Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

christine brooke-rose - xorandor
william gerhardie - of mortal love

Rob Young All Gates Open arrived a couple of days ago and i've had a quick look in it. Read his description of Ege Bam yasi and been busy with other stuff.
Also got latest Ugly Things in same delivery which is also great.

Years ago I read a borrowed copy of “Havoc” by Tom Kristensen, and loved it (as documented on the Scandinavian lit thread). I’ve been looking for a copy since then - the only available edition was a university of Wisconsin edition. It’s been varying between £120 and £1000 on Amazon this whole time

Yesterday I was in a bookshop in Madison, WI and there was a copy for $7.50! I was so excited.

I looked it up on Amazon to show my wife what a score I’d made and how rare it was and noticed that it’s about to be issued by NYRB this month. Oh, and another paperback edition had been available since 2016. Oh well, it’s still GREAT.

I also bought a copy of “Encires for a Dilettante” by Ursule Molinaro, I remember loving her “Positions With White Roses” twenty-odd years ago.

I bought that 2016 edition and still haven't read it. Need to rectify this.

Broke down (again) and purchased a few items off Amazon:

Sergio Pitol - The Magician of Vienna
Josef Wrinkler - The Garden of Bitter Oranges
Wolfgang Hilbig - I

(I love all three writers dearly - sadly published by obscure-ish ppl, however these are some of the most successful writers to be rendered into English these last few years)

2nd hand:

John Keats - So Bright and Delicate. Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Browne.
Anne Carson - Red Doc >
Joao Gilberto Noll - Quiet Creature in the Corner
Durs Grunbein - Ashes for Breakfast

a dollar a piece:

the penguin complete saki
ew hornung - raffles: the amateur cracksman
elizabeth bowen - eva trout
elizabeth taylor - hester lily
elizabeth taylor - the soul of kindness
dorothy carrington - granite island
malcolm lowry - hear us o lord/lunar caustic
dh lawrence - letters to thomas & adele seltzer
louise desalvo - conceived with malice: literature as revenge
the concise oxford dictionary of french literature
francis james child - the english & scottish popular ballads vol. iv

Wow

The Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire, unabridged, translated by Peter Gay, in two used hardcover volumes, slip-cased, for $10. In the bookshop I randomly opened to several different passages and read them, and decided it looked like some pretty awesome stuff in there.

oh, and wow, no lime tangier! that's some ace used book nabbing.

not bad for thirty minutes attendance at a book sale. sort of regretting not picking up some of the countless henry james titles that were lying around.

That's a great haul. Raffles is fun and very, very gay. The Bowen and the Taylors are excellent.

I was at a wedding recently and the place where they held the reception had a giant library, clearly used for decoration. At my girlfriend's instigation I stole Joy In The Morning, following the logic that books are to be read, not displayed.

All IN THe Downs
Shirley Collins memoir. America Over The Water was a fantastic read so hope this is as good

Hippie Hippie Shake Richard Neville
Oz editor's memoir of the 60s

I was at a wedding recently and the place where they held the reception had a giant library, clearly used for decoration. At my girlfriend's instigation I stole Joy In The Morning, following the logic that books are to be read, not displayed.

This is wise. Once stayed in a hotel that had a library where the books had obviously been bought by the metre based on spine colours. But managed to make off with a couple of St Expurys and a Molly Keane.

Tom Stoppard - Arcadia (loved it and already ordered The Coast of Utopia trilogy to follow up)
Arthur C Clarke - Rendezvous with Rama (basically new and £1!)
Antonio di Benedetto - Zama (had to pick it up after seeing the film)
Clark Gable, Laurence Olivier and Humphrey Bogart biographies (I've forgotten the authors but they were £2 each and I presume they were all donated by the same enthusiast to Oxfam)

And in advance of September jaunt:
Paul B. Henze - Layers of Time: History of Ethiopia
Ryszard Kapuściński - The Emperor (this was absolutely fascinating)

Amazon:
Paul Celan - Complete Prose
Holderlin - Hymns and Fragments

2nd hand:
Gyula Krudy - Knight of the Cordon Bleu
Kenzaburo Oe - A Personal Matter

1st hand: Georg Buchner - Lenz (This is a birthday present for a friend)

Bloody hell, that Oe. It's very good but, oh god.

Its in a really pretty tuttle edition too. Looking fwd to it :-)

Really happy about the Krudy as well, that's as good a find as I'll have all year (quite a few Krudy books on Corvina, but I don't think the publisher exists anymore)

(I've probably banged on a bit about The Fifth Seal by Ferenc Santa, also on Corvina? Amazing book. Corvina was a Hungarian state publisher, I always assumed, but now I realise I have no particular basis for that assumption.)

Yeah, that was my impression too - maybe Soros need to get on top of that

I bought a couple of Zsigmond Móricz titles on Corvina last year, and found the first boring enough that I haven't troubled the second yet.

needed to pick up some Henry James:

What Maisie Knew
The Wings of the Dove
The Aspern Papers & The Spoils of Poynton

a couple Roald Dahl books for our kid:

Boy
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me

john cowper powys - a glastonbury romance

Bof. ^That's extraordinary. Read it in Fiji of all places.

have to admit the size of it is somewhat intimidating, though once i got stuck into wolf solent i sped through that so here's hoping (will also be reading it in the south pacific, if not in quite so warm climes)

All IN THe Downs Shirley Collins memoir. America Over The Water was a fantastic read so hope this is as good

need to read! just got hold of a copy of the documentary.

Gyula Krudy - Knight of the Cordon Bleu
How much did you pay? That goes for crazy money, sometimes

lol, really. I paid 3 quid for it.

"The End of the Novel of Love," Vivian Gornick

A couple of thrift store buys:

The Sicilian Vespers, Steven Runciman, Cambridge U. Press. It's a hardcover in good condition w/ dust jacket, a Book Club edition. $2.

Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton, New Directions paperback in good condition, $2. A small collection of his essays.

Some great 2nd hand finds:

Pavese - This Business of Living
Strindberg - Inferno/From an Occult Diary
Rilke - Selected Letters

^that strindberg is something i have to revisit

thomas bernhard - extinction
alfred döblin - a people betrayed
adolfo bioy casares - asleep in the sun

Kit Pearson, The Sky is Falling

"Reading Rilke," William H. Gass
"How Fiction Works," James Wood
"By Night in Chile," Roberto Bolaño
"Moravagine," Blaise Cendrars
"No Place on Earth," Christa Wolf
"In Patagonia" and "The Songlines," Bruce Chatwin
"The Years," Annie Ernaux
"Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius," Ray Monk
"The Avignon Quintet," Lawrence Durrell

a compilation of 3 Henry Miller texts from his centenary
& Rock and Roll Doctor by Mark Brent on Lowell George and Little Feat

Brecht - Poems Part Two 1929-1938
Brecht - Poems Part Three 1938-1956
Dezso KosztoLanyi - Anna Edes

Note to Londoners - Judd books had quite a few Hungarian books in their shelves last week when I picked up Anna Edes.

Well you're disqualified from borrowing my copy of Anna Edes now.

I am sure I will qualify to borrow something else from your Hungarian collection soon enough.

Dudes, if you are interested in Hungarian come over to Beszélsz magyarul?

Yesterday I ordered (through alibris) a used copy of the Everyman Library hardcover containing three novels of Penelope Fitzgerald: Offshore, Human Voices, and The Beginning of Spring, for $7.30, shipping included.

Today I took books to Powell's Books to sell. From the proceeds of selling about a dozen books, I was able to purchase these six books:

Doting, Henry Green, NYRB trade paperback, new (remaindered), $9.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor, used trade paperback, $3.

The Rise and Fall Athens: Nine Greek Lives, Plutarch, trans. Scott-Kilvert, used Penguin Classics, $2.

The Face of Battle, John Keegan, used trade paperback, $2.

Maigret Gets Angry, Georges Simenon, used trade paperback, $3.

The Hot Kid, Elmore leonard, used mass market paperback, $3.

Doting, the Fitzgeralds, Mrs Palfrey and the Simenon all great. The Hot Kid is disappointing--Leonard did seem to be running out of puff towards the end.

Mrs Palfrey is vg but made me v sad.

Bohemians by Dan Franck
a book on the Birth of Modern art in Paris in the early 20th century

Robert Plant A Life Paul Rees.
biography of midlands singer, like.

Didn't buy Johnny Rogan's Neil Young biography cos the pages were brown down the outside which looked very suspicious in a 2nd hand book. Shame want to read that.

2nd hand:

Tanizaki - A Man, A Cat and Two Women
The Psalms

1st Hand:

Dag Solstad - Armand V

I went a bit wild today and bought more books than I have in a single day for as long as I can recall. Used, of course. Cheap, relatively so. But I rarely buy more than three at a time. I guess it will be time to clear more space on my shelves and get rid of some dead weights.

Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust, the Kilmartin update of the Moncrieff translation, in 3 hardcover volumes published by Random House (1981), for $12 total. Approx. 3200 pp of languid fiction that I don't know when I can find the time for.

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym, used trade paperback, Penguin, $3.

Iceland's Bell, Halldor Laxness, used trade paperback, $4.

The Human Factor, Graham Greene, used Everyman hardcover, $3.

A Malgudi Omnibus: Sawmi and Friends, Bachelor of Arts, English Teacher, R. K. Narayan, used trade paperback, $4.

The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson, used trade paperback, $4.

The Dog of the South, Charles Portis, used trade paperback, $4.

The Siege of Krishnapur, J. G. Farrell, used NYRB paperback, $4.

The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macauley, used NYRB paperback, $2.

The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald, used trade paperback, $1.50.

I also bough some nice replacement copies of Herodotus and Thuycidides, in Penguin Classic editions, for $3 each, because my old copies were kind of bunged up.

Found a 2nd edition of CV Wedgwood's Kings Peace for £2, excited to read

Wow, Aimless, good haul

At a well-organized used bookstore before a movie, both in unread condition:

How Should a Person Be?, Sheila Heti, $8

O Pioneers!, Willa Cather, $5

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.