis - the red priest
djuna barnes - vivid & repulsive as the truth

Not sure why I'm buying books in comparison to how little I'm reading at the mo :-(

Andrei Platonov - The Return
Flann O'Brien - Myles Away from Dublin
Sylvia Path - The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath - Letters Home (its nice to find a bunch of books by her, and a nice ed. of her poetry - hope to be digging deeply soon)
Dubravka Ugresic - Ministry of Pain
Szilard Borbely - Berlin-Hamlet

Claude Simon- The Grass.
Looking forward.
Loved Flanders Road - desert island stuff.

A Month in the Country, J. L. Carr
Selected Poetry, Christopher Smart

The Bronte Sisters - Selected Poems
The Loft - Marlen Haushofer
Wolfgang Koeppen - A Sad Affair
Roberto Bolano - Distant Star
Celine - Death on the Installment Plan (this replaces my tired looking Calder paperbk with the NDP one)

from the best used bookstore in my area last weekend:

the wonder effect - pohl & kornbluth
the other end of time/the siege of eternity/the far shore of time - fred pohl
manservant and maidservant - ivy compton-burnett (i probably already have it...)
you'll enjoy it when you get there - elizabeth taylor
the fury from earth - dean mclaughlin
the cosmic rape - ted sturgeon
pearls, girls & monty bodkin - wodehouse
no time like tomorrow - brian aldiss
a house and its head - ivy compton-burnett (i probably already have it...)
shellbreak - j.w. groves
hawksbill station - robert silverberg
the silver eggheads - fritz leiber
born with the dead - robert silverberg
moons of triopus - john rankine
the mutants - kris neville
dome world - dean mclaughlin
starchild - pohl & williamson
venus development - david bergamini
wolfbane - pohl & kornbluth
endangered - c.j. box
the big jump - leigh brackett
stolen faces - michael bishop
the insane city - kenneth bulmer
down in the black gang - philip jose farmer
none so blind - joe haldeman
pattern-master - octavia butler
wild seed - octavia butler
clay's ark - octavia butler
full moon - wodehouse
mulliner nights - wodehouse
the other foot - damon knight
stepsons of terra - robert silverberg
worlds without end - clifford d. simak
time and stars - poul anderson
cosm - gregory benford
timepivot - brian n. ball
pelican at blandings - wodehouse
uncle fred in the springtime - wodehouse
summer moonshine - wodehouse
motion of light in water - samuel r. delany

Fucking hell
Read the Elizabeth taylor first

I dreamed I bought a book by Elizabeth Taylor last night!

Book I actually bought irl yesterday: Alasdair Gray, Every short story 1951-2012 for £2.50. Probably never get around to reading it but it looks nice next to my copy of the book of prefaces

And I bought two Elizabeth Taylor books this week! _In a Summer Season_ and _At Mrs Lippincote's_

Another book I got this week was the California University Press trade paperback reprint of the Arion Press edition of Moby-Dick. It's hotttt.

It must be in the air. I was checking my library's site four days ago to see what Elizabeth Taylor they had on the shelf.

Read the Elizabeth taylor first

i've never actually read the collected stories of ET. i've read a lot of the novels.

Isn't the one you bought a selected stories?

yeah, its just a nyrb paperback. i'd like to find her original short story collections in hardcover. it's really getting harder and harder for me to find out of print hardcovers around here. it's weird. even at great stores there just isn't much in the way of original 50s/60s/70s stuff. all the literature shelves are filled with trade paperbacks.

there are stores around here that i never go to that i need to try. mostly because i have so much stuff to get to already. i've probably got a good 3 or 4 years of future reading at home.

and apparently all my books are set in country houses or in space...

Skot is like the Karl Lagerfeld of moldy old paperbacks

not moldy! i like clean paperbacks. i don't like any evidence of past bathrooms.

i won't buy any book with any water stains. even if its just one page.

My dream didn't come true but I did get a pretty good haul yesterday: a bunch of Bernhard from the market (old masters, yes, the loser, the lime works) and some brand-new paperbacks that Heffers were getting rid of at £1 each:

Casares, The invention of morel
Lydie Salvayre, Company of ghosts
Edouard Levé, Newspaper
Eric Laurrent, Do not touch
László Krasznahorkai, Melancholy of resistance
Roberto Arlt, The seven madmen
Aharon Apelfeld, Badenheim 1939
Etgar Keret, Kneller's happy campers
Ken Bruen & Jason Starr, Bust (this is one of those hard case crime things)

I'm off work this week so quite keen to just bum around & read

Finally got around to ordering Under The Hoodoo Moon the Dr John memoir so it will appear in a few days. Been meaning to order that for ages.

Got a Doc Pomus biography and the Lester Bangs book on Blondie waiting for me to pick them up from local 2nd hand bookshop probably this Thursday.

ha so I'm out today and I see the other bookseller, who's not there as often, and lo and behold three novels by Elizabeth Taylor! I took it as a sign & bought them all

Very nearly said to the guy "you know the night before last I dreamt that I bought a book by Elizabeth Taylor at the market" but then I realised that the only reason it was even half worth mentioning was the coincidence with this thread and even then it is the most boring "story" in the world

It's not a properly boring Elizabeth Taylor conversation unless the star of Cleopatra has also been mentioned.

ann quin - berg (og cb pb)
anna kavan - julia and the bazooka
giorgio de chirico - hebdomeros: a novel

Please let us know what the De Chirico is like, always wondered about his fiction (having been spooked by the heyday of his art at an early age, mine I mean).
Bangs on Blondie=coffee table book and hatchet job in one, unique in my reading experience.

Yeah, realy getting into this Bangs Blondie. Seems really odd as a mass market pop tome.

xpost: will do... had been looking for a copy of hebdomeros since my mid-teens based on the mention it gets in one of aldiss' sf histories (seem to recall his opinion of it was rather negative!)

I bought a couple of $1 used trade paperbacks today, just to put on my shelf and have handy in the unlikely event I want something to read that exactly aligns with them. That may take a while, considering the 40 or so other books just waiting for the same alignment to occur.

The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki, translator Seidenstecker, abridged version (~360 pp.)
Cathedral, Raymond Carver, a short story collection.

I have had the massive unabridged Genji for so long. No idea if/when I will ever read it. So many pages, such tiny type.
I do have this beautiful book which summarises each chapter with wonderful papercut illustrations, though.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/SZSuPYhH1DI/AAAAAAAAESE/54It39Db4TQ/s400/genji01.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/SZSuPNugp4I/AAAAAAAAER0/3czGb3lfOwE/s1600-h/genji+03.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/SZSuPNzCbzI/AAAAAAAAER8/Z0wA9dngk7w/s1600-h/genji+02.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/SZSuPNzCbzI/AAAAAAAAER8/Z0wA9dngk7w/s400/genji+02.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/SZSuPNugp4I/AAAAAAAAER0/3czGb3lfOwE/s400/genji+03.jpg