Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

table!

Hi. I'm trying to wean myself off Facebook and start posting here again.

I work at a university now so have professor borrowing privileges at the library, but still buy a lot of books. Recent purchases:
- Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot
- Grenade in Mouth by Miyo Vestrini (trans. Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig)
- a collection of Said essays
- Pet Sounds by Stephanie Young

The TatumO'Neal bio. I want to know how much of qn asshole her dad was/is.

Today I bought:

Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein's Barry Goldwater book, used paper back, good condition, $2. This will probably be the next book I read.

Burr, Gore Vidal, used mass market paperback, fifty cents. Last read this two decades ago. I'll probably revisit it before 2020.

Salute to Adventurers, John Buchan, used hardcover, a 1949 reprint of a 1915 novel, $1. Buchan was an originator of the modern espionage novel. This might be good. Who knows?

Simon Schama The Story of the Jews
Looked interesting and goes from ancient history 10000 BC to renaissance 1492. Not read it yet so assuming must be some connection to significance of that date or is it when the Spanish king expelled everybody of the faith.

Max Tegmak Our Mathematical Universe
I enjoyed Alex Bellos Alex In Numberland enough to pick up its sequel.
& I think this is similar from a different author so perspective also a little changed.

Fuzzy Thinking Bart Kozko
Book on fuzzy logic which I have been wanting to read about since reading about Lotfi Zadeh in George Lakoff's book on categories years ago.

xpost: not sure i've even heard of that buchan before, looks to be an historical work rather than his more usual fare?

some 2nd hand finds:

ed sanders - peace eye
bs johnson - travelling people
tom phillips - a humument: a treated victorian novel

Glam the Performance of Style edited by Darren Pih
collection of essays tied in to an exhibition in Liverpool.Interesting philosophical/sociological stuff. I like Glamn so have several books on aspects of it.

Black Power Revolt edited by Floyd B.Barbour
1968 set of essays on Black Power. looks to be in pretty good state for something I picked up for €1 in a charity shop. So thought it might be a reprint but it only says 1968 in the front.

Was introduced to the fab secondhand Bookmongers in Brixton yesterday - I wish I could have carried more back up with me:

Diaries and Letters 1939-1945 - Harold Nicolson (hardcopy £6)
Diaries and Letters 1945-1962 - Harold Nicolson (hardcopy £6)
Edited diaries and the odd letter of diplomat and MP Harold Nicolson (husband of Vita Sackville-West).

I didn't realise that there was a 1930-1939 volume but I suppose it has been more exciting to jump straight into the War years. Nearly halfway through the first - it's mainly been interesting stuff on the day-to-day British understanding of the war as it developed - offering insight on the average person and of one slightly more in the know (but only slightly). The footnotes (by his son, Nigel) do a great job of explaining what in reality was happening at various points in time compared to what the public/backbenchers thought was happening.

The Fight - Norman Mailer (hardcopy £4)
Covering "The Rumble in the Jungle" which I don't know much about. I don't care that much for watching boxing but I've found myself often stuck in boxing history wikiholes so I'm looking forward to this.

Italian Cinema - Mary P. Wood (paperback £6)
Figured I would immerse myself a bit more after falling heavily in the last few months for Antonioni and Fellini.

Movies and Methods (vol. 1) - Edited by Bill Nichols (paperback £4)
Appears to be a varied collection of essays on film theory and criticism worth a flick through.

Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry - Gordon Bowker (paperback £4)
Seems pretty weighty for a two book author but I really loved the Kenneth Macmillan biog I read recently and this seems in a similar vein.

Was introduced to the fab secondhand Bookmongers in Brixton yesterday

ah my local!

Sheridan Le Fanu In A Glass Darkly
I read some of his stuff about 10 years ago. Enjoyed it but I think never finished all of it. This turned up in a charity shop today so thought I'd get some more.

Reading In A Glass Darkly for me was like being in a Calvino novel. The first copy I bought was the OUP edition, and it was misbound, with 48p missing and 48 repeated. Desperate to keep reading, the only other copy i could quickly buy was a cheapo Wordsworth Classic edition, which was so full of OCR errors that it was unreadable. So I had to buy a THIRD copy, which was included in this vast and unwieldy omnibus of Irish ghost stories, but at least I could finish it.

It was good, though.

ha, my oxford world's classic edition suddenly turns into walden... which was somewhat jarring!

"The Reluctant Fundamentalist" - Mohsin Hamid
"Dino" - Nick Tosches
"The Chapo Guide to Revolution"

Le Fanu is the Wordsworth edition, not looked at it much yet. So not seen the errors.

purchased over the last two months (have to boot into windows specially to download these)

Adrian_Tchaikovsky_Ironclads.epub
John_Wyndham_The_Kraken_Wakes.epub
R_A_Lafferty_Nine_Hundred_Grandmothers.epub
Chris_Packham_Fingers_in_the_Sparkle_Jar.epub
Neal_Stephenson_Reamde.epub
Margaret_Atwood_Hag_Seed.epub
Jennifer_Clement_Widow_Basquiat.epub
Patrick_deWitt_The_Sisters_Brothers.epub
Ian_Rankin_In_a_House_of_Lies.epub

1st hand: Pasternak, Rilke, Tsvetaeva - Letters: Summer 1926

2nd hand: Machado De Assis - Quincas Borba
Osip Mandesltam - Selected (tr. David McDuff)
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o - Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Landscape in African Literature
Abdellaf Laabi - The Bottom of the Jar
Jose Saramago - Blindness
Kingsley Amis - Ending Up
Yuko Tsushima - Territory of Light

A history of Immediate Records from a charity shop.

The Jorma Kaukonen memoir Been So Long which I'm waiting to arrive.

A DK book on nutrition

The Jorma Kaukonen memoir Been So Long which I'm waiting to arrive.

I'm reorganising my books, which is causing stuff to pop up i forgot i had and never looked at*: for example the 200 best novels in english since 1950, carmen callil and colm tóibín (1999)

*maybe this shd be a different thread tho

copped a first edition of Tough Trip Through Paradise

Test

What books have you purchased lately? What books HAVEN'T I purchased lately? Help me.

I only read 2 books last month, but I bought all of these:

tree books
Matsumoto, Masahiko - Cigarette Girl
Mossfegh - Eileen
Harper Lee - Go Set a Watchman

ebooks
Broken Stars anthology
Lucia Berlin - A Manual for Cleaning Women
Arthur C. Clarke - The City and the Stars
Tomas Transtromer - The Great Enigma
a humble bundle that had a particle physics textbook in it that looked interesting

audiobooks
The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle
Alec Nevala-Lee - Astounding

i have an ikea bookcase filled with unread books.

Short intro to zee Fwench Revolution

spent an hour or so at the annual 24 hr booksale here & walked away with the following for a grand total of $15:

e.r. eddison - the worm ouroboros
charles maturin - melmoth the wanderer
diderot - jacques the fatalist
diderot - rameau's nephew/d'alembert's dream
christina stead - seven poor men of sydney
marina warner - monuments and maidens
alex callinicos - against postmodernism: a marxist critique
jack murray - landscapes of alienation: ideological subversion in kafka, celine, & onetti
julian symons - makers of the new: the revolution in literature 1912-1939
wyndham lewis - the essential wyndham lewis
d.h. lawrence - studies in classic american literature
roger shattuck - the banquet years: origins of the avant-garde in france
philippe jullian - dreamers of decadence: symbolist painters of the 1890s
john ashbery - reported sightings: art chronicles 1957-1987
mario bussagli - bosch: life & works

all book covers really are the same now

https://aux.avclub.com/under-the-radar-underrated-or-simply-missed-7-books-1835282240

Ha

Roadside Picnic. It’s fantastic.

Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens ($5, hardcover)

the other day I picked up a copy of The Westing Game because I somehow don't have one right now and then I saw Sheila Heti's Motherhood is out in paperback now so I got that too.

I've got a copy of Peter Higgins' Wolfhound Empire coming in the mail today, psyched to revisit it.

Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad is en route, though I'm annoyed at how reviews keep referring to it (written before Life and Fate) as a "prequel".

A couple of cheap used bookstore purchases:

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963, Taylor Branch, a paperback in like new condition, $4. Some 900+ pages of stirring, inspiring, infuriating history. It's ground that needs to be visited and revisited until we get it right.

The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermout, a NYRB Classic paperback in like new condition, $3. I generally trust NYRB to print things I want to read. The title reference to the Tao-Teh-Ch'ing helps to coax my interest, too.

Got Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s (Bojack Horseman creator) book of short stories, gonna crack it over the July 4th weekend

Wolfhound Empire is wonderful. I just finished his latest book, Dragon Heart, which sadly was just ooooookay.

An early hardcover copy of Colonel Sun, Kingsley Amis's Bond novel, $2

2nd hand finds:

Wolfgang Hilbig - The Tidings of the Trees
Horacio Castellanos Moya - Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in El Salvador
Border Districts - Gerald Murnane
Yasunari Kawabata - Thousand Cranes
Yasunari Kawabata - The Old Capital (both of these Kawabata's are in the classic Tuttle covers)
Ovid - Metamorpheses (tr. Arthur Golding)

Fuck me, that's a good haul

Love Kawabata. Often unfairly overshadowed by his deranged protegé.

Amy Schumer The Girl with The Lower Back Tattoo, was €1 in a charity shop so I thought it might be worth a shot.

The Body Shop book same price same charity shop. 70s or 80s healthy advice stuff thought it might be some good.

Christopher Hitchens Arguably
Compilation of various short pieces

THe treasured THangkas in Yonghegong Palace
a book with reproductions of a load of buddhist i9mages from Tibet. Some of it is quit ebeautiful but it is a bit small since it is an A4 book and i Assume the original images are much much bigger.

A History of Irish Thought Thomas Duddy.
book by a NUIG Philosophy lecturer who I was taught by. I think I may have already gtot a copy of this when it first came out but it appeared for €1 in a charity shop.

got a few other bits and pieces over the last few weeks too.

Not a purchase per se, but for xmas last year I was lucky to receive a Galley Beggar annual subscription. Their first book of the year arrived yesterday: "Ducks, Newburyport" by Lucy Ellmann. It seems to have some long sentences in it. I am thinking in particular of the sentence that runs from page twelve to page nine hundred and ninety eight, the others (found on pages eleven and twelve) seem less unusual in their length.

I am looking forward it and feeling daunted by it in roughly equal measure.

not long enough

…preordered (out in September in USA)

bought murmur by will eaves on yalls recommendation

I used to love Lucy Ellmann and then she suddenly started writing books HALF OF THEM IN HYSTERICAL CAPITAL LETTERS AND DELIBERATELY FUCKING WITH REALISM IN A WAY THAT WAS IRRITATING RATHER THAN CLEVER

Theatatus, Plato, used Penguins Classics paperback, 99 cents.

finally bought guns germs and steel and it's mainly irritating in ways i can't quite define

also reading Don Quijote for the first time since a teenager and it's amazing. half the stories i didn't remember and the other half I'm seeing entirely new details in. i love how so many of the stories use reported speech - it's a lot of tell-not-show, but the effect, slightly distancing, makes it effortlessly comic, your mind filling in all the blanks. i know there have been some doomed movie versions but genuinely surprised there haven't been more.