Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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.

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.