Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

thanks for the heads-up about the Moby Dick edition, James.

'There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night' - Cao Naiqian

*googles* that sounds good Michael, let us know...

Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein's Nephew

Same here, Correction is one of the best half a dozen or so bks I've read this year

It's excellent; very poetic.

Ha, just bought this: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0140620621.jpg

i bought a couple dozen very cheap copies of '50s and '60s penguin paperbacks based entirely on their covers. lots of self-help, mystery, sci-fi stuff.

and i just picked up a copy of 'a deepness in the sky' by vernor vinge.

i know the vinge book is a prequel to 'a fire upon the deep', but i don't have that...does it matter which one i read first?

i bet the moby-dick penguin classics has jettisoned the insane 300-page critical commentary by harold beaver

i have way too many penguins acquired 'based entirely on their covers', though my last girlfriend bought most of them for me

i have had bernhard's 'correction' lying around for ages

along with max frisch's 'i'm not stiller' which for some reason i associate with it. i mention this because i saw an old orange penguin paperback of it this weekend

i have just bought a job lot of muriel sparkses on ebay

along with max frisch's 'i'm not stiller' which for some reason i associate with [Bernhard's 'Correction'].
Perhaps because they're both on Donald Barthelme's Syllabus ?

Just got word that my copy of the complete Cosmicomics has been shipped, hooray. It's been a good while since I read anything new by Calvino. Oddly few of his works have been translated to Norwegian -- I did pick up a Danish paperback of Cosmicomics last year, but I haven't actually read it.

i know the vinge book is a prequel to 'a fire upon the deep', but i don't have that...does it matter which one i read first?
Pretty sure it doesn't matter much, though I never finished 'A Deepness' (and, to be honest, I wasn't terribly keen on 'A Fire...' either.)

Frisch and Bernhard are v different. Can't quite see why Bernhard or Celine are on that Barthelme list (if you're gonna make the assumption that the list wasn't compiled on a whim).

Recently:

Celine - Journey to the End of the Night. Read it before but it was a library copy
Robert Graves - Greek Myths vol. 2
Bohumil Hrabal - I Served the King of England

Looking for 2nd hand copies of Biely's Petersburg and Zeno's Conscience. Also vols 2 and 3 of Proust (the multi-translator ed). Good luck to me etc I know :-(

I love Hrabal!

just got a copy of faulkner's "light in august" on the street for a buck

been having my mind blown reading "billy bathgate" and wanting to be a 1930s bronx hoodlum.

Michael - In case you haven't seen, see here for a piece on Hrabal, it is what got me to look out for him.

Proust - Remembrance of things Past (trans. Scott Moncrieff) vols 3-10: Within a Budding Grove (3-4), Guermantes Way (5-6), Cities of the Plain (7-8) and The Captive (9-10)

Its the vols published in the 40s by Chatto & Windus, looks unread...

Only the last two vols left and have the Lydia davis trans of Way by Swann's.

I'm ready to go :-)

The nice thing about shopping at charity bookshops is the pure randomness of what is there. I just combed the shelves at Goodwill and came home with these:

We, Eugene Zamiatin, used paperback published by Dutton, $2. Looks like one to take hiking, maybe.

The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World: Poems 1953 - 1964, Galway Kinnell, used paperback published by Houghton Mifflin. New condition, $4.

Gilgamesh: A New Rendering into English Verse, David Ferry. Used paperback in good condition, $3. I had seen this once before for cheap, but I passed it by and then had regrets. Not this time.

Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947 - 1985, Gary Snyder, used hardcover published by North Point Press, good condition, $4.

'We' is great stuff.

The randomness of charity bookshops is fantastic. I love/hate how very occasionally I'll find one that's so good that I end up buying a dozen books at once.

Once you break the barrier of looking at the shelves thinking 'what do I actually want' you are done for. The moment you think 'Oooh, I've heard of that/that looks rather neat' it's time to go fetch the shopping trolley.

Seconds for We here, as well, very good.

Patricia Highsmith - Carol (her first novel, published under a pseudonym)
Nathalie Sarraute - The Planetarium
Jim Thompson - Nothing more than Murder

just got some rilke and the new denis johnson. fuckin love that dude.

which rilke? i've been meaning to post some of the terrible, terrible translation of the duino elegies i picked up a while ago on here

"An Angel, alone, is misted in dread." Uh-huh.

The Denis Johnson ('Nobody Move') is almost pure (uneasy) fun.

JG Ballard The Millenium People
JG Ballard The Drowned World
George Pelecanos The Turnaround
Simon Reynolds Energy Flash

All £2 in Fopp.

thomp, is it the 2 Buddhist women translating Rilke? I can't think of their names but they've put out several different volumes recently. I have a couple of them, and I while I don't speak a word of German it was obvious even to me that they were taking huge liberties with the original lines.

no it is this:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3289/3129371925_2374aabce0.jpg?v=0

1957.

<a href=http://bostonreview.net/BR25.3/krauss.html>;this article</a> is interesting; i might try and get hold of the gass book.

Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans
Mark Folse, Carry Me Home: A Journey Back to New Orleans
Earl J. Higgins, The Joy of Y'at Catholicism
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

VII by Mark E Smith

which is to say the new, improved and updated Mark E Smith lyrics book.

It's fantastic - a collage of images, letters, utilities bills, paintings and newspaper snippets, Smith's scrawlings and typings, advice and playlets.

i got three milan kundera novels i haven't read yet. $1/apiece. immortality, the joke, and the book of laughter & forgetting.

Jaka's Story by Dave Sim
The Wild Ass's Skin by Honore de Balzac

my kids called me from a bookstore yesterday asking if there was a book i'd like to read. i said yup, and it's called infinite jest. 24 hrs later, they gave it to me giftwrapped, for father's day.

Got round to spending some book vouchers my mum gave me for Christmas -
library love and abebooks were somehow preventing me before.

The Confusions of Young Törless - Robert Musil
Chaos and Night - Henry de Monterhlant (loved The Bachelors, and great title, Henry!)
John Betjeman on Churches - Jonathan Glancey (John Betjeman's essay at the
beginning of English Parish Churches is brilliant, and well,
I'm not really sure why I've got this now, but perhaps something to do with cycling past some lovely tenth century churches in Kent at the weekend. I'm not actually a believer, but there's something curiously soothing in their brickwork and their spires seen across fields.

Still got more to spend and am thinking of getting Ooga-Booga by Friederick Siedel, but they didn't have it in the shop. Was served by an exceptionally surly girl, in fact I'm having one of those days where I appear to have the word 'RAPIST' tattooed on my forehead.

Wicked - this is surprisingly dark and more entertaining than I was expecting

The Olivetti Chronicles - John Peel (a collection of articles he wrote for various newspapers and magazines over a 30 year period)

Visit to a charity shop today while I was waiting for my train yielded the following:
Rites of Passage by William Golding
Super Cannes by JG Ballard
How to be a Bad Birdwatcher by Simon Barnes
The Black Album by Hanif Kureshi

Final Del Juego by Julio Cortázar.

Bought a bunch of Indian classics from a cheap Indian online bookshop as a bit of a trial (Oxford Bookstore they're called, and the prices are VERY low, but weirdly you can only get their site to work if you run Netscape, rather than Mozilla or IE).

First-edition hardcovers of Barthelme's The Dead Father and City Life for 8 bucks each. The same store wanted 30 for The Dead Father last time I was in there, so that was cool.

my husband bought me a copy of raymond carver's first ever mass-produced book - a semi-chapbook limited to a 1000 copies.

Did some bookshop cruising today - including Powell's:

On the Loose, Jerry & Renny Russell, used hardcover in a slipcase, $2. A sentimental purchase harking back to my high school period. It's a calligraphed book of quotations and photos put together by a couple of college kids circa 1965 and published by Sierra Club - about the wonders of poking around the CA wilderness and being young and reckless. David Brower loved it, of course.

The Jewish War, Josephus, as a used Penguin paperback, $3.

Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach, tr. A.T. Hatto, as a used Penguin paperback, $7.95. I greatly enjoyed Hatto's translation of Tristan and may like this one equally well.

Poems from the Greek Anthology, tr. Forrest Reid, in a 1944 hard cover edition printed by Faber & Faber, $5.95. These versions are a bit bald, but at least they are not all tarted up with contemporary slang and goofy typographical conventions.

Bought a bunch of Indian classics from a cheap Indian online bookshop as a bit of a trial

These arrived, and groovily, the package was sewn carefully and tightly in muslin and sealed with sealing wax (with an unreadable image stamped into the wax).

That's so great - except that if I received such a thing I'd never be able to bring myself to open it, and would have to go back to hunting for mass-market paperbacks instead.

I took photos before ruining it by cutting it open:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/28475170@N02/3703165865/"; title="Delivery from India by jrsmorrison, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2333/3703165865_f86efb6d33.jpg"; width="425" height="346" alt="Delivery from India" /></a>

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2333/3703165865_f86efb6d33.jpg

Sorry about that--never posted an image from flickr here before.

complete poetry of emily dickinson for 99p this afternoon

in the past week:

five novels by ronald firbank
baron corvo - hadrian the seventh
kierkegaard - fear and trembling/repetition
janet frame - owls do cry
jean rhys - good morning, midnight
patricia highsmith - high water
esther leslie - hollywood flatlands: animation, critical theory and the avant-garde

Coincidence: last night I was reading a group of Graham Greene essays on Baron Corvo, wherein he praised Hadrian the Seventh as the best novel of its era.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Sterne

Pierre by Melville - for a friend; we're conducting an informal literary pissing contest, one that began when I mentioned that if there was any book that had beat me bloody and pulpish twenty pages in, it was this one. If there are any official literary pissing contests being conducted, do tell.

A Voice Through A Cloud - Denton Welch
A Private View - Jocelyn Brooke
The Senior Commoner - Julian Hall
Murder in the Submarine Zone - John Dickson Carr
A Thousand Nights and One Night - illustrated Jan Pienkowski

The first three were to replace library copies that I kept on getting out/renewing and decided I might as well buy.

Murder in the Submarine Zone was me finally giving way to getting a new Dickson Carr (Carter Dickson in this case in fact, I think). I was trying to ration myself, because I realised that there weren't many that I hadn't read - and they are a pleasure on rainy afternoons with beer and nothing to do, when you have no heart for 'serious' reading. It's rather easier to get in the American edition (And Death Makes Ten) but I prefer the English title and so splashed out a bit extra to get that one.

The Arabian Nights was a present for a newborn baby girl - not that I expect her to read it now, but with any luck, it'll be something she'll have when she grows up. Cunning heroine as well, which is nice as it's for a girl. Rather scary illustrations.

The Literature Machine (Essays) - Italo Calvino
Another Day of Life - Ryszard Kapuscinski
Children's Stories - Anton Chekhov