Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

Oops I mean the vet’s daughter

last week i bought a small book lot and ended up with a 1st uk edition of henry green's blindness, (another) copy of denton welch's journals, betjeman's first and last loves, the nonesuch william morris & uh the pilgrim's guide to franciscan italy

Library used book sale haul (for the tidy sum of $5):

Machado de Assis - The Alienist and Other Stories of 19th Century Brazil
Patricia Highsmith - The Blunderer
Philip Levine - The Simple Truth
John Fogerty - Fortunate Son (harcover)

Bei Dao - City Gate, Open Up
Shakespeare - King Lear
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (tr. Lydia Davis)
Henry Green - Pack my Bag
al-Hariri - Impostures

I'm tempted to start a thread for little free library finds. Most of my acquisitions recently are from those (also pretty sure that they're increasingly conditioning the path of my daily walks).

Joseph Conrad - Nostromo (black spine Penguin edition)
William Peter Blatty - The Exorcist
George V. Higgins - The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Patricia Highsmith - Edith's Diary
P. G. Wodehouse - Vintage Wodehouse

Also a couple of buys:

Michael Moorcock - The Eternal Champion
James Tiptree - Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

The Death Ship, B. Traven, used trade paperback, very good condition. Got it for my birthday.

^excellent. Feel like B. Traven is some kind of classic ILB writer who is still read. Think I may have had a screenname or two if not a thread title in his honor.

Although maybe he is fondly remembered but you are the only one actually reading him, reading The Death Ship over and over. Where To Start With B. Traven?

I went a bit wild lately stockpiling books at sale prices. Lots of NYRB Classic in the mix:

Nightmare Alley, Wm Lindsay Graham
Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman
The Expendable Man, Dorothy Hughes
The Gate, Natsume Soseki
Botchan, Natsume Soseki
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
Niki: The Story of a Dog, Tibor Dery
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
Cause for Alarm, Eric Ambler
As She Climbed Across the Table, Jon. Lethem
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
Collected Tales, Nikolai Gogol (P&V translations)
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene
Journey to the East, Herman Hesse
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Youncenar
Franny and Zoey, JD Salinger
The Long Ships, Frans Bengsston
The Third Horseman, William Rosen

Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper - Donald Henderson
Stone Blind - Natalie Haynes
Sea of Tranquility - Emily St. John Mandel
Complete Works of Anthony Trollope

(that last being a Delphi ebook, slightly above your shovelware public domain ebooks, but obviously sourced from Project Gutenberg and other places and slightly tidied up, but only slightly. interestingly though they have a Proust version which has more than the two PG have. the trollope is 36,000 pages, £1.49)

Gifted:

Antonio Vieira - Six Sermons
Yoko Tawada - 3 Streets
ah-Hariri - Impostures
Clarice LIspector - Too Much of Life (Complete Chronicles)

Christmas gifts:

Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, by David Maraniss

The Philosophy of Modern Song, by Bob Dylan

Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles, by Jonathan Gold

Clarice LIspector - Too Much of Life (Complete Chronicles)

I love Lispector, even in translation. I read Near to the Wild Heart a couple of years ago, it was quite an experience.

No idea whether the translation is accurate as I don't read anything other than English, but in English she has lots of awkwardness to offer.

Asked for and received Alec Nevala-Lee's Buckminster Fuller biography for Christmas. His Astounding was my favorite non-fiction book in recent memory.

Two Pushkin Vertigo ebooks on sale on amazon today: Death on Gokumon Island and The Decagon House Murders. I love this series of translated mysteries.

Sarah Weinman - Scoundrel, hardcover, about the murderer who William F. Buckley helped free, or maybe buckley is the scoundrel
Marc Cushman and Susan Osborn - These are the Voyages: TOS Season 2, paperback -- first one had tons of information, perhaps too much. I see that in 2021 Cushman published a 700 page book on the "Phase II" pilot, which is just scary.
Ellen Raskin - The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues, pb, which j.w. friedman of I Don't Even Own a Television recommended on a podcast episode about the westing game
David Lynch - Time to Dream, hardcover, from a charity shop. Tons of pictures.

https://archive.org/details/artnouveau0000fahr
large sized coffee table book on Art Nouveau by Gabriele Fahr-Becker which I got as 3 for a Euro yesterday and i think was way more expensive last time i saw it elsewhere. Th0ough still about 15Eur or something. Bit of a windfall then. Pretty nice, hadn't known taht archive.org had it on their site until I was looking it up for a better image of the cover. So can be browsed at least.

Also got a great thing on Art Deco which seem sto be a great deal lesser thna teh above but has turned me onto new artists already, thjough maybe should have been aware of them Demetre Chiparushttps://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/2006/PAR/2006_PAR_05446_0134_000().jpg for one. Though it only has 2 or 3 images by artist it still has some great stuff in for a book I payed like 33c for. Think it will prompt opening up several rabbit holes to get lost in.
Had come across some Tamara de Lempicka https://i.etsystatic.com/20564088/r/il/1d0063/3244562736/il_1140xN.3244562736_ptu7.jpg before though not sure L knew the name

> Death on Gokumon Island

just read the second of these, Inugami Curse, and that mentions other cases he'd worked on, including things that are obviously the 3rd (eight graves) and the 4th (gokumon). i think those numbers are right, they are the order i bought them in, which i think follows the Japanese releases. 77 of these in total, take that ed McBain...

japanese release order is wildly different
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosuke_Kindaichi

also, there's another out, the Devil's Flute Murders