Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

i do have a complete set of penguin classics Dickens that I've only read the Project Gutenberg versions of but i know that's an extravagance. the intros were informative at least (although you can often read the intro via Amazon's look-inside feature)

have just noticed ocr errors in my new digital copy of The Accidental Tourist. "Sony!" offered as an apology.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig. Seems like it is some kind of bestseller now, so expecting some sort of ILBacklash.

Remembering How We Stood John Ryan
book on the literary bohemian scene in Dublin in the mid 20th century. pen portraits of several writers from teh time. Should be interesting.

Warlock Oakley Hall
1950s Western reflecting the political feelings of the time. Fear of McCarthy and so on.
I think I know the name from somewhere was it filmed. Seemed interesting for a euro anyway.

City of Bohane Kevin Barry
dystopian sci fi novel by local author. I have his Beatlebone around somewhere too , maybe other stuff.
I bump into him t openings and things so think I need to read him.
Plus i heard he's really good.

Camera Lucida Roland Barthes
Philosopher's views on photography. Apparently his final book.

THree Novels of Old New York Edith Wharton
I think I may have picked up a copy of teh Age of Innocence after seeing the mid 90s film .
& sill haven't read it. But thought i might be tempted now.
Not like I've actually bought another stack of books since the olast things i added to this list and neglected to add tehm here or anything. Or amybe it is exactly like taht.

plus new book out of teh library
Ain't I A Woman bell hooks
Been meaning to read her fro a while and never see them in charity shops which I hope will change.
She was somebody who was recommended during the recent TULCA arts festival and I had this ordered as an interlibrary loan before that but seems like copies of this are disappearing and still listed within the system.

Damian Catani - Journey to the Extreme
Natalia Ginzburg - The Dry Heart
Wolfgang Hilbig - The Interim
Mario Vargas Llosa - Conversations in the Cathedral
William Congreve - Incognita

Went overboard over the last couple of weeks leading up to Xmas.
Walked half way around town a couple of times to hit charity shops.
Got some interesting stuff and so on.

cutting and pasting from Goodreads doesn't seem to be working too easily, there's another 2 or 3 x this from the last couple of weeks

Unwritten Laws: The Unofficial Rules Of Life As Handed Down By Murphy And Other Sages

Rawson, Hugh

Bubble Of American Supremacy

Soros, George

Bessie

Albertson, Chris

A Girl of the Limberlost (Limberlost, #2)

Stratton-Porter, Gene

American Indians: Folk Tales & Legends (Wordsworth Myth, Legend & Folklore)

Cunningham, Keith

The House by the Lake: A Story of Germany

Harding, Thomas *

Out of the Fury: The Incredible Odyssey of Eliezer Urbach

Weigand, Edith S.

The Group

McCarthy, Mary

Conversations with Friends

Rooney, Sally *

And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey

Terkel, Studs

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Sagan, Carl


The Shorter Pepys

Pepys, Samuel

Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air

Holmes, Richard

A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

Dorris, Michael

A Day in the Country and Other Stories

Maupassant, Guy de



Rack, Rope and Red-Hot Pincers: A History of Torture and Its Instruments

Abbott, Geoffrey


Walter Winchell: A Novel

Herr, Michael


Sacred Hunger (Sacred Hunger #1)

Unsworth, Barry


The Awakening and Selected Stories

Chopin, Kate


A Personal Anthology

Borges, Jorge Luis

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

King, Stephen *


The Big Sleep and Other Novels (#1, 2, 6)

Chandler, Raymond


(TV HEAVEN)Complete Cult (Collins)

Condon, Paul


Weep Not, Child

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o


Strangers on a Train

Highsmith, Patricia

The Complete Parkhurst Tales: Behind the Locked Gates of Britain's Toughest Jails

Parker, Norman


Superbad: The Violent Rise and Fall of the Black Mafia

Griffin, Sean Patrick

Got the new 33 1/3 volume on Avalon in my Xmas stocking.

Got a copy of Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels earlier this week.
I don't remember having seen one in years of charity shop scouring.
Also got stacks of books from various other places on like 3 occasions this week.

Also got a copy of Sir Robert Frazer's The Golden Bough after having bought a copy about 20 years ago taht I never got through. May still have it somewhere .

& a nice copy of Simone de Beauvoir's The 2nd Sex

From the great Kaboom Books in Houston:

Memoirs of Hecate County, Edmund Wilson (edition upgrade)
In Praise of Older Women, Stephen Vizinczey
In Any Case and Natural Shocks, Richard Stern (whose
What Hath God Wrought, Daniel Walker Howe
The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood
Inventing a Nation, Gore Vidal

What Hath God Wrought was one of my big pandemic reads back in 2020, it's very good

I enjoyed that Edmund Wilson, especially "The Princess with the Golden Hair". He should have written more fiction!

In Any Case and Natural Shocks, Richard Stern (whose

all three used

rivka galchen - everyone knows your mother is a witch

patricia lockwood - no one is talking about this

book of vija celmins' drawings published by a parisian art museum in the mid-90s. contains a long interview with vija and an introductory essay by robert storr. most of the drawings are of the night sky

I more or less stopped reading through the pandemic, scraped through a few bits and pieces but it was more of a chore than a joy. Managed to start reading again which means I can start buying more books than I ever manage to read, again. Hooray! Including, in the last 10 days or so:

Maigret Goes South by Georges Simenon
The Sweet Indifference of the World by Peter Stamm
Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen
Youth by Tove Ditlevsen
Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen
Guestbook by Leanne Shapton
Trieste by Daša Drndić
Operratics by Michel Leiris (this last a small (Green Integer) book of very short pieces about opera - I'm not terribly interested in opera but I am interested in Michel Leiris and how he might talk about opera)

If I was a good person I would look up and write down the translators for seven of those eight but I am not, this morning.

I've been hitting the library lately. The only recent one I've purchased lately is The Fall of Babel, by Josiah Bancroft. Honestly, it's a bit of a letdown early on, but I've gone so far on this journey that I'll see it through to the end.

amazon monthly deals for march include War and Peace, i notice. too soon...

It's the Briggs translation, which is v. good

i already have it, i think, albeit unread, waiting for the right year.

but vaguely related, march's reading is Grossman's Stalingrad

I ordered a copy of Rob Shearman's We All Hear Stories in the Dark, a short story collection with the gimmick of being organized as a choose your own adventure book. 1800 pages. Shearman is mostly known for writing some very good Doctor Who audio plays.

Peter Weiss - The Aesthetics of Resistance (Vol. II)
William Shakespeare - Othello
William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Juan Carlos Onetti - The Shipyard
Christopher Logue - War Music
Antonio Moresco - Distant Light
Vassily Grossman - Life and Fate

swag from an hour spent at the annual "24 hour book sale" after a two year hiatus... $1 a book:

allain/souvestre - fantomas
robbe-grillet - the erasers
gombrowicz - pornografia
pynchon - inherent vice
jim thompson - omnibus
henry miller - tropic of cancer
kafka - the trial "definitive edition"
george gissing - the nether world
thomas hardy - far from the madding crowd
charles brockden brown - wieland/carwin
ann radcliffe - mysteries of udolpho
ef benson - as we were: a victorian peep-show
anthony trollope - an autobiography
ivy compton-burnett - more women than men
stevie smith - over the frontier
lorca - five plays/three tragedies
ibsen - 3 volumes of penguin plays
strindberg - three plays
lawrence - penguin selected poems
yeats - collected poems
oxford classic irish short stories
bowker (ed.) - malcolm lowry remembered
william sansom - proust

Quite a few. Probably too many. But as long as I have a place to store them I'm sure I'll be working my way through tehm.
& may be my main source of exercise waking around the various charity shops in town.
also still getting the books from interlibrary loans

This week I got my preordered download of the audiobook for The Candy House, the new novel from ILB fav Jennifer Egan. I will probably end up getting it in paper at some point, too.

She published (and read) an excerpt from that in the New Yorker. I quite enjoyed the concept. Her last book was very good, if fairly conventional.

I just bought Isaac Asimov: FOUNDATION (1951).

Isaac Asimov: FOUNDATION & EMPIRE (1952); SECOND FOUNDATION (1953).

Pohl and Kornbluth, THE SPACE MERCHANTS.

George Moore, ESTHER WATERS.

the pohl half of space merchants is great

Is it split in half?

Maybe it actually splits into thirds?

The Wisden Book of Cricketers' Lives (I know (nearly) nothing of cricket, but love reference books. I need help)

I am always looking for small, lightweight, used paperback books I can take on backpacks. I found two:

The Abbess of Crewe, Muriel Spark, used paperback in very good condition, $2.
The Singing Sands, Josephine Tey, used paperback, $2.

ooh, I love The Singing Sands!

Still haven't tried Tey--what's this one about?

Detective suffering from claustrophobia and panic attacks takes medical leave and goes to Scotland to rest and recover; on his way there he encounters a death that doesn't initially seem like a murder at all, and starts investigating it as a way to take his mind off his anxiety.

I’ve been curious about Tey as well.

Pohl wrote the first half of Space Merchants (and maybe some of the ending). Kornbluth wrote the section where the protagonist becomes lower class.

Detective suffering from claustrophobia and panic attacks takes medical leave and goes to Scotland to rest and recover; on his way there he encounters a death that doesn't initially seem like a murder at all, and starts investigating it as a way to take his mind off his anxiety.

Where do singing sands enter into it?

It's cool enough for me to know that the phenomenon of 'singing sands' is a real one that exists is the world. How this fact fits into the book is, for me who hasn't read it yet, just that it makes for a damn interesting title.

Bought my childhood favourite Help! I Am Prisoner In A Toothpaste Factory on eBay for my daughter

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1329734023l/13493050.jpg

Xavier De Maistre - Voyage Around my Room
Cesare Pavese - The Beautiful Summer
Wole Soyinka - A Shuttle in the Crypt
Vladimir Sharov - Before & During
Halldor Laxness - Independent People
Christina Stead - The Man who Loved Children

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IdIxi8kLzE

John Darnielle, Devil House
Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction

Hermann Burger - Brenner
Heinrich Heine - Travel Pictures
Joy Williams - Harrow
Sergio Pitol - The Love Parade
Marie Darrieussecq - Pig Tales
Gregor Von Rezzori - The Death of my Brother Abel

This summer:

J R R Tolkien – The Silmarillion, Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (ed. Humphrey Carpenter)
Eric S. Rabkin (ed.) – Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales, and Stories
Clark Ashton Smith – The Dark Eidolon, and Other Stories
Clive Barker – Books of Blood, vol. 1-3
Stanley Cavell – Cities of Words, Themes Out of School
Ray Russell – Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories
Ellen Datlow (ed.) – Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror
Michael Moorcock – Stormbringer: The Elric Saga, Part 2

Still stacks
Lauren Bacall By Myself and Then some
Allan Jones Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
Nikki Sixx The Heroin Diaries
Chapman Frank Sinatra The Chairman
Ursula K Le guin The Dispossessed
Nicky Hayes Understand Psychology
Ruth Dudley Edwards Patrick pearse The Triumph Of The Failure
Rosemary Ellen Guiley Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience
Revolutionary Japanese Educator And Founder Of Soka Gakkai
Bethel, Dayle M. Makiguchi The Value Creator: Revolutionary Japanese Educator And Founder Of Soka Gakkai

are some of the ones I've bought this week
So no wonder I can't get into my work table.

& I'm still getting a stack from the library too.

,

Summer purchases. I'm buying less, but still more than I can read.

audiobooks:
Isaac Butler - The Method, which I'm currently reading and it's great
Mel Brooks - All About Me!
Darnielle - Devil House

ebooks:
Karin Tidbeck - The Memory Theater
Micaiah Johnson - The Space Between Worlds

bookbooks:
Richard Noll - The Jung Cult
Ken Jennings - Brainiac
Tamsyn Muir - Harrow the Ninth
Clive Barker - Books of Blood
The Best of R.A. Lafferty

Was curious about the Butler book, good to know it’s worth it.

I bought a big handful of cheap secondhand Viragos: the tortoise and the hare, angel, our spoons came from Woolworths, the clergyman’s daughter, a wreath for the enemy - and also brookner’s “look at me”.

Also just got Oliver Harris’s new one A Season in Exile on audiobook - really looking forward to that