Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

Elijah Wald Dylan Goes electric
I really enjoyed teh book on Delta Blues, Leaving The Delta and have been meaning to grab this for a while.

Snow Upon The Desert Frank Mcflynn
biography of Richard Francis Burton the victorian explorer and translator.
I picked this up and then saw there was another biogrpahy of him from the same year 1990. Not sure what the significance of that is yet. centenary of something?

Not purchases as such, but have recently been going through a dozen big boxes of unread books that have been in storage for over a decade, so at the moment my house is like an ideal 2nd-hand bookshop circa 2005.

Mick Farren The Black Leather Jacket
interesting find in a local newsagents I don't tend to go near. Have to check them out more frequently. THink I've seen some interesting rock stuff in there before cheaply. T
This was €1.99. Not asure why something like this would be popping up in there but do like his writing .

Frederik Pohl: THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS - a memoir.

Cool. Old edition or did they recently put out a new one?

No, an old hardback, 2nd hand, for £3!

Bought at the big-ish NYRB sale @ Gower st Waterstone (there are I'd say nearly 50 titles going for a fiver each):

Poems of the Late T'Ang
Proensa An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry
Umberto Saba - Ernesto
Yoel Hoffmannn - The Sound of One Hand 281 Zen Koans with Answers

1st hand:

Gerald Murnane - The Plains

2nd Hand:

Nabokov - Speak, Memory An Autobiography Revisited
Bae Suah - A Greater Music
Maeve Brennan - The Visitor
Dante - La Vita Nuova

I should check out this sale.

THe Fire and teh fury Michael Wolf
wondering what of teh books on the trump era are actually worth reading. I know most of what's in here already or have heard the related stories.

Mars By 1980 David Stubbs
bought but not as yet received. The book on the history of electronic music by the author of Future Days which I enjoyed and i think only saw very superficial attacks on. I know him from his writing from one of teh music weeklies a couple of decades ago anyway.
hopefully will appear by the end of the week.

Ernie Pyle Ernie's War the best of Ernie pyle's WW2 Dispatches
been meaning to read something by him since I saw the film of his work with Burgess Meredith I think. THough had Henry Fonda as him running through my head.
Saw a copy of something by him somewhere recently and looked it up on Amazon where i bought thsi from the marketplace.

Noam chomsky Understanding powerL The Indispensable Chomsky
from a charity shop yesterday. Looked good.

a few library books and library giveaways.

Kenny's choice 101 Irish Books You Must Read
list book of books over the last couple of centuries. One of the brothers who runs one of the local longstanding bookshops writes a couple of page son each, short precis a story connecting the book to the bookshop.
looks interesting for 25c and even more interesting on closer perusal.

Ghosts of my life by mark fisher

So far this book is fucking good. Reminds me why i used to love music writing and made an ilx account years ago.

Burne-Jones by Martin Harrison and Bill Waters.
1989 paperback version of an overview of teh Victorian Pre-Raophaelite painter.
I put this aside in a shop a while back and then didn't get around to buying it for ages. Bought a number of other titles from the same shop.
When I did go to buy it the counterstaff couldn't find it. They had rearranged their kept stuff in the interim
I found it on the shelf today. Or at least a version of teh same book.

Looks great anyway. I like a number of these Pre-Raphaelite and otheriwse Romantic victorian painters.

I have the Penelope Fitzgerald bio of Burne-Jones, need to actually read it.

I didn’t know you were interested in PKF.

Sundog-Scott Walker (a compendium of his recent and some not so lyrics)
The Velvet Underground-New York Art (not essential as literature perhaps, but man is it Beautiful to look at.
Mark E Smith-V11 (a wonderful and rare bit of Fall arcana that i scored on ebay recently,illuminates some of the darker corners of his wordage for this yank and lifelong Fall freak. Also just paid 50.00 u.s. for pages out of NME and Sounds etc of Fall inteviews etc from 78 to 80. Figure that kinda stuff's not going to get cheaper)
So yeah mostly music stuff here.

Richard Holmes - Shelley: The Pursuit
Sybille Bedford - A Legacy

Both second-hand.

For any Torontonians or anyone in the GTA, U of T is starting up its annual college book sales tomorrow, which are always an embarrassment of riches.

Mars by 1980 just arrived. Not had a chance to look at it very closely yet.
Hoped it might be today but thought storm might delay it.

Bought the new Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, which is gorgeous. Also Leaving Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour) and What a City is For (Matt Hern)

Wondered about that Penguin Japan collection, but am dubious about the editor: anyone who thinks Haruki Murakami is amazing and who devotes much of their life to his work is someone whose judgement of what makes for good literature, Japanese or otherwise, is deeply suspect.

Having said that, I'll inevitably end up buying it in paperback.

Including Murakami will automatically make the book sell so many more copies, I really can't begrudge that editorial decision. I have no strong feelings on him either way tho so that might help.

Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Sianne Ngai

I have heard that that was interesting!

Michael Chabon: THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION - £2 hardback from a library sale.

It's a good one.

2nd hand:

Giuseppe di Lampedusa - Two Stories & A Memory
Thomas Bernhard - The Lime Works
Natalia Ginzburg - All our Yesterdays

bought mahself a greg tate reader and that ian bostridge book on the winterreise

At the bookshop:
The Little Drummer Girl, John Carré
The Vegetarian, Han Kang
Solar Bones, Mike McCormack
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

Online:
A Hypocritical Reader, Rosie Snadjr

Michael Chabon: THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION - £2 hardback from a library sale.

― the pinefox, Monday, September 24, 2018 1:24 PM (three weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haven't read it in a while. but i remember loving this. apparently the coen bros had an option to film it? don't think it's gonna happen tho.

2nd hand - Violette Leduc - La Batarde

Dag Solstad - T Singer
Ilse Aichinger - The Bound Man
Juan Rulfo - The Plain in Flames

I read the Violteete leduc about 1990 thought it was pretty good, was there a 2nd volume of it or something.
PIcked it up in a charity shop at the time.
May still have it somewhere.

From what I can see there is a 2nd volume that appeared 10 years later called Mad in Pursuit. What I do have is this first volume, published in '64. This is an edition on Panther books.

Yeah Think it was taht Mad in pursuit I had too.

The Books of Earthsea is out. 1008 pages collecting the 5 Earthsea novels, Tales from Earthsea, early and late uncollected stories, a couple other bits, and illustrations by Charles Vess. Buy one for every middle schooler in your life.

I have an earlier omnibus of the novels that I picked up a couple of years ago. Only got though the first one. Must get back and read more.

Picked up the DK books on Pollitics & Shakespeare yesterday from a charity shop.

Also a thing called Tescopoly: How One Shop Came Out on Top and Why it Matters by Andrew Simms
cos it interests me to some degree and I've come across the tesco monopoly both in other books and attempts on the local streets.

pickled up an encyclopaedia of JRR Tolkien or something to that effect in a charity shop last week too.

& a DK Chilli Lovers cook book last week or the one before.

crossposted from the amazon thread:

this is weird: Booksellers Protest Amazon Site’s Move to Drop Stores From Certain Countries

On Saturday night, in response to a query from a reporter, AbeBooks issued a statement saying it was dropping the countries because “our third-party payment service provider is closing at the end of the year.” It added that, “We regret that we cannot continue to serve all sellers.”

Asked how many booksellers and countries were affected, Richard Davies, an AbeBooks spokesman, said, “I am not adding anything else to that statement.”

Mr. Brown, one of the dealers organizing the protests, said that for many of the booksellers, AbeBooks’ actions underlined both Amazon’s power and its refusal to be accountable for it.

“The biggest e-commerce giant in the world apparently finds it too complicated to do business in Prague,” he said. “You have to wonder who’s next. We’re all vulnerable to Amazon’s capricious actions.”

The complete lack of information makes it hard to understand what’s going on here. It’s not clear whether they are withdrawing from specific markets or cannot service specific sellers. I don’t really understand how a change in payment provider or system would affect specific countries. I guess it’s possible that some seller systems may not report in a way compatible with the new software or platform. But they also seem to be citing unspecified complexities and expenses associated with named markets.

The complete lack of notice and public comms from Abebooks are both very poor.

Particularly shitty since, for the most part, Russia, Sth Korea, Hungary and the Czech Republic all have flourishing lit scenes/pasts and their own languages, so plenty of people outside those countries who want texts in those languages will now be stuffed, since ABE had swallowed most of the used/rare book market.

Yes. I mean, Abebooks and Amazon's acquisition of Abebooks was obviously a real shot in the arm for the second hand bookseller. Also encouraged some interesting practices like acquiring and holding on to single copy stock because they know they can sell it to US universities/colleges for hugely inflated prices and the ability to tap into those insanely lucrative steam train and military markets.

There is also afaict no alternative middle platform provider in the market, which may account for Abebooks' complacency.

nyrb classics on sale for 7$ at campus bookstore

ge fei - invisibility cloak
william sloane - the rim of morning
qiu miaojin - notes of a crocodile
john wyndham - chrysalids
dorothy b hughes - in a lonely place

Cool

A used hardcover omnibus of all Dashiell Hammet's novels, no dust jacket and kinda cheap binding, for $1. I've read them all, but may want to re-read them sometime.

For $1 how could you not

I purchased a used copy of The God Particle yesterday solely because I opened it up to find it was previously owned by David Van Koevering

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2018/01/31/david-van-koevering-has-died/

BKS Iyengar - Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
Uwe Johnson - Anniversaries
Christa Wolf - Cassandra

gombrowicz - bacacay
lispector - the foreign legion
mina loy - the last lunar baedeker

& to round out the year:

knut hamsun - pan
robert walser - selected stories

the walser is a nice carcanet hb from the eighties which i think is the same as the nyrb reprint?

1st hand:
Josep Pla - The Gray Notebook
Various - A Hidden Landscape (ed. Mark s)

1st hand (xmas gifts - giving):
Four Books - Yan Lianke
Natalia Ginzburg - Family Lexicon

xmas gifts - receiving:
Wyndham Lewis - Tarr (The 1918 Version)

2nd hand:

Jonathan Swift - The Major Works
Marina Tsvetaeva - A Captive Spirit (this is an awesome score, love her writings, read this years and its A+)
Various - Petrarch in English
Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky
Antonio Munoz Molina - Like a Fading Shadow