Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

Jesse locke some Heavy Metalloid Music
Simply Saucer biography
finally found this available from Book Depositry so cheaper tahn going staright to the publisher. Think it was reprinted last August or something.

Couple of books on Aubrey Beardsley.
Amazon could do with getting its categorisation and differentiation of product better sorted. I bought what I thought was the hardcover of a V&A related book on his work only to find out it was a different thing, a biography. Both had the same title since it's his name. & both were going pretty cheap <£1 for one and slightly over £2 for the other plus p+p so hopefully got some good stuff to look at shortly.

The Naked Man Dennis Morris' book on the male body I already have his the Naked Woman companion volume on the femnale body which I picked up in a charity shop a couple of years ago.

The Hustler Walter Tevis.
Had been thinking about him being the writer of both the Man Who fell To Earth and the Color of Money the day before since there wasa Bowie biography or repeat of a programme on people who died in 2016. Can't remember exactly which since both have been on over the last few days. & this is the book that Color of Money was the sequel to.

latest edition of Ugly Things, not quite a book but almost full enough of info to be. Hopefully be here over the next couple of days.

The Look Inside thing is often useful, if available. Sometimes you get a good chunk of the book, but sometimes you get only the copyright pages.

(Was useful to me yesterday for seeing which translation of Les Miserables they were using for the TV tie-in edition. Turns out it's the new version which is available for £3 less in another edition, you're paying £3 for a worse cover and a single page of introduction by the TV writer)

This had both options under the same entry but it was a different book of the same title if you chose hardback or paperback.

Actually, said that wrong. The page that the book was advertised on seemed to apply to the V&A exhibition tie in by Stephen Calloway.
But if you chose hardback in marketplace and then pressed Return to Product information an option in the top left hand corner of the marketplace page it showed the biography by David Colvin.
I've just had another look at this and they've sorted it out so that both are Stephen calloway. Will see what arrives when it arrives now. Maybe I'll have 2 different books and maybe I'll have a spare copy of the other format of the same thing.
BUt seemed to be a glitch tied in with previous experience of looking through the site. THough that may be more trying to work out details of specific details of specific issues of music or printruns of the same book at different times and finding that all the reviews etc show for every release under the same title. Particularly annoying when publishers/record company have stuck out anthologies under the names of existing lps/books.

So now got to wait until presumably later this week to see what arrives. ho hum.
I think other websites use specific product numbering so you know what pressing you get.

Also got the Max hastings history of Vietnam since it was in a half price sale locally.
Had seen it in Waterstones over Xmas and thought about getting it. So grabbed it when i got the chance once i got home..

Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
Bunch - Moderan
coincidentally, these both have forewords by jeff vandermeer.

Heinlein - Starship Troopers
checked out a new used bookstore -- this was all i found. $2.

Big Book of Ghost Stories
got this for christmas. it's one of those phonebooks edited by otto penzler. looks good.

Donald Barthelme - 60 Stories and 40 Stories
microfiction seems to be the only stuff i can finish as of late.

Bunch - Moderan

just read this last month, curious what you make of it

Mike McCormack - Solar Bones
Peter Biskind - The Sky is Falling

alan burns - dreamerika!
ann quin - the unmapped country

Today at Open Books, a poetry bookstore in Seattle

Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems
Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Christopher Logue, War Music
Donika Kelly, Bestiary

I am buying (and reading) all the Devil Advocates books. Now it'll be ab The Shining. Yay

Adam, Starship Troopers is awesome! Very different from the movie.

The book on which The Thing was based. Yay

I somehow (not by design) managed to read/see “who goes there”, the thing from another world and the thing in the order they were produced, with many years in between each. So I dimly remember enjoying the story but I didn’t then have the carpenter film to compare it to (only saw the film for the first time a couple of years ago, it’s great obv)

dreamerika is killer

Xpost woha! I'm sort of going through books made into movies by Hitchcock (and also the devils advocates series). Need some pat Highsmith(?) too!

Colette - Gigi and The Cat
Pushkin - The Tales of Belkin (good score except the student prick underlined the intro for his assignment)
Faulkner - As I Lay Dying (ashamed of my struggles but this should be good)
Coetzee - The Life and Times of Michael K.
Jose Saramago - Cain
Jose Saramago - All the Names
Juan Goytisolo - The Blind Rider
Juan Goytisolo - Count Julian
Jane Austen - Mansfield Park

1st Hand:
Bruno Schulz - Collected Stories

Is that the new collected Schulz with the previously uncollected stuff?

Yeah the new one. Want to get to it soon, have high expectations.

No idea what I'm doing anymore:

Rachel Cusk - Outline
Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (bought it because of the BBC adaptation cover) *
Henry James - Wings of the Dove (has the Merchant/Ivory crowd on the cover, and there are a number of stills from the film in the middle of the book lol) *
Gottfried Benn - Selected Poems and Prose
Erich Auerbach - Dante: Poet of the Secular World

* these are insane buys, lord help to read them.

two orders from a remaindered books e-store

Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
Lipsyte - Home Land
Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange
Bibliomysteries: Stories of crime in the world of books and bookstores
Stream System - The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane
Le Guin - The Word for World is Forest
Jansson - Comet in Moominland
some crosswords and batman comics

You guys ride for Christopher priest inverted world right? picked it up at the shop last week bc i thought it sounded familiar. hilarious 70s édition where cover is naked amazonesque ladies walking up a mountain to an enormous glowing orb

This is one of my fave 70s SF paperback covers:

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1264395115i/2208886._UY475_SS475_.jpg

Never seen a copy of that book. Did manage to get his second novel out of the library though.

Yes, flopson, Inverted World has a number of fans on this borad.

nice :)

Today I mostly sold books, but in doing so I picked up a used (very good) hardcover copy of 2666, Roberto Bolano, for $16.95. I read it several years ago from a public library copy and I finally decided to add it to my not-exactly-permanent collection.

Aside from it I also bought a $1 copy of Alan Watts' autobiography, In My Own Way, another book I've read in the past. It forms an interesting contrast to the ever-so-earnest autobiography of Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, which I re-read in 2017.

My Indoctrinaire has a wince-inducing close-up of someone being injected in the eyeball

^pvmic!

also, still on the fence about reading his latest

Aside from it I also bought a $1 copy of Alan Watts' autobiography, /In My Own Way/, another book I've read in the past.

Mordecai Richler - St. Urbain's Horseman
Alice Walker - The Color Purple

also, still on the fence about reading his latest

Have read his latest, couldn't recommend. The plot is straight up WTC conspiracy theory, the "near future" post-brexit world he paints is pretty clunky. I do think Priest has gone way off the boil in old age. Which is not to take anything away from his past glories - The Affirmation is the key work for me.

Ordered The Tribe. 7 euros. Hurrah. Cldnt get it on kindle. So ordered sec hand.

50% off sale at a local 2nd hand bookshop, so:

elizabeth taylor - palladian
elizabeth bowen - to the north
sylvia townsend warner - selected stories
claud cockburn - beat the devil
dashiell hammett - the continental op
jp donleavy - the history of the ginger man

& from elsewhere:

knut hamsun - look back on happiness
alfred kubin - dance of death & other drawings

her Body & Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
Rebel Footprints, David Rosenberg
The Year Of Reading Dangerously, Andy Miller
The Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories
The Story Of A New Name, Elena Ferrante
Ealing Studios, Charles Barr

Good haul

The Machado book is great, and she's a lovely human