Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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?

I have bought, very cheap:

Diarmid Ferriter: A NATION NOT A RABBLE
Ian McEwan: ON CHESIL BEACH
Gail Honeyman: ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE

jM is me

So you and Tim H. have made that website that he linked to?

Tim did all the work, I just contributed some data.

I am Damo Suzuki
which was 1/2 price on Book Depository yesterday.
I've been meaning to buy it since it came out.

I did a curbside pickup of three used books from my local Friends of Library bookstore and I ordered a used book from a Goodwill in Colorado, via Amazon. All are paperbacks, hopefully in readable condition.

The Fish Can Sing, Halldor Laxness, $6.30.
Living, Loving, Party Going, Henry Green, $3.
Crampton Hodnet: A Novel, Barbara Pym, $2.
Civil to Strangers, Barbara Pym (stories), $2.

I heartily recommend bookfinder for all used book purchases.

Also, I might have mentioned it above, but there are loads of rare and inaccurately priced books in the Powell's warehouses, searching their site is clunky but one can find some deals.

just for informational purposes, bookfinder.com is owned by Amazon.

As is every single worthwhile used book emporium online.

It's also one of the best ways to get money into the hands of small booksellers. If people don't want to use it because the site infrastructure is owned by Amazon, that's fine, but pretty shitty praxis

when I can deal directly with a local used bookstore, that seems far preferable to using a service where Amazon gets a cut. when I can't deal direct, I am content to buy used from small bookshops nationwide through Amazon's online services.

Oh, it's just that all the stores in Philly are shit, and so to get decent used books I need to go to a different state or order online. If you live in a place with a good used bookstore that's still open, more power to you.

If I lived in Northampton or New Haven, I'd be at Grey Matter every goddamn day.

Just as a side note, are other country's Amazons, the US aside, as shitty as the Australian one? I rarely buy from them unless there's no other choice but they are also routinely more expensive than other online shops and books even from major publishers (Penguin Random House etc) are frequently "available in 1-2 months", which seems fairly much bullshit. Plus they had Prime Day and the "amazing deals" were things like infinitesimally cheaper Wordsworth Classics and $5 remaindered sticker books.

Bookfinder is also not great here, as it'll tell you a book will cost you, say $15 Australian and when you actually click through it's routinely several dollars more.

Basically, how did this empire of crap deals and non-availability conquer the world.

Acquisitions! Amazon purchased Abe in 2008, and the latter had purchased bookfinder a few years prior to that. Bookfinder does work well here in the states, not sure why it wouldn't work well elsewhere.

around a third of the internet runs on amazon web services. no ethical consumption under capitalism.

Do wish Book Depositary wasn't them.
Cos it does seem to get most things reasonably cheaply and free p+p .
So then could escape guilt of buying from Amazon, like.

But the point is that a lot of times on Bookfinder you're not actually buying from Amazon! You're buying from small booksellers and shops who lost through Abe, and who rely on that income to keep their businesses afloat. Of course it sucks, but if Abe and Bookfinder didn't exist, half the booksellers in the US would go out of business tomorrow.

G.K. Chesterton - The Best of Father Brown
Adelbert Von Chamisso - Peter Schlemihl
William Shakespeare - Hamlet
Ann Quin - The Unmapped Country
G.K. Chesterton - Robert Browning
Junichiro Tanizaki - The Makioka Sisters
The Metaphysical Poems (selected and ed. Helen Gardner)

another bookoutlet haul. I'm on a 20th century history kick.

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
How Democracies Die

I dipped into my local Friends of Library charity used bookshop once again, mostly looking for innocuous, but acceptable, non-fiction distractions. I never have a sufficient supply of moderately interesting non-fic on hand. I came up with:

The Monkey's Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life, Alan de Queiroz, hardcover, $3.

Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics, George Johnson, harcover, ex-libris, $2.

Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, Michael Ruhlman, hardcover, $3.

The Doctor is Sick, Anthony Burgess, trade paperback, $2.

The Stories of Muriel Spark, hardcover, $2.

I also ordered through Amazon: Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions, Ursula K. LeGuin, new trade paperback, $12.50.

The World's War by David Olusoga
turned up reduced in the main Easons in town a couple of days after I sawa webinar on colonial troops in the first world war . Assume it must just be coincidence cos webinar can't have been known about and book was 2014. Poppy day is November init.
NOt got very far into it so far but looks like it should be interesting and have enjoyed other things by Olusoga.

Bop Apocalypse Martin Trogoff
Seen this around for a while, wanted to grab something from the local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop before it closed down for lockdown.
It's about drugs, beats and bebop so should be good.
Read the introduction and possibly first chapter seems to start good anyway.

JOhn Keegan The American Civil War
was 1Eur in a charity shop and I want to read a book on th ewar. This is by a military historian who is respected for other books he's written. haven't read it yet. hope its ok, may need to look at Shelby Foote or soemthing.

Gideon Rachman Zero Sum World.
Overview of the last few years might be interesting another 1Euro book fro charity shop.

The Penguin Guide to 20th Century protest
anthology of entries fro across the 20th century on the subject of protest

don't look at Shelby Foote

Foote's massive history is very good and comprehensive in terms of the factual narrative and it covers even the more obscure and remote battles in the west, but he very definitely was captured by the romantic mirage of 'the gallant South's glory and heroism in the face of long odds'. If you read him, you'll have to constantly filter out the rosy glow of admiration he casts over such reprobates as Nathan Bedford Forrest and Stonewall Jackson.

right, probably not going to be looking at that in a while. Who's good then?
I just remember him as being the guy behind the tv thing I watched a couple of decades ago.

Not sure how much detail I really want to know anyway. Would just like to know a bit more about it since its a war I've semi known about for years and i like the clothing from the time.

Art the Ultimate Visual Guide
coffee table overview of Art over about a millenium. NOt sure how good it is as a canonical work but I think I might learn a thing or 2 fro it. I missed the same book in the same charity shop a couple of years ago cos I thought it would probably still be there if I went off to get cash to pay for it so had been hoping to get a copy ever since.
NOw got it so I can like totallyu neglect it

Grim Humour HIghlights and Lowlights 1983-87
anthology of a Herne Bay based fanzine fro the mid 80s that I knew some of the people involved in. I thought i was given a dedication to in the edition i had a copy of from the time, now not so sure.
Anyway quite nice to have the collected editions

who's good then? I've heard good things about James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, which is in the Oxford History of the United States series and won the Pulitzer--skimmed it at library and saw lots and lots of footnotes, so whatever he says, whatever his take or attitude, he's got plenty of back-up at least.
From publisher's description:
Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, Battle Cry of Freedom will unquestionably become the standard one-volume history of the Civil War.

James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. Packed with drama and analytical insight, the book vividly recounts the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War--the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry--and then moves into a masterful chronicle of the war itself--the battles, the strategic maneuvering on both sides, the politics, and the personalities. Particularly notable are McPherson's new views on such matters as the slavery expansion issue in the 1850s, the origins of the Republican Party, the causes of secession, internal dissent and anti-war opposition in the North and the South, and the reasons for the Union's victory.

The book's title refers to the sentiments that informed both the Northern and Southern views of the conflict: the South seceded in the name of that freedom of self-determination and self-government for which their fathers had fought in 1776, while the North stood fast in defense of the Union founded by those fathers as the bulwark of American liberty. Eventually, the North had to grapple with the underlying cause of the war--slavery--and adopt a policy of emancipation as a second war aim. This "new birth of freedom," as Lincoln called it, constitutes the proudest legacy of America's bloodiest conflict.

This authoritative volume makes sense of that vast and confusing "second American Revolution" we call the Civil War, a war that transformed a nation and expanded our heritage of liberty. First published in '03, so affordable second-hand copies should be around.

Glen Sweeneys Alchemies
Book on the Third Ear Band taht I grabbed from Reccommended.
Having troble connecting with an account i had there f0or years.,
But this looks good.

Meet Me in the Bathroom
Book on New York based music in the early 21st century. THought I'd grab it when I saw it.
Think people were saying it was good when it came out.

wow, gonna have to get a copy of the 3eb book if only for the accompanying cd of pre-macbeth tracks!

recently picked up 4 of the sjöwall/wahlöö martin beck novels + 9 x simenon green penguins

Hadn't heard of the Simenon (or any other) Green Penguins, what'd you get?

all maigret's excepting the last:

m mystified
my friend m
m meets a milord
m at the cross roads
m in court
m's memoirs
m & the burglar's wife
to any lengths
the hatter's ghosts

a couple are the old school horizontal banded ones, the rest from the slighty more exciting early to mid sixties period, for example... i notice one even uses a chris marker photographic collage.

Wowwww---did you make that image of so many covers? Amazing to magnify of course, but even not (would make a great book/album cover in itself). Being near-sided as hell, haven't quite made out all the author names yet; who else is here besides Simenon? And which one uses the Marker collage? Thanks!

Or are they all Simenons? Can't quite see about ones w Death and etc. in titles.

second imgage stolen from here & the marker cover

image^ that is. also a little maigret/penguin history available here: https://www.trussel.com/maig/mackay.htm

Thanks so much for all of that! Especially glad to see this from trussel:
Penguin embarked in 2013 on 75 new translations. It is issuing all the Maigrets, after an opening flurry, at about one a month, in as good a match as can be made to the order in which they were first published. By late 2018, either in paperback B format or as e-books, Simenon’s sometimes obsessional English readers will at last be able to run through the whole of Maigret in one edition.

Meanwhile, we hope that this brief guide to the more complicated past of one of Penguin’s best bestsellers will help readers as well as collectors and conservators to find that elusive missing Maigret.

There was a 'flash sale' at NYRB Publishing not long after Thanksgiving and I ordered four titles (getting 40% off, too). They arrived today:

Chess Story, Stefan Zweig, paperback, $8.97
A Journey Round My Skull, Frigyes Karinthy, paperback, $10.77
Hindoo Holiday, J.R. Ackerley paperback, $11.37
The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson, paperback, $9.57

Everything I bought in 2020. Mostly ebooks and audiobooks on sale, but also a lot of remaindered books. Audiobooks labeled with (a). ! = I read it in 2020.

non-fic

math/science
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Fooled by Randomness
N*** S***** - The signal and the noise
Loren Eiseley - The Unexpected Universe
LE Fisher - The Night Country

politics/history
Randy Shilts - And the band played on
Jane Mayer - Dark Money
Kurt Andersen - Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire
Leonard Zeskind - Blood and Politics
Steven Levitsky - How Democracies Die
Douglas A. Blackmon - Slavery by Another Name
Nancy MacLean - Democracy in Chains
Adam Higginbotham - Midnight in Chernobyl
Seumas Milne - The Enemy Within
George Packer - The Unwinding
Jill Lepore - These Truths (a)
!Hongoltz-Hetling - A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear (a)
Richard J. Evans - Lying about Hitler
Richard J. Evans - The Pursuit of Power
Rick Perlstein - Before the Storm
Tim Weiner - Legacy of Ashes

writing/author bio
Caroline Fraser - Prairie Fires
Gotham Writers' Workshop - Writing Fiction
Robert Mckee - Dialogue
Terry Eagleton - Literary Theory: An Introduction
Frank Conroy - Stop-Time
William Goldman - Adventures in the Screen Trade

other media
Tat Wood - About Time 8
Nicholas Pegg - The Complete David Bowie
!Richard Ayoade - Ayoade on Top (a)
Joe Hagan - Sticky Fingers (a)
Betty Edwards - Drawing on the Right side of the brain

misc
Jon Ronson - So you've been publicly shamed (a)
John Rawles - A Theory of Justice
Errol Morris - The Ashtray
Maria Tumarkin - Axiomatic

fic

mystery and crime
Masako Togawa - The Master Key
Boileau - She who was no more
Martin Holmen - Clinch
Emma Viskic - Resurrection Bay
Masako Togawa - The Lady Killer
Sjowall & Wahloo - The Abominable Man
Sjowall & Wahloo - The Locked Room
Tana French - In the Woods
!Helen Eustis - The Horizontal Man (a)
Antal Szerb - The Pendragon Legend

sf
Vonnegut - Mother Night
Vonnegut - Player Piano
Yoko Ogawa - Memory Police
JD Vinge - The Snow Queen
Melissa Scott - 5/12ths of Heaven
Nina Allan - The Rift
Joe Haldeman - Collected Stories
Charlie Jane Anders - The city in the middle of the night
Charles Stross - Accelerando
Various - Big Book of Classic Fantasy
Various - Big Book of Modern Fantasy

Martin Amis - Money
Scott Hawkins - The Library at Mount Char
Miriam Toewes - Women Talking
John Updike - The Early Stories
Andrew Sean Greer - Less
!Raphael Bob-Waksberg - Someone who will love you in all your damaged glory (a)
Olga Tokarczuk - Drive your plow etc.
Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo
Andrei Bely - Petersburg
Moshfegh - My year of rest and relaxation
Patrick Suskind - Perfume
Malinda Lo - Adaptation
Malinda Lo - Inheritance
Mark Dunn - Ella Minnow Pea
Rebecca Makkai - The Great Believers
Raymond Carver - What we talk about when we talk about love
Katherine Anne Porter - Collected Stories and other writings
Cormac Mccarthy - Blood Meridian
Herbert Zbigniew - Collected Poems 1956-1998
WG Sebald - Austerlitz
!Saunders - The brief and frightening reign of phil
Angie Thomas - The hate u give
Hesse - Steppenwolf
Chia-Chia Lin - The Unpassing
Roddy Doyle - Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Kim Thuy - Vi

comics
GG - I'm Not Here
!Junji Ito - Uzumaki
Satoshi Kon - Opus
various - Choke Gasp! Best of EC Comics
Guy Delisle - Hostage
!Gene Luen Yang - American Born Chinese
Clowes - David Boring
various - Graphic Witness
Richard McGuire - Here

Aimless, those four are all brilliant books

Chess Story would a good candidate for “best thing I’ve ever read” if saying such a thing were meaningful or true in any way

i have the true deceiver and intend to read it again because i know i read it and liked it but as usual forgot everything about it. i will put the chess story on my list.

Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend by Scott Reynolds Nelson

not started it yet but looked like something I needed to grab.

wish I'd realised the same thing with a book on Tommy Johnson I saw. Not sure why I didn't get it anyway.
If it's still around it may be quite a while before the shop reopens

Not sure what else I have grabbed recent;y a[art from a new edition of Ugly THings which will hopefully appear tomorrow. May have some more book stuff coming in the mail but delivery seemed to be a bit delayed over week after xmas.

if Xmas gifts count, which would be more acquired than purchased.
I finally got a copy of Italianprog the encyclopaedia of Italian prog bands of the early 70s etc by Augusto Croce.
Have wanted a copy for a while.
So just came through the mail as a Xmas or birthday present yesterday.
Looks interesting, haven't had a chance to give it a thorough look.
One thing that I would think was an improvement would be a translation of the bandnames, don't think everybody interested in the music is going to be fluent in Italian. I know I'm not. did a year of it at University but that wasa while back.

Did just get a new Ugly Things too which seems to be as good as ever.

Purchased a few older/used ones recently:

- Jean Day, Linear C
- Danielle Collobert, Murder and It Then. If I like these enough, I'll do some more digging.