Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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...

2nd hand racks:

Italo Svevo - As a Man Grows Older
Haldor Laxness - The Fish can Sing
Antonio Tabucchi - Tristano Dies
Marie Darrieussecq - My Phantom Husband

i am finally reading tristram shandy (tho i bought it years ago)

Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker
Herman Melville - Moby Dick

Sold about 25 books at Powell's Books a couple of days ago, then came home with:

Five Tang Poets, David Young (translator), paperback, $7.95.
Less Than Angels, Barbara Pym, mass market paperback, $3.95.
At Freddie's, Penelope Fitzgerald, trade paperback, $4.95.
Froissart's Chronicles, used Penguin paperback, $1.
Fong and the Indians, Paul Theroux, used mass market, $1.

I went to Hay on Wye and now I am broken,broke and divorced.

Was trying to buy the new Henry Cow by Benjamin Piekut but it seems to be appearing on the 27th. is that a delay on the paperback

xp Read that as "Ham on Wye".

I think this has to be the be

Sold about 25 books at Powell's Books a couple of days ago, then came home with:

/Five Tang Poets/, David Young (translator), paperback, $7.95.
/Less Than Angels/, Barbara Pym, mass market paperback, $3.95.
/At Freddie's/, Penelope Fitzgerald, trade paperback, $4.95.
/Froissart's Chronicles/, used Penguin paperback, $1.
/Fong and the Indians/, Paul Theroux, used mass market, $1.

Picked up Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth from someone's stoop who was giving it away.

my recent finds (for the most part) skewing very much mid-twentieth century & english:

josephine tey - the franchise affair
elizabeth taylor - complete short stories
jocelyn brooke - the orchid trilogy
anthony powell - a dance to the music of time
william gerhardie - the polyglots

Dirk DeWachter: the art of buying unhappy

He’s awesome.

extremely late 19th century lately

- the portrait of a lady - h james
- sentimental education (in French!) - flaubert
- house of mirth (1905 ok, ok)

xpost Nice score on the Gerhardie, don't often see his books s/h (in the UK, anyway)

Broken Stars anthology
Lucia Berlin - A Manual for Cleaning Women
Arthur C. Clarke - The City and the Stars
Tomas Transtromer - The Great Enigma
I read some wonderful (translated) TT poems in a New Yorker essay, soon after he won the Nobel, and people who over here were saying Who is that man: he seemed like a true Transtromer, and thanks for reminding me to read some more.
Mean to finally catch up with The City and the Stars and Broken Stars too.
Berlin collection is one of my all-time-space fave raves: the way she places and shines a window between fiction and non-fiction, if there's any fiction in there at all---stuff I assumed she made up about her life turned out to be verified, but then again it's the telling, in any case. Coming from the way she experienced it: like she mentions the time and place out West frequented by her and a ripe bunch of other citizens (and others, maybe) of all ages, who would party all around bands that were like big ol' recombinant jukeboxes, reflecting the mix of the crowd, incl. moods and other tides--she never heard anything like the bands at this particular joint afterwards, until she got to New York and caught the Ornette Coleman Quartet.
Vachel Lindsay's poems seem better for performance than on the page, like a lot of Poe--VL was associated with the Chautauqua arts & entertainment circuit, I think--favorably mentioned by Allen Ginsberg, and good 'un by xpost Pere Ubu yeah.

"Better for performance than on the page," but then again you can hear them as you read them.

dow, were those kindle daily deals? i bought all those there.

Bought Fitting Pieces to The Jigsaw the book on Dr Strangely Strange cos I found out I could get a further discount on Book depositary stuff a couple of weeks back. Heard about it in either teh Monthly mainstream rock mags or Ugly THings a coupl eo fmonths back.
Quite like Kip of the Serenes and probably oughta have Heavy petting.

bought Buddy Guy autobiography and a biography of Sam Phillips on sunday.

Got a copy of the Marquis de sade book a couple of weeks ago in a mass purchase from a local 2nd hand/remainder shop's anniversary sale.
alongside a book on the 85 ways to tie a tie by Thoams Fink & Yong Mao
Cowboys & Indies the book on record companies by Gareth Murphy
The Vatican cellars by Andre Gide
The Big Oyster A Molluscular History of New York by Mark Kurlansky

THat is the Grove Press version of Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and other Writings to be specific

dow, were those kindle daily deals? i bought all those there.
No, these are the only kindle books I have (via free app on my laptop, but after using it for work I can't stand to read for pleasure on a screen, turns out):

Shots From The Hip: Notes From the Counterculture by Charles Shaar Murray (got it after reading interviews etc in mark s anthology A Hidden Landscape Once a Week: The Unruly Curiosity of the UK Music Press in the 1960s-80s, In the Words of Those Who Were There).
Atomsk by Carmichael (AKA Cordwainer) Smith (early Cold War thriller).
Sleep Donation by Karen Smith (contemporary speculative etc fiction; she's one of my favorites).

These are all ebook-only, apparently, so I hope I'll get to where I can stand to read for pleasure on a screen.