Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

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

filling some gaps at a dollar a pop:

gerard de nerval - oeuvres
alfred doblin - berlin alexanderplatz
boccaccio - the decameron
two spanish picaresque novels (penguin classic)
robert tressell - the ragged trousered philanthropists
herman melville - complete short works
emile zola - germinal
anthony trollope - phineas finn
george eliot - silas marner
george eliot - daniel deronda
henry james - the europeans
henry james - the awkward age
henry james - in the cage & other stories
ford madox ford - the good soldier
compton mackenzie - vestal fire
ef benson - as we are
ef benson - the freaks of mayfair
dornford yates - jonah & co
len deighton - the ipcress file
new worlds 3 (moorcock ed.)
william morris - the well at the world's end
the sherlock holmes treasury (illustrated strand magazine facsimile)

Sold a bunch for:

Stendhal - Love
Anne Serre - The Fool & Other Tales

One more gift:

Antonio Lobo Antibes - Fado Alexandrinho

Then:

Keith Ridgway - A Shock
Hermann Burger - Tractaus Logico-Suicidalis
Camilo Jose Cela - The Hive

*Antunes

bought a few online over the last week
Angela Saini Patriarchs her latest book that came out last month. Do enjoy her writing and interviews.
This is looking at the phenomena of patriarchy and what alternatives there have been historically, both different types of patriarchy and different types of matriarchy. Looking forward to reading it.

Augusto Boal
Legislative theatre & Rainbow of Desire
THought I wa sgoing to get a few of his books from a friend but turns out it was only one book on him. & there were a few he has buried in te corner of a room because he's as untidy as i am it would appear.
But these are 1) Legislative Theatre a book looking at the time he was in the government and applying his Theatre of the Oppressed methodology to the act of government and legislation
& 2) Rainbow of Desire where he applies the methodology as therapy.
I had this ordered from the library but I think it's been lost or just not returned. Found it relatively cheaply so grabbed it online.

was also thinking of buying Orlando Patterson's book Slavery and Social Death cos I can't get it though the library.
Anybody read it?

Did also get a copy of George Perec's first 2 novels Things and A Man Asleep in one volume.

plus a continual stream of books from charity shops. If I can reinvent the passage of time I might get through a load of these.
Do have a bit more time now that the bike mechanic course has ended.

Did buy that Orlando Patterson so should be arriving over next few days. THought i would make one last Book Depositary purchase they close next week.

Angela Saini Patriarchs arrived a couple of days ago. I haven't really looked at it. Did strike me that it must have been sentthe one day I was physically near the shop and thinking I mightdrop in and ask if I could grab it. Didn't wind up goingthere after all. Seemed to take forever to get processed though. So wasn't sure of status.

Bought the rest of teh Time Life World of Art books that were in a local charity shop. So have 7 of them yesterday got Michaelangelo , Delacroix, Vermeer and Rembrandt. Had picked up Durer, Breugel and Da Vinci earlier.
Do not know how I managed to get the bag that was that heavy up the stairs last night. Couldn't stand up elsewhere.

& purchased a copy of Ugly things new issue yesterday too.

I weakened and, when a £3 copy of the Tadeusz Rozewicz volume in the Penguin Modern European Poets series came up on eBay, I bought it. Normally it's more like £30. Now I have collected the full run of that series, and completion feels more melancholy than it feels exciting. Should've known.

The poetry good though.

$2 each from a school sale. I was thrilled to find these.

John Dewey - Art as Experience
T. J. Clark - The Painting of Modern Life

Tadeus Borowski This Way For tHe Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Polish Auschwitz survivor's set of short stories about life in teh prison camp.
Every time i go and look in charity shops I find something I really want to read. JUst wish I could find a way of creating a new timestream or means of osmosing books since real time doesn't suffice.
Have heard this is extremely haunting and not easy reading.

James Burke Circles
The writer and presenter of Connecctions connected book which is a lot of short pieces on inventions.

The Phenomenon of Religion Moojan Momen
Summary and comparison of core tenets of mainstyream religions. THis looked like a book I'd wanted to read for years and now I wonder hwo soon I will get to it.

Alan Weisman The World Without us
speculative work on what the planet would do in our absence should a sudden calamity remove teh prevalent destructive species.
I've now listened to a few podcasts tied in with this and really want to get into it.

Adam Higginbotham Midnight In Chernobyl
Oral history of the Chernobyl disaster

Orlando Patterson Slavery and Social Death
survey of all historical instances of survey in society. GOing back thousands of years and loking at what it meant at theh time.

which are only a handful of a larger pile amassed recently. I want to read them all immediately as well as a stack of things from the library. & all the books I bought over the last couple of years

School book fairs always turn up some gems. I found a first edition hardcover of Cavell's The World Viewed for $3, as well as William Gass's On Being Blue.

Found a copy of Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Managed Heart by chance on Friday. Like it was what I was specifically looking for for the last few weeks but after being told that it doesn't turn up in charity shops i heard it calling to me in a 2nd hand place.Or close to. Went to the section and it was there, though nopt in the cover I would have liked.
BUt have been meaning to read it for years. May have read it soon after hearing about it in the early 00ies but if so I think I read it really fast and that was 20 years plus ago. So very glad that it turned up . & it was cheap. I had nearly ordered it on ebay.

Gifts from people (birthday etc.):

Charles Rosen - The Frontier of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music
Geza Csath - Opium and Other Stories
Sergio Pitol - Mephisto's Waltz (Selected Short Stories)
Miguel de Palol - Garden of Seven Twilights
Yu Miri - The End of August

Otherwise I have bought v little over the last six months.

Honore de Balzac - The Quest of the Absolute
William Shakespeare - Macbeth
Mircea Cartarescu - Solenoid

What did you think of Solenoid?

The past few purchases have all been book club readings

Clarke, Piranesi

Enger, So Brave, Young and Handsome

Grann, The Wager

Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

that csath collections is... interesting? also at times somewhat gruesome

think the only book i've purchased at all recently is the updated edition of the electric muse by lang, dallas, denselow & shelton

Just reading the Csath now. It's an amazing book.

What did you think of Solenoid?

― dow, Thursday, 17 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Looking to crack it open in the next month.

I found two more books on the cheap, ofc.

Thomas Bernhard - Gargoyles
Marguerite Duras - L'Amour

Sold a bunch at Skoob for:

Gottfried Benn - Primal Vision
Samuel Beckett - Three Novellas
Louis Ferdinand-Celine - Fable for Another Time
Euclides da Cunha - Backlands
Hans Magnus Enzenberger - Mausoleum

Also:

William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
Henry Green - Caught

Look Homeward Angel Thomas Wolfe
autobiographical novel by a writer I was turned onto as an influence on Jack Kerouac about 40 years ago. I may have read this back then.
BUt found it for a euro yesterday so Thought I'd take the plunge.

The Day Of The Locust Nathaniel West
Book about turn of theh 40s Hollywood that I've meant to read for an age. I saw the 1974 film of it a couple of weeks back then found this in teh charity shop I got the above from. May have a copy in a different imprint floating around somewhere.
Also reminds me that I need to read the City of Nets about the same era Hollywood. have had taht sitting around for a while.

Al Capone's Beer Wars John F Binder
history of prohibition era gangsters in Chicago. Looked good anyway.

& I just bought a copy of C. Willett Cunnington's A handbook of English Costume in teh 19th century
hoping that it is at least presentable cos it is listed as Poor but the better quality versions are upwards of £50 a copy.
Hoping that an ex library version dating back to 1966 with some writing inside is going to be rated as this if not in absolutely pristine condition . Well will see. It is up on archive.org but I do want a physical copy.
writer's name sounds like a particularly middle class sexual euphemism or something.

went slightly book mad and ended up with close to a year's worth of reading:

kafka - stories 1904-1924
grossmith & grossmith - diary of a nobody
somerville & ross - the irish rm
anthony trollope - the pallisers
ivy compton-burnett - parents & children
ivy compton-burnett - a father & his fate
sylvia townsend warner - mr fortune's maggot
elizabeth bowen - the last september
capel boake - painted clay
dali - hidden faces
john berger - g
stig dagerman - games of night
thomas tryon - the other
simenon - maigret sets a trap
henry james - english hours
dickens - selected journalism 1850-1870
stevenson - dr jekyll & mr hyde/weir of hermiston
horace walpole - castle of otranto/hieroglyphic tales
the common muse: popular british ballad poetry
roland barthes - selected writings
cervantes - don quixote
rabelais - gargantua & pantagruel
balzac - cousin pons
gautier - mademoiselle de maupin
flaubert - madame bovary
pushkin - eugene onegin
bulgakov - the white guard
thomas hardy - wessex tales
thomas love peacock - novels of
cs lewis - that hideous strength
michael moorcock - an alien heat
michael moorcock - the hollow lands
roger zelazny - isle of the dead
julian symons - bloody murder
graham greene - a gun for sale
robertson davies - the deptford trilogy
russell hoban - riddley walker
thomas pynchon - crying of lot 49
italo calvino - our ancestors
elias canetti - auto da fe
willa muir - imagined selves
george painter - marcel proust
gerard manley hopkins - poems and prose
joyce cary - the horse's mouth
ralph ellison - invisible man
joseph heller - closing time
deighton - billion dollar brain
deighton - game, set, match trilogy

also a number of pulp/crime/ghost/horror anthologies. now to try and find shelf space for them all.

I have come to accept that I do not have meaningful amounts of shelf space left, nor do I have wall space to put shelves against, and I'm just a person who is going to have piles

Carrying all those books will do that to you.

Just logging my last buys and stuff I got from Xmas gifts now:

S. Yizhar - Preliminnaries
Miguel Asturias - Mr. President
Alejo Carpenter - Explosion in the Cathedral
Shakespeare - Julius Ceasar
Lucio Cardoso - Chronicle of the Murdered House
Andrei Platonov - Chevengur
Stanislaw Witkiewicz - Insatiablity
Wittold Gombrowicz - Ferdeyduke
Yasunari Kawabata - The Old Capital
Yasunari Kawabata - The Rainbow
V. S. Prtchett - A Cab at the Door
Henry Green - Concluding
John Donne - Sermons
Jeremy Taylor - Four Sermons
Osvaldo Lamborghini - Two Stories
Horacio Quiroga - Beyond

if you have piles you could take a book suppository
or not as the case may be.