Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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.

Gamaliel Denton Welch sounds amazing to me! Must chase

As for me:

Jaroslav Hasek - The Good Soldier Svejk
Camilo Jose Cela - The Hive
Arthur Schnitzler - Dream Story

The Julian Hall came through the post yesterday. Those faber find books really do look horrible, although I daren't rip the cover off because the glue doesn't look like it would hold the pages together for more than a couple of days.

Anyway, just went and bought Inherent Vice. Wasn't really feeling the love, but as I had a book voucher that needed using, and I'd also bought Mason & Dixon and Against the Day (which I really liked) when they came out, I thought I might as well. Will probably save reading it for a bit though.

Nearly also bought The South Country by Edward Thomas, but something put me off. Again, not really in the mood - the meditations seemed like they might be a bit impressionistic for what I wanted, not too much historical substance. More feeling something like Oliver Rackham's History of the Countryside at the moment, which is great, but I've left it in a place I am not, and so have had to move on to something new (probably Murder in the Submarine Zone, truth be told).

Harold Brodkey - Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.

I think when I get round to reading Proust in a month or so I'll double with short story collections like this one.

Actually I don't know whether this is a good idea.

Sold a bunch and bought in exchange:

Leonardo Sciascia - The Day of the Owl
Alberto Moravia - Contempt

Sciascia! Great choice, Julio. I never read a Sciascia book I didn't like.

(I got your mail about the Scando miserabilism too and I will reply, honest.)

Thanks Tim! (btw you should read the Jelinek, its awesome!)

went to a book exchange in l.a. today and came away with the following for free:

he's a rebel - mark ribowsky (book about phil spector)
crimes of war: guilt and denial in the twentieth century (essay comp)
rosemary's baby - ira levin (looks like a first edition hardcover)
the best film ever made - pauline kael (about citizen kane)
battle royale - koushun takami
the luhzin defense - vladimir nabokov
freedom song - amit chaudhuri

I will admit to a book-buying binge. Here is the evidence.

The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, used Penguin paperback, $2. FSF exposes Hollywood!

The Jewish War, Josephus, used Penguin classics paperback (black cover) stating "Revised Edition", $3. Stout Romans crush resistance by nasty ungrateful Jews.

1066: The Year of Conquest, David Howarth, used Penguin paperback, $4. The Conquerer comes and conquers.

Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire, William Rosen, used Penguin paperback, $4.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written By Himself, used Modern Library paperback, $3. Slave autobiography from abolition times.

The Future of Life, Edward O. Wilson, used hard cover, $5. Talented biologist indulges in well-informed speculation.

Genius: The Life and Times of Richard Feynman, James Gleick, used paperback, $4. Talented physicist rampages through staid academia and wins Nobel Prize.

The Velocity of Honey: And More Science of Everyday Life, Jay Ingram, used hard cover, $5. Science popularizer follows up with sequel to earlier popularization.

Medieval English Lyrics: 1200 - 1400, ed. Thomas G. Duncan, used Penguin paperback, $8. Looks like a honey of a book, with great attention to detail and mastery of the subject matter.

Narrow Road to the Interior: And other Writings, Matsuo Basho, tr. and ed. Sam Hamill, in a new (remaindered) trade paperback, Shambhala Press, $8. I like Sam Hamill's style.

Rivers of America: The Columbia, Stewart Holbrook, used hard cover (early edition) in good shape, $2. I consider this a steal. Holbrook was a top-notch journalist and a great lay historian. I've seen this priced at ten times the amount, but I plan to keep this one.

This haul should keep me in reading for the rest of the year and beyond. And I still have $31 of trade credit at Powell's Books to help tide me through the coming months.

i'm eagerly awaiting the new issue of my favorite magazine - matrix. it's shipping from the UK, so i get to play the will it/won't it game every day when the mail comes at work for around three weeks now.

even though it's a periodical, i count it as a book, since it only comes out once a year.

Denton Welch - A Voice Through a Cloud
Friedrich Durrenmatt - The Judge and His Hangman

Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet. Dumb title, but looks good. A bonus is the 1943 OK by the War Materials Board for the use of paper. $2.

Michelle Naka Pierce, Beloved Integer. From that ocean of contemporary poets I have never heard of, all of whose books have three blurbs by other poets I have never heard of. Looks OK. $2.

On our way to a hike last Friday, my brother and I stopped in the small town of Estacada, Oregon, where I noticed a thrift bookstore run by the volunteers to raise money for the local public library. These shops always sell at shamefully low prices. So, I purchased:

Haiku: Volume 2: Spring, R.H. Blyth, a used hardcover in fair shape, with a dust jacket. This looks to be a 1950 edition, printed in Japan by the Hokuseido Press so it is likely a first printing. I paid 25 cents for it.

This is something of a classic, in that the four volumes of this collection were probably the first real attempt to present and explain haiku to the English-speaking world. For a long time they were the only haiku collection you could find. I can recall longingly fingering these volumes as a impecunious college student, circa 1978, when I couldn't afford such expensive goods.

Huizinga's book on the Middle Ages! I had seen it in a second hand shop with my friend. But it was closed so I asked my friend to buy it. She didn't. In the end I told her I would come over (to Antwerp) and buy it myself. When we arrived IT WAS GONE! I was so angry. I kept looking but it was gone. ARGH! Then I looked once more thinking noone could have bought it... Lo and behold it was located somewhere else. Someone had moved it. 4,50 euros for an out of print classic. Yipieeeee

I am still reading the other books I purchased, namely the Sookie Stackhouse series. Will probably start the last one this week. And also got the Treasury of Knitting Patterns books. Classics in their own field/ :-)

Rainy Saturday. Visited a few bookstores. Bought:

Aurthurian Romances, Chretian de Troyes, translated by Wm. Kibler and C.W. Carroll, used Penguin Classics paperback, $6.95.

The Ring and the Book, Robert Browning, Oxford Standard Authors, 'thin India paper' edition from 1930s, $6. Couldn't resist RB's magnum opus in such a compact form at such a good price.

The Beleaguered City, Shelby Foote, a hardcover Modern Library edition that excerpts just the siege-of-Vicksburg section of Foote's huge Civil War history, $4.

Nice 2nd hand run:

Henry de Montherlant - Chaos and Night
Joseph Roth - The Radetzky March (btw, Judd books have several new copies of this going for 2.95)
Robert Musil - Young Torless
Leonardo Sciascia - To Each His Own

all 8 vols of Best SF Stories from New Worlds (1967-74)

Just got a copy of The Annotated Alice (for those who don't know - Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass with marginal annotations on history, translation, mathematics and later uses in the arts). For some reason have never acquired this before, tho have been meaning to for years.

Likewise with Sciascia in fact - never read any and have been meaning to for ages, so I'd be interested to hear what you have to say on him, xyzzz__.

Nice buy, ledge!

Recently bought a cheap copy of Gaiman's The Graveyard Book at the library bookstore - very good, I think it's my favorite novel of his. Also picked up a copy of Saint Joan.

Read Day of The Owl so far Gamaliel, and it had more than enough in it for me to go back for more. He talks in the after word of The Day... of his need to 'prune' (I think most, if not all of his books are 150 pages at most) but what seems to be as vital is his need to highly concentrate. The crimes as described in his books are a symptom of a wider disease and the inability of people to overcome whatever it is he is diagnosing -- which is what I'm still trying to decode.

The above might be a bit obscure at the mo but I'd also say his books do travel further than their Sicilian setting.

so i've started working in this second hand internet bookseller in a retail park in oxfordshire. i'm trying to be strong. i did buy a first edition of fowler's usage, though. but it was a slip up. it won't happen again.

side effect: going into oxford, walking into second hand bookshops, thinking O GOD NO, walking straight out

I think it would take a very strong constitution for a booklover's love to survive prolonged contact with the bookselling business. It must be time to revive What's it like working in a bookshop?, so you can dish us some dirt.

My "eternal distant hopeless crush" worked in a series of bookstores and most of them closed. She claims she's a bookstore jinx, but it's probably the times we live in.

Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man.

I loved working in a bookshop. Plenty of reading - almost as much as at university - could order whatever I wanted pretty much. People coming in with snatches of poetry (including memorably the Jamaican cleaning lady who came up to me once and recited four or five stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - a testament to the Scottish modelled Jamaican education system she said).

With the shelving, dusting and stocking you got to have a spatial awareness of the history of literature.

Another memorable moment was when a chap came in to ask if I had anything on And Quiet Flows the Don, and its disputed authorship. Funnily enough, I had been dusting in a rather gloomy corner, a small section rather hazily referred to as Critical Methods, whose books I had been hoping in a vague way to disperse amongst other sections, and noticed one of those books, always intriguing, whose spine presents no information. I pulled it out and saw that it was A Statistical Enquiry into the Authorship of And Quiet Flows the Don.

I took the chap to the place and presented the book to him, and he was delighted. Turns out he was a statistical analyst. It didn't have a price so I sold it to him for what I think was a nominal fee. Couple of quid I think.

Of course those slightly unusual pleasures were rare, but I always enjoyed helping people who didn't know what they want but wanted, or the endless queues of people lining up for a copy of Khalil Gibran's The Prophet. Can't stand bookshop snobbery.

Michael Foot used to come in as well, looking for his edition of Gulliver's Travels. He was delighted if we had it, and often bought a copy (for a friend he used to say), but was equally pleased if we didn't have it, as it meant we had sold out (I never pointed it out that it also showed I had failed my job as I had neglected to re-order it in time).

Completely unhealthy god that's cheap, really Amazon clicking fortnight. Couple of volumes of Burke's selected works (bonus: the slightly uncomfortable feeling I get when I buy something published by The Liberty Fund), Waugh's Letters and Diaries (nice old hardbacks, matching), Sir Philip Sidney's Major Works, Doting by Henry Green, and at last a copy of Shaftesbury's Characteristics (still waiting on this, probably fairly rough considering it was <£10).

I would say I am unlikely to read all of these cover to cover.

Nice hardback of Kenneth Koch's Collected Poems, too, that was in Judd 2 books on Marchmont St (Serious q: is there a better remainder shop in London?)

I never got anywhere with Waugh's letters/diaries. They were less, er, sparkling than one anticipated.

Also the ppl I work for are pretty neat so far! Maybe if I grow jaded and bitter about it I will post to that thread.

Ha woof I think I saw that Henry Green at Judd but I already had enough with me.

Now I got an idea for a book shopping ending with FAP :-)

Not a lot better than Judd. I like the couple of books around Charing X road and Skoob - any others apart from yer Charity shops? I guess not much more will emerge - unfortunately I never get around to Amazon.

skoob are actually owned by the same people as the place i'm working.

over this past weekend:

morante - history: a novel
frame - a state of siege
stead - the man who loved children
stead - dark places of the heart
john cowper powys - wolf solent

Nice little haul!

frame - a state of siege
stead - the man who loved children
stead - dark places of the heart
john cowper powys - wolf solent

yeah!

Would be interested on any thoughts when you get round to the Morante, omar.

b.f. skinner - 'walden two'
althusser/balibar - 'reading capital'
theodore h. white - 'the making of the american president 1960'
michael chabon - 'the final solution' (american edition i've wanted for the cover fr aaages)
james kelman, alasdair gray, agnes ownes - 'lean tales' (1st ed.)
british medical association - 'the medical effects of nuclear war'

The Epistles of Horace: Bilingual Edition, trans. David Ferry, used paperback, good condition, $9.50.

Su Tung-P'o: Selections from a Sung Dynasty Poet, trans. Burton Watson, used hardcover from Colombia U. Press, 1966, $9.95.

Insurgent Mexico, John Reed, used paperback, $1. Firsthand account of Pancho Villa's guerrilla war, by the author of Ten Days That Shook the World.

will do!

xxp

Thomp, yes, Waugh's diaries aren't much fun; the letters, though, I found very readable: like there's a lot of the shitty side of him (grumpy foul Catholic snob bigot), but it's fun enough when he sharpens up for writing to Nancy Mitford, also all the letters to other writers where he's sort of indifferent-critical about the book they've just sent him. Still, wouldn't exactly recommend above reading actual Waugh novels.

& xyzzzz, always on for bookshopping and pint. I'll sometimes do a circuit of Gower st Waterstone's, Skoob & Judd 2 of a weekend. Maybe see if used-to-be-Osborne's has fluked something interesting. I've never really got to know Charing X for second hand - I just imagine that every shop is full of ancient reptilian dealers waiting to gouge me. I don't really know about other second-hand and remainder places. The South Bank book tables can have pleasant surprises, I guess. And if I pass an Oxfam bookshop I'll drop in.

But I should slow down, since I've just been back to the Liberty Fund for Hume's History of Britain in six volumes.