Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

The FitzGerald is very loose, but having read Borges wonderful essay on it, I'm OK with it being the version I have.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1951-borges-theenigmaofedwardfitzgerald.pdf

After publically stating on ILB my New Year resolution to read more books than I buy in 2020, today I bought copies of:

Maigret in Montmartre, Georges Simenon, used mass market paperback, $1.
The Bachelors, Muriel Spark, used trade paperback, $2.
An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym, used mass market paperback, $1.

Books I have finished so far in 2020: zero.

Not a good or worthy resolution tbh.

Just buy the books that’s half the fun

The Beautiful Ones the Prince cowrite.
It was 1/2 price in Waterstones.

Several other things that will come back to me later.

Kindle deals in the UK is currently a list a thousand books long what with Christmas. in the last week I've picked up

the owl service
the penelopiad
American gods (some 4 story compilation thing)

and rescued "the haunting of hill house" from my teenage bedroom

john cowper powys - maiden castle
jocelyn brooke - the image of a drawn sword
kenneth patchen - the journal of albion moonlight
rainer maria rilke - the notebooks of malte laurids brigge

a thing that will bring at least two of those books together (the Brooke and the JCP - I haven’t read the Patchen ) is John Ireland’s Mai Dun Symphonic Rhapsody.

Salvador Dali the Making of an Artist by Catherine Grenier. looks like a comprehensive book on the artist. Had it put away a few months ago.

Now got a Keith Morris memoir put aside and will collect it next week.

Been gifted by various ppl:

Edward Gibbon - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (the Abridged version)
Natalia Ginzburg - Happiness, as Such
Sadeq Hedayat - The Blind Owl
Victor Serge - Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Sappho - if not, Winter (tr. Anne Carson)
Joy Williams - Escapes

2nd hand find (some of these go months back)

Franz Kafka - Letter to Father
Linda Bostrom Knausgaard - The Helios Disaster
Vladimir Nabokov - Nikolai Gogol
Colette - Cheri

My last few. All second-hand except the Borges, which was a vacation souvenir. I'm going to learn to read Spanish I've decided.

Jorge Luis Borges - Inquisiciones/Otras inquisiciones
Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire
Saint Augustin (tr. Arnauld d’Andilly) – Confessions
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan – Comets
William Carter – Marcel Proust: A Life

re: ireland connections, interesting thanks. coincidentally it was mention in electric eden of his great literary inspiration machen that pointed me in his direction a number of years ago (though have not pursued his work to any great length thus far)

from a thing I wrote a long while ago:

The composer John Ireland loved Machen’s works. His Legend for Piano and Orchestra, with its beckoning, pastoral motif and discordant, sinister piano was dedicated to Machen and inspired by the vision on the Sussex Downs of children in white silently dancing near the site of an old leper colony, who vanished when he glanced momentarily away.

"Oh, so you’ve seen them too?"

was the slightly terse reply from Machen when Ireland wrote to him of the event.

Wandered into Oxfam books during my lunch break yesterday, had a look at an MP Shiel, but I can get that out of the library, did end up getting:

Gross's Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour textbook, which was standard for my A-level course
Fourth edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry - canon setting classroom standard anthology, usefully diverse.
Poesia Inglesa - vol 1 of the 'Obras de Fernando Pessoa', with facing page translations into the Portuguese.

Vernon Joynson A Potpourri of Of Melodies And Mayhem
the Latin America and canada volume of his extended work on psychedelia and prog etc. It grew out of being part of his Dreams, Fantasies and Nightmares from Far Away Lands which also covered the antipodes and Asia.
IT's in 2 sections one being all of South America grouped together instead of by individual countries and missing things like Gato Barbieri which I thought he might have included. That section is shorter than the Canadian one which I also found a bit surprising. But I guess there was less money or record company set up down there .
Anyway interesting find and i got it at a cut price.Does look like the book has been read and seems a little floppier than i would have expected from such a heavy book. Glad I got it though, somehow missed hearing about it despite getting the previous book by him which was the other one split off from “Dreams, Fantasies and Nightmares from Far Away Lands " and came out several months before this one.

I'd really like to know if his Short Sharp Shock to the System book on punk/postpunk etc etc was worth getting since I think it's a limited edition and every copy of it I've seen physically has been sealed in cellophane so i couldn't really look at it. Hope taht the standard of recent editions is what he is trying to keep up to, I heard the old punk book by him "Up Yours" wasn't as good as it could have been and regurgitated info from cd sleeves and stuff. Did used to find that his books from the early 00ies seemed to be a couple of years out of date by the time they were printed. In terms of what was and wasn't available on cd etc at least. But info technology is a lot better than it was then.
Anybody got it?

Yesterday I bought a used hardcover copy of Thomas Mann's tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers for $2. It's one Alfred has enthused about more than once on ILB, so naturally I had to nab it at that price. However, I see I am beginning to pile up a backlog of 1000+ page works waiting to be read (JaHB is 1200 pp, give or take). I need to think about tackling some of them.

Poesia Inglesa - vol 1 of the 'Obras de Fernando Pessoa', with facing page translations into the Portuguese.

You know, whenever I read Pessoa's english language stuff it reads like embarrassing attempts by someone who's not too good with the language, but as Pessoa was clearly more clever than I am I'm sure I'm wrong. Would love to hear what a native speaker has to say on the matter!

IT's in 2 sections one being all of South America grouped together instead of by individual countries and missing things like Gato Barbieri which I thought he might have included. That section is shorter than the Canadian one which I also found a bit surprising. But I guess there was less money or record company set up down there .

With all due respect to the Canadian psych scene, I find it hard to believe South America as a whole has less to offer. I have two books on Brazilian psych alone!

My wife got me the NYRB 2020 Book Club subscription for a present, so I guess I won't need to buy many books this year.

sold a bunch at skoob for:

Marcel Proust - Sodom & Gomorrah (I was re-reading this volume on a flight a few years ago and left it there so pleased to have the full set again)
Pierre Michon - Masters and Servants
Gerald Manley Hopkins - Poems and Prose
Hart Crane - Complete Poems
Colette - The Last of Cheri

Picked up:

Antonio Tabucchi - The Woman of Porto Pim
P.G. Wodehhouse - The Code of the Woosters
William Shakeapeare - The Sonnets

Pure reason
Girls will be girls - O’Toole
On aggression Lorenz
De Montaigne’s Essays

Found Stephen Morris' memoir Record play pause in a charity shop for 1eur today which was nioce.
Do love JOy Division so have read all the other memoirs so far i think.

A book on Greek mythology from the same charity shop

The Enduring Vision A History of the American peoples from another charity shop.

A book on Ubuntu cos I still haven't really got the grip of this installation of teh OS. Hope it gets me there

Went to a Deanery bookshop, which always has amazing stock and is ridiculously good value. They always seem to have a slew of Virago books so got two Elizabeth Taylor's I've not read (Palfrey and Lippincote's) and a Molly Keane (The Rising Tide).

I read a short story of Taylor’s this week - The Flypaper. Not exactly good but *very* unsettling

A copy of WCW's WHITE MULE that used to belong to another quite celebrated poet.

Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, used hardcover in an old (1962) Modern Library edition, very good condition, no dust jacket, $1. I bought this in order to re-read the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is included complete. The other selections are just a bonus.

The Highland Clearances, John Prebble, used Penguin trade paperback, very good condition, $1. Because it's good to recall that the poor always get handed the dirty end of the stick.

georges perec - three/53 days
morton feldman - give my regards to eighth street

WH Auden - Around the House
Seamus Heaney - Death of a Naturalist
Wallace Stevens - The Palm at the End of the Mind
Susan Cain - Quiet
Sylvie Simmons - I'm Your Man

Ciaran Carson - In the Light of (after Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud)
Marina Tsvetaeva - Select (tr. McDuff)
Juan Benet - A Meditation

thrift store purchases that should see me through the end of the world:

Gontran de Poncins - Kabloona
memoir by a French nobleman who traveled to the Arctic to live with an Inuit community in the late 1930s. nice looking Time Reading Program reprint, though the first edition has a more generous selection of photos

RW Spryszak - Edju
signed by the author: "thank you for letting Edju into your house"

Sacheverell Sitwell - Journey to the Ends of Time
I've dipped into this a bit and I'm still not sure what to make of it: part Sunday morning sermon, part art criticism, part morbid philosophical musings of a leisure class nonbeliever, part guided tour through setpieces/dreams/prose-paintings representing death and the afterlife? it looks like he wrote s(ach)everal other books in the same vein. can't help but type out this gem of a quote from the introduction:

It is my belief that I have informed myself of nearly all works of art in the known world. I cannot think that anything considerable is missing. Where I have not been in person, I have read and studied. I have heard most of the music of the world, and seen nearly all the paintings.

alright big man

Esther Perel-mating in captivity.

my first post-quarantine book purchase arrived today...

wrong movements: a robert wyatt history (michael king) - being a combined chronological oral biography/discography/session history with masses of archival photos, art & articles up to the early nineties + an unexpected bonus book!

The 13th Floor Elevators A Visual History
Paul Drummond's 2nd book on the subject. has some really great images in. Might get some of tehm printed up and stick them on a wall once the shops reopen.
Not read any of the text yet.

The sewing Machine Master Guide Clifford Blodget.
Great book on the workings of a sewing machine. Shows how it works and how to do simple fixes and things like timing and needle correction.
I thought my sewing machine had totally messedup at a time that I couldn't take it to a repair person. So thought I needed to teach myself.
I got it working a coupleo fdays later but now have this which is really useful. This plus loads of hours of hands on exeprience ought to lend to me knowing how to fix things.

Active Hope Joanna Macy.
I saw Demain a couple of months ago which talks about soime of her work.
Wanted to read some of it too. So hoping this is going to get here soon.

Mike Barnes A New Day Yesterday
Nice overview on prog in the UK.
MIght go out and pick up a few titles i don't have. Still not got any Egg unless you count Arzachel which you can't really . Also not got solo Steve Hillage.
Interesting read anyway.

Tony Allen Autobiography
Japanoise
2 books grabbed from the duke University press sale. Might go back for some more.

that elevators visual history looks nice. i did have a copy of drummond's eye mind but ended up giving it away mostly unread cos i'm not really sure i need to know all the voluminous 13fe related detail it went into... then again maybe i'll borrow it back sometime.

With all my favorite bookshops closed, of course I've turned to online ordering to feed my habit. I've tried to feed it as sparingly as possible, since I'm used to paying $3 or less for used books. I've put more than a dozen into my 'shopping carts' while browsing, but have not sprung for any beyond these:

The Complete Novels of Dawn Powell, in the two-volume hardcover edition published by Library of America, new, $27.50 (after discount). I've read about half her output and these will allow me to read the remainder.

A Maigret Trio: Maigret's Failure, Maigret in Society, Maigret and the Lazy Burglar, George Simenon, as a used hardcover w/o dust jacket, $6. Hasn't arrived, yet, but I'm looking forward to gulping these like oysters on the half shell. I hope it's mostly unmarked, cuz I hate markings anywhere past the inside cover and frontispiece.

I've got that threefer, posted about first two on previous What Are You Readings: very tasty individually, and go together well. Looking fwd to The Lazy Burglar.

I don’t need any new books, two decades of over-purchasing and under-reading has meant I have a pretty good lockdown library of stuff to read. That said, we have a kids bookshop on the road I’d like to support, and they also take adult orders, so I’m gonna pick up 4-5 Barbara Pyms, the Madness oral history, Dumas’s Women’s War, Harriet the Spy, Nancy’s Genius Plan board book, and a bunch for Virago things

Re: Virago - I wanted to pick up some Rose Macaulay and Barbara Comyns - recommendations gratefully accepted!

I like all Comyns's books; of the (I think) four VMCs the only one is hesitate to recommend is "Sisters By A River" because some people find its child-like tone a bit much iirc. I'd prob start with the Vet's Daughter but toy can't go wrong with The Skin Chairs or Our Spoons Came from Woolworths.

THe Selling Sound Diane Pecknold
book about how country music was shaped by commercial concerns etc

Birds of Fire Kevin Fellezs
book on jazz fusion. Have heard some varying reviews of this so hope it is pretty good.
THere were another load of books I might have grabbed if I had some more money. The Duke University Press sale ends today unless it gets a further extension.
Would have loved Slaves To Taste the book on Black Dandyism.

Site did seem to not be the best lay out for browsing easily and going in to check the blurb then step back to where you were on teh list left you with a dead connection which isn't great.
Looked like there were a load of very interesting books in there though.

The Selling Sound is really good.

great, I wondered. Did hear it was pretty good for information but th ewriting might be a bit taxing or something. BUt looking forward to reading it.
Not sure how long it'll take to get here. Previous purchase hasn't appeared yet.

Pier Paolo Pasolini - Roman Poems
Simone Weil - Anthology
The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1920-24 (vol.2) (these are the years where she wrote Mrs Dalloway and was reading Joyce and Proust so it should be a banger)

I bought a physical copy of The Pendragon Legend (1934) by Antal Szerb, described as combination of romance, class comedy, ghost story and murder mystery -- a mix that made me curious. Translated by Len Rix who also did Magda Szabo's The Door.

Superior by Angela Saini
saw the online launch of this a couple of weeks ago.
Thought it sounded interesting, the return of scientific racism or that is racism getting a pseudo scientific backing from sources taht really shouldn't be supporting such tosh.
Haven't got it yet but looking forward to reading it.
A return to things like Eugenics that were putting forth an idea of some races needing to be controlled more athn others whic was BS at the time but too widely believed and policy influencing and directing in too many places.

Antal Szerb was an absolute gem

Maria Gabriel Llansol - The Geography of Rebels Trilogy
Pontoppidan - Lucky Per (this is an incredible find for 3 quid lol)
Robert Musil - Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
Ciaran Carson - The Star Factory
Juan Jose Saer - La Grande (great to finally have my own copy of this masterpiece!)

In a fit of despair-induced shopping the other night, I utilized a tip from a friend an went on the very clunky Powell's Books website and found some gems for next to nothing, including:

Norma Cole- Do the Monkey <--- Cole has become one of my favorite poets and translators over the past year, she's incredible
Bruce Andrews- Corona <--- signed copy, from an edition of 300, goes for 10-15 times what I paid for it elsewhere
Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian- Wide Road <--- an experimental novella that I've never even *seen* a copy of, which goes for 10 times what I paid.

Basically, if you can deal with the clunkiness of it, it's worth checking out the Powell's site, as you can get some real deals. Why? Well, they stopped selling through both Abe and Amazon, so one of the only ways to get at their huge warehoused catalog of used books is by ordering through their website. Since the workers there don't give a shit about some of these names and don't know what they're shelving, there's a lot of great stuff that's extraordinarily cheap.

Those three books I mentioned? I could have easily paid $100-$150 bucks for them elsewhere....but I paid $21 including shipping.

from the last two months

ebooks, mostly kindle daily deals
Tim Weiner - Legacy of Ashes
Rick Perlstein - Before the Storm
Sjowall & Wahloo - The Abominable Man
Vonnegut - Player Piano
Mark Dunn - Ella Minnow Pea
Emma Viskic - Resurrection Bay
Betty Edwards - Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction
Loren Eiseley - The Unexpected Universe
El Sandifer - Tardis Eruditorum Volume 8 kickstarter/preorder

physical, from bookoutlet.com
Angie Thomas - The Hate U Give
Margot Lee Shetterly - Hidden Figures
Sjowall & Wahloo - The Locked Room
Masako Togawa - The Lady Killer
Hesse - Steppenwolf
Chia-Chia Lin - The Unpassing

local library
Jason Lutes - Berlin

Hey book buyers, a few of us including JM and me have been doing this: can you fill in any of our Harvill Leopard gaps?

https://300oddleopards.wordpress.com

Current gaps / queries: 33, 76, 176, 196, 249, 284, 288, 289, 294, 298.

1491 Charles C Mann
I think I bought the UK version from 2006 cos it was cheaper. Hope I'm not going to find out that the more recent US 2nd edition is heavily updated or anything.
Couldn't see anything said anywhere.
Anyway attempt to revise supposed understanding of the Americas before Columbus as not having civilisations across it. Showing instead that people were thriving and 1492 was a point of disruption not discovery.so 1491 or whatever it would be in the native calendar was just another year or at least one without a European influence.
Book hasn't arrived yet so looking forward to reading it. Bought partially because I was looking for equivalents to the below for the Americas and Africa.

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe
Is a book that was recommended to me on a few webinars when I had mentioned native land stewardship after hearing presentations on Native American influence on their environment.
Interesting overview of what a settled population of aborigines had cultivated in terms of agriculture and aquaculture . & what early European explorers actually saw in the 19th century before European influence erased large parts of it.
Also what effect a mislabeling of aborigine culture has meant in terms of rights. A nomadic hunter gatherer society is still seen to have less right to traditional lands than a settled people so that is useful in a racist establishment's treatment of a displaced population.

Who is JM?