Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

Ooh, 'Another Day of Life'--that's really good. Started me off on my Kapuscinski kick.

GamalielRatsey what Carr books do you recommend? I read The Three Coffins and He Who Whispers and they were great. Then I read a few that weren't so hot.

What I got for my birthday:

Good Book - David Plotz
My Dark Places - James Ellroy
Bowie in Berlin: A New Career In A New Town - Thomas Seabrook
The Complete Novels - George Orwell
The Radetzky March - Joseph Roth
The Best of Slate (10th Anniversary Edition) - Miguel de Cervantes
Miles: The Autobiography - Miles Davis
Map Addict - Mike Parker

GamalielRatsey what Carr books do you recommend? I read The Three Coffins and He Who Whispers and they were great. Then I read a few that weren't so hot.

― abanana, Friday, July 31, 2009 4:22 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

The Blind Barber in particular nearly put me off him for life; displaying what is often his greatest weakness, a sort of hysterical facetiousness that's incredibly wearing on the nerves and perhaps more importantly incredibly destructive of one of his great strengths; the build-up of a sinister atmosphere from more or less mundane particulars.

I suppose I should state my stylistic preferences before I list my favourites, so you can get some idea whether you share them: I prefer the Dr Gideon Fell novels (John Dickson Carr) to the others, in particular those of Sir Henry Merrivale, who I find incessantly irritating, but who did appear in some excellent stories. I don't mind the early Henri Bencolin novels, those I've read of them anyway, even though they are rather high on gothic atmosphere and low on the fiendish detection that makes the later stuff such a pleasure. I haven't read any of his later historical romances.

I don't mind, in fact am sneakingly rather fond of, the novelettish aspect to his books, the romance etc, sometimes rather laughable perhaps.

I have got used to grown people saying things like 'Weeee' when delighted in his books, but it was an effort. Still some part of me winces.

I don't mind a bit of the facetious humour, but only a bit (The Case of the Constant Suicides is about as far as I go and I get off well before The Blind Barber), having learnt in some degree to accept it as part of his literary fingerprint.

The Hollow Man (The Three Coffins in the States) is my favourite I think, as you say, it's great. My other favourites would be -

The Burning Court (features a nondescript detective who doesn't appear anywhere else but is excelled only by the The Hollow Man for its build up of sinister force.)
The Case of the Constant Suicides ('humour' rather tiring, see above, but the mystery and solution excellent)
The Ten Teacups (Carter Dickson, so Henry Merrivale, but if you can turn a blind eye to his obscene eccentricities, brilliantly entertaining)
The Crooked Hinge (but I don't like, or even really understand the solution at all, although others have said it's one of his finest)
The Reader is Warned (great stuff, one where he alerts you to the clues as he goes along, although if I remember rightly, not one of my favourite stories, and the blasted Merrivale again)

I also like,

The Judas Window, The Black Spectacles and Hags Nook (the first Gideon Fell mystery).

Emphatically stay away from The Problem of the Wire Cage (ludicrous and just plain bad) and in general from the later ones. I see from quickly looking at a list that I've read quite a few others, but I can't remember them very well, so would hesitate to make recommendations. Although I've got to the stage now where I'll read any of them, even the bad ones, have developed a mild-ish case of addiction to him.

I'm delighted to say I'm not sure I've read He Who Whispers though, and shall seek that out soon, but perhaps not too soon.

The Best of Slate (10th Anniversary Edition) - Miguel de Cervantes

What?

Just checking to see whether anyone reads my posts. You're right, it's actually Goethe.

The Senior Commoner - Julian Hall

How'd you find one?

I initially read it in a library copy but Faber Finds have 'published' it. I'm rather ambivalent about this enterprise, but in this particular case I'm ignoring my qualms because I want a copy.

That said, I had it on order prior to it's released. On the day of it being released my order cancelled itself. I ordered again and received a phone call the next day to check I had really ordered it. I assured the caller of the sincerity of my intention, whereupon she informed me it would be dispatched 'soon'. Since then I've heard and seen nothing, so it may maintain it's legendary scarcity.

'its release' obviously.

regarding He Who Whispers: the Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection (great site; unchanged for at least a decade) doesn't even mention it, but the Mysterylist.com guy considers it his best (no spoilers for HWW)

Thanks abanana, interesting. I think I disagree with this chap for the same reason I tend to disagree with the arguments of a lot of mystery and detection wonks in their analysis of books; they, understandably perhaps, tend to focus on the crime and detection elements, but at the expense of atmospheric and, for want of a better word, artistic elements. [SPOILERS OF A SORT FROM HEREON] I think part of the reason The Hollow Man is my favourite, well, lots of people's favourite, is the body in the middle of the dead end in the virgin snow with no one around, the mysterious tall figure at the beginning, the grotesque history to the deaths, the strong sense of a supernatural flying hollow man, who can appear and disappear at will - there is a sort of magic about it that is uniquely compelling.

I don't necessarily think it's too far-fetched to say that much of JDC's best work is like MR James subjected to rational detection(in fact the connection is made more or less explicitly in The Burning Court).

He gets rather hoity about it not really being a locked-room mystery, but all I can say is it looks like one, and that's surely what counts? Especially in a novel devoted to the nature of illusion and magic.

Whatever the reasons, it will stay my favourite, although that certainly doesn't mean I'm not looking forward very much to reading He Who Whispers.