Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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.

Yesterday I picked up a used paperback copy of Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald for $1.50. It's unmarked and in good readable shape. When I bailed out of Vertigo earlier this year, many ILBers said Austerlitz was the one to read. Now I can test that theory, some time or other.

Went to an exhibition in the local art college as part of the Arts Festival found they had a trolley of Free books that they had withdrawn from the library there.
So not bought but acquired

Cutting Room Floor Movie Scenes which never made it to the Screen Laurent Bouzereau

The Film Editing Room Handbook third edition Norman Hollyn

Print The Legend Photography and The American West Martha A Sandweiss

The Archaeology of Knowledge The Discourse on language Michel foucault.

haven't really looked at them much yet. Was pretty busy with things today.

Krakatoa The Day The World Exploded Simon Winchester

The Establishment and How They Get Away With It Owen Jones

The Blessings Of A Good Thick Skirt Women Travellers and Their World Mary Russell
think I may have heard of this, but subject matter looks interesting anyway. Not really looked at it to see exactly what time period it covers assume it's 18th, 19th centuries maybe longer.

Nopt really had a look at any of these so far. But look interesting.

Sold a bunch for:

Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alexander Pope - Selected
Ursula Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness

I'm going to have to sell a bunch soon. Shelves are getting crowded. But today I went to a charity shop where I bought:

Ferdydurke, Witold Gombrowicz, used paperback like-new, $4. This has been name-checked so often on ILB I figured it had to go home with me so I could check it out.

Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky, (the Pevear/Volokohnsky translation) used paperback, very good, $3. They are Dostoevsky specialists and I like their work. Been playing around for a couple of years with the idea of reading this again.

Collected Poems, Vachel Lindsay, 1941 hardcover edition, no dust jacket, unmarked, in very good condition, $3. I'm not his biggest fan. He was bruited as an 'authentic American primitive' by people like Carl Sandburg, but is he a good poet? Not especially, but I'd like to browse this one a bit to see if it stays or goes.

The name Vachel Lindsay appears a dozen times in The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, trying to remember which section in particular struck me when I was reading it last year. Think it was something to do with Robert Frost.

found a lovely paperback of antal szerb's the pendragon legend, with what i believe are called, er, "french flaps". so far it's quite gentle, erudite and funny. terrific translation, you'd never know.

Pere Ubu the Scrapbook
blooming nice collectio9n of press reprints lyrics and things.
do wish somebody would write a full biography dedicated to them and covering the Cleveland scene. But thi sis a nice thing to have.

pleasingly one of pere ubu's songs is based on a vachel lindsey poem (=the voice of the sand)

This is the voice of sand
The sailors understand
There is far more sea than sand
There is far more sea than land
Yo ho yo ho yo ho (ho)

Now if we could only discover Vachel Lindsay's connection to Kevin Bacon...