Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion
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Archived Chit Chat & All That
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What Book(s) have you just Bought, Ordered or Taken Delivery Of?
Went to Worldcon, got a haul...Foundryside (not actually that edition, it was a promotional edition being given away for free)
To Be Taught, If Fortunate
Karen Memory
The Melancholy of Mechagirl
Speak Easy
Magic for Liars
Little Eve
The Refrigerator Monologues
Pinion: Book One
The Resurrectionist of Caligo (signed ARC from a giveaway)
Rusalka (also an ARC, from way back in 1989)
And picked up physical copies of a few things I'd previously read on Kindle:
Jade City
American Hippo
Lud-in-the-Mist
Got most of them signed, too. :)
Just picked up the sci-fi book Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe this morning for $2.99 (Kindle Daily Deal)!
Mod
not a classic (yet, having been published in 2017!)but prompted by my reading of his 1998 "Modern Classic" The Restraint of Beasts and my consequent compulsion to buy everything Magnus Mills has ever written
just received a lovely hardback which is square in aspect ratio and whose dustcover has a circular hole in the middle, so that it looks like a vinyl LP or single:
The Forensic Records Society
Katy wrote: "Whenever I feel guilty about having a book buying splurge, I just come to this thread and I feel no guilt at all."Ha ha, I'll be glad to contribute to the cause this Saturday at my second library sale this month.
I do love second-hand treasures! I appreciate SO much that I have seen a few "new to me" titles in the polls that I felt draw to search out at Powell's.
Some more wonderful finds this week...
Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education = I love his writings! (Powell's)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies = I love finding books for my reference library! (Goodwill)
Jude the Obscure (Powell's)
A Pair of Blue Eyes (Powell's)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Powell's)
Sons and Lovers (Goodwill)
A Tale of Two Cities (Powell's)
The Golem (Powell's)
It wasn't my fault. The books made me do it (and for some reason it was a total noir splurge)...
The Moving Target
The Drowning Pool
The first two of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels, and then the pièce de résistance...
The Ross Macdonald Collection from the Library of America. Including:
(1950s)
The Way Some People Die
The Barbarous Coast
The Doomsters
The Galton Case
(Early 1960s)
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
The Chill
The Far Side of the Dollar
(Later Novels)
Black Money
The Instant Enemy
The Goodbye Look
The Underground Man
The Underworld U.S.A Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid & The Cold Six Thousand
The Underworld U.S.A Trilogy, Volume II: Blood's a Rover
& The L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz all by James Ellroy
American Noir: 11 Classic Crime Novels of the 1930s, 40s, & 50s from the Library of America.
And then the usual variety:
Heinrich Heine: Selected Verse: Dual Language Edition
& The Harz Journey and Selected Prose
Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov
Bound to Please by Michael Dirda (directly inspired by Tami's excellent purchase, *tips hat*)
Concrete by Thomas Bernhard (because I can't find my copy for the life of me)
History of My Life by Giacomo Casanova
Celestial Harmonies by Péter Esterházy
Shadows on the Hudson by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
The Hideout by Egon Hostovský
The Last Bell by Johannes Urzidil
I also ordered Arthur Rimbaud: The Complete Works (different translation from the one I already own) and pre-ordered After the War by Hervé Le Corre.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis StevensonAll the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown
Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Whose Body?by Dorothy L Sayers
My thrift store hunts have turned up slim pickings lately--all I've found after a roundup of the usual suspects was The Silmarillionby J.R.R. Tolkien--not too collectible, but still, a nice early book club edition in hardback. Read this a long time ago--probably won't dive into it again anytime soon, but a bit of a nostalgia grab
and
The Beast of the Haitian Hills by Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin, two brothers, which I was a little excited to find.
I did pass over two books that I keep thinking about--
Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas in an old modern library edition and A Concise History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by John S. Reshetar Jr.
It's just that my bookshelves are already groaning, and I don't see myself dipping into the Summa Theologica anytime soon. As far as the C.P.--I probably ought to pull down Leszek Kolokowski's Main Currents and read that before buying anything related.
Mod
This month's haul, part two:Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors by Louise Erdrich
The Complete Phantom of the Opera - George C. Perry
Honored Guest: Stories - Joy Williams
The Getting of Wisdom -
Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson
Women in the Wall - Julia O'Faolain
The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories - Joy Williams
I thought I hadn't found anything already on the TBR, so I was more liberal in my choosings and grabbed some Viragos and some other associated literature, but it turns out I added the PotO book waaaaay back when, so three cheers for consistent personal aesthetics. Here's hoping the lit that I'll be taking chances on ends up more well than ill gained.
Aubrey wrote: "This month's haul, part two:Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors by Louise Erdrich
[book:The Complete Phantom of the Opera..."
...Oh, some very promising titles here - I hope you thoroughly enjoy all of them!
My thanks for sharing titles that are new to me and sending me down a rabbit hole trying to learn more. I find getting send down the rabbit hole to learn more about a new to me books is just about the best thing ever!
Best - Thanks - Enjoy,
T
Damned used book stores:
Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing by Evelyn Waugh
Hopscotch, Blow-Up, We Love Glenda So Much by Julio Cortázar
Reflections in the Library: Selected Literary Essays 1926-1944 by Antal Szerb
Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann
Twilight and Moonbeam Alley & The Governess and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig
I'm absolutely giddy about Reflections in the Library. Easily the prize of the lot (and it's a good, if limited, selection). I had no idea that any of Szerb's essays had been published in English. That gives me hope that someday his three-volume masterpiece about the history of literature will one day be translated.
And years ago I bypassed the chance to buy the Everyman's edition of Waugh's travel writings, an edition I believe they no longer publish. So I'm grateful for the opportunity to rectify that mistake.
Pillsonista wrote: "Damned used book stores: [bookcover:Darkness Spoken|..."Many congratulations, especially on the Szerb.
More thrift store finds:History of Art Criticism by Lionello Venturi
and Poetical Works by John Donne
Tami wrote: "..."Glad to hear that, Tami. I hope your reading benefits from some of these inadvertent recommendations. Honestly, though, I just like to show off :P
GRISHAM LIVES! I just began reading RUNAWAY JURY for a discussion to begin September 1 at the Mystery, Crime, Thriller, group.
So I lost my mind after reading Genius and Western Canon by Harold Bloom this past week. Yes, I read both in a week. Anyway, I ended up adding ALL DA BOOKS on those lists to my shelves in the last couple of days and have spent the weekend looking for free or cheap copies to add to my library. I also made some great purchases at Thriftbooks this week too. I’ll post those with the link later.
BAM wrote: "So I lost my mind after reading Genius and Western Canon by Harold Bloom this past week. Yes, I read both in a week. Anyway, I ended up adding ALL DA BOOKS on those lists to my shelves in the last ..."what an awesome task. Now for that moment when every day or so you get to traipse to your mailbox with anticipation of another incoming adoptee.
I recently picked up a couple books at New York Review Books summer sale:
Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan by Ivo Andrić and
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Kirsten #EnoughIsEnough wrote: "I recently picked up a couple books at New York Review Books summer sale:\\\Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan by [au..."Welcome to the club! (If, indeed, these are your first NYRB titles)
It's the greatest American publishing company currently in existence, and I hope this is just the beginning of your initiation and future collection!
BAM wrote: "So I lost my mind after reading Genius and Western Canon by Harold Bloom this past week. Yes, I read both in a week. Anyway, I ended up adding ALL DA BOOKS on those lists to my shelves in the last ..."Bren, the late Florence King (d. 2016) spoke right to your situation. Her 1989 book REFLECTIONS IN A JAUNDICED EYE contains an essay, "A Bloom and Hirsch Girl," about the mixed joys of cultural listing.
Here's the Kirkus review from when the book was first pubished:
REFLECTIONS IN A JAUNDICED EYE
By Florence King
GET WEEKLY BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:
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KIRKUS REVIEW
More barbed humor, this time in a collection of essays, from King (Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, 1985; He, 1978; WASP, Where is Thy Sting, 1977; etc.). In her opening piece, King identifies herself as "a Bloom & Hirsch girl before Bloom & Hirsch were cool." Her lifelong interest in intellectual pursuits was no comfort to her grandmother, who told her about a boy who graduated from Harvard at 13: "He's a famous professor today, but he wears his clothes inside out and won't have a lamp in his house. He reads beside a jar full of lightning bugs." Meanwhile, King's intellectual streak is rubbed raw by self-help books, hyperbolic junk mail, lazy literary technique (vilified in "Woman's Litter") and Lockjaw Chocktaw, which she parodies in "Land of Hopefully and Glory." She deplores the national cult of "Nice Guyism" that she finds in our culture and politics ("We want a president who is as much like an American tourist as possible"); dislikes children, whom she calls "wartlings," the fumbling feminist movement, and Phyllis Schlafly; and was compelled to scour her apartment after trying to review John Updike (hilariously described in "Phallus in Wonderland"). She also mourns the sorry state of humor in America: "a land where headline writers see nothing wrong with 'Hearts Go Out To Brainless Baby.' " Wicked and witty, keeping alive the tradition of Dorothy Parker.
Pub Date: April 17th, 1989
ISBN: 312-02646-3
ALLEN that does sound interesting
Pillsonista wrote: "Kirsten #EnoughIsEnough wrote: "I recently picked up a couple books at New York Review Books summer sale:\\\[book:Omer Pasha Latas: Mar..."Not my first, but I find some interesting selections there. Love them.
Kirsten #EnoughIsEnough wrote: "I recently picked up a couple books at New York Review Books summer sale:Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan by [au..."NYRB's are always seductive. I passed a few by at my last sale that I wanted to purchase purely for the aesthetic.
I have to be careful, Aubrey, I could get in real trouble in one of those sales!!
Yeah, that's part of why I really don't mess around with purchasing direct from publishers anymore. Not to mention the lack of storage space.
Yeah, I always joke that I could downsize to a tiny house but I'd need an extra house just for the books!!
ALLEN wrote: "Bren, the late Florence King (d. 2016) spoke right to your situation. Her 1989 book REFLECTIONS IN A JAUNDICED EYE contains an essay, "A Bloom and Hirsch Girl," about the mixed joys of cultural listing."Now this is my kind of book. Love the description. Time to go on the prowl again...
Tonight's Little Free Library swap:The Poetry of Robert Frost
Candide
Four Quartets
Mansfield Park
The Canterbury Tales
To Kill a Mockingbird
Taking the dog for our evening walks, in different neighborhoods throughout the city, turns up some pretty sweet trades!
T
More thrift store hi-jinks:Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
The Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon
The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 by Robert Middlekauff
The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis
ETA: Used Bookstore shopping tomorrow, and library sale on Sunday. Ought to have some good stuff from that
A few things from the friendly neighborhood USB--Dante's Inferno by Marcus Sanders. While reading the Divine Comedy last year, I kept coming across these illustrations by Sandow Birk which put a modern spin on Dante's work. I didn't think I was likely to ever find a collection of it, but there it was.
The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 by T.S. Eliot
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth--a favorite of mine that I didn't happen to have a copy of. Rectified.
The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works by Thomas Nashe--who could resist this cover:
waiting for me when I got back of holsa compilation of three stories by Georges Perec
including "The Exeter Text" a translation of "Les Revenentes" which includes no vowels except the letter "e" (!)
Three By Perec
Bryan "goes on a bit too long" wrote: "The Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon"That's a good one. Many might disagree, but I think his very best novels are the ones in which Maigret is not a character, and this is one is one of his best.
So I fell off the wagon and binged again (it was only a matter of time). I'm not even going to bother with excuses anymore, but it did allow me to finally eliminate several lacunae plaguing my library...
(Translation: damn, did I score!)
The Melancholy of Resistance, War & War, Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
The Hour of the Star, The Passion According to G.H., Água Viva by Clarice Lispector
Kornél Esti & Anna Édes by Dezső Kosztolányi !!!!
Collected Poems, 1956-1998 & Collected Prose, 1948-1998 of Zbigniew Herbert
Naomi, The Maids, Devils in Daylight by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Happiness, As Such, The Dry Heart, The Manzoni Family: A Novel (pre-ordered) by Natalia Ginzburg
Gravity and Grace (!!!) & Waiting for God by Simone Weil
Witold Gombrowicz: Diary !!!! (complete, single-volume) & A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes
Songs of Mihyar the Damascene & Selected Poems by Adonis
Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope: A Memoir !!!! & Hope Abandoned !!!!
Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, tr. Christian Wiman
Every Riven Thing: Poems, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art, & My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman
A significant amount of Paul Celan:
Breathturn into Timestead: Collected Later Poetry, tr. Pierre Joris (bilingual)
Lightduress, tr. Pierre Joris
Selected Poems and Prose, tr. Johnn Felstiner
Poems of Paul Celan, tr. Michael Hamburger (bilingual)
And then a great, eclectic variety:
Raymond Aron's The Opium of the Intellectuals & Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (to continue on once I've finished Main Currents)
Essays and Letters of Friedrich Hölderlin
Diaries, 1918-1939 by Thomas Mann
The Maias by José Maria Eça de Queirós
Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg !!!!
Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind: The Complete Text !!!!
Divine Days by Leon Forrest !!!!
Night and Day by Virginia Woolf (I figured it couldn't be any worse than Orlando, so what the hell...)
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Literary Conference by César Aira
Ahmet Altan's Endgame: A Novel
The Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert
Winter: A Novel by Ali Smith and pre-ordered the paperback edition of Spring
One of my August reads was Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina, and while I knew it was to a great extent autobiographical, I did not realize just how fundamental her relationship with Celan was to the text itself. Not only does she use lines from his poetry regularly throughout the book, she quotes from the shared (and unshared) correspondence they conducted during their brief, and briefly rekindled, affair.
Their correspondence isn't going to be published in English until October, so I think I'm going to wait to re-read the novel until then, and in the meantime make a serious study of his poetry, because even the title of the book of Bachmann's collected poems, Darkness Spoken, a reference to one of her (greatest) poems, actually originates from one of his.
Pillsonista wrote: "Night and Day by Virginia Woolf (I figured it couldn't be any worse than Orlando, so what the hell...)."I couldn't figure out the literary value of Orlando. It looked to me to be the novel equivalent of one long in-joke between Woolf and Sackville-West. A DNF for me.
That is an impressive list--if you tell me you found all that at one bookstore, I'm planning my next vacation to that location.
Bryan "goes on a bit too long" wrote: "I couldn't figure out the literary value of Orlando. It looked to me to be the novel equivalent of one long in-joke between Woolf and Sackville-West. A DNF for me."How unfortunate.
Bryan "I couldn't figure out the literary value of Orlando. It looked to me to be the novel equivalent of one long in-joke between Woolf and Sackville-West. A DNF for me.That is an impressive list--if you tell me you found all that at one bookstore, I'm planning my next vacation to that location."
That's as good as any explanation for Orlando that I've heard/read. I essentially finished it out of spite. That way I could denigrate it implacably should anybody praise it within hearing distance, I hated it so much (it possessed the added sin of being assigned reading).
One of my favorite literary/cultural critics wrote about it and she cites Woolf's own diary, about how the author wrote the first half of the book in a "feverish rapture" and then later "struggled listlessly" to complete it. Basically, according to this critic, when Woolf was imagining Vita Sackville-West as a man, she was inspired. When West becomes a woman halfway through the book (i.e, herself again), Woolf lost nearly all interest and that her contempt for masculine intellectual history and achievement compounded the novel's crippling tediousness.
Which, again, seems as good an explanation as any to me.
And yeah, I wish it had only been at one bookstore. I'd never leave the place. In truth it was four different used bookstores and two separate library sales (I made a day of it). I still can't believe I finally found Divine Days. I've been looking for that book for literally 15 years.
Guru, you must have had a grand time that day. I’m so envious. What a great haul!
My first collection of purchase after moving in to my own place. Now there is plenty of room for them and no one to complain. :)The Plague
The Canterbury Tales
Dead Souls
War and Peace
Resurrection
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Fathers and Sons
Little Dorrit and
The Man in the Iron Mask
Yesterday I picked up:David Copperfield
Gulivers Travels
I'm pretty thrilled both are on our October's reading list. They have been on my to-be-read list for so long. I'm so grateful to have found this group to read with.
The copies I picked up are published as Barnes and Noble Classics. B&N is my favorite publisher of classics. They are very affordable and well made. They are inexpensive enough that I feel okay writing in them. Each edition includes a biography and a timeline for both the author's life and the major events that happen around them. It used to be hard for me to get into some of the classics. These editions have vastly improved my reading experience.
I picked up an interesting looking memoir this morning: The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return by Kenan Trebincevic for $4.99 at the Kindle Store.
Had a chance to visit a bookshop near the University in Bristol that sells two books for £5 and picked up; The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
All picked up in the first couple of minutes of browsing!😜 The discussion of a forum like this accretes on the memory; awaiting only the activation of a book cover. I stopped at 4 so as not to totter down the road with an unmanageable pile. 🤓
———-
I bought The Great and Terrible King : Edward I and the Forging of Britain and How to Read Poetry Like a Professor. I plan on immersing myself in poetry for the next 12 months or so and I’m doing a ton of preparation.
Not quite at the level of my last binge, but still notable. Especially with one of them being the book of a lifetime:
The Zibaldone (literally translated as 'hodge-podge') of Giacomo Leopardi. I cheated and ordered it from Amazon, but it's one of those books that I just can't not have if I can afford it.
I also ordered his Canti: Poems, tr. Jonathan Galassi. Plus more Italian poetry:
Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poems & The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition
Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti
Songbook: The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba
& Collected Poems, 1920-1954: Revised Bilingual Edition of Eugenio Montale
And then a number of other steals:
The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse
Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse From the Jewish Tradition, ed. Peter Cole
Peter Cole, again: Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations
Yves Bonnefoy: Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011
Wartime Notebooks: France, 1940-1944 by Andrzej Bobkowski
Economy of the Unlost and Plainwater: Essays and Poetry by Anne Carson (one of my favorites)
And after the Zibaldone, probably the two greatest gems:
Varujan Vosganian's The Book of Whispers and Graveyard Clay: Cré na Cille, by Máirtín Ó Cadhain.
Guru sounds like some amazing poetry
Tami wrote: "Yesterday I picked up:David Copperfield
Gulivers Travels
I'm pretty thrilled both are on our October's reading list. They have been on my to-be-read list for so long. I..."
Ditto on the B&N Classic books.
This month's haul:We Who Are About To... - Joanna Russ (!)
GayBCs: A Queer Alphabet - Rae Congdon
We're Here, We're Queer, We're Mad Libs - Roger Price
Água Viva - Clarice Lispector (!)
Red Poppies: A Novel of Tibet - Alai
Near to the Wild Heart - Clarice Lispector
The Kindness of Strangers - Salka Viertel
The Year Before Last - Kay Boyle
Some fun stuff, some beautiful stuff (the Lispector editions especially), even some stuff that was on my TBR already. I was also able to indulge my lust for certain imprints today with a Virago, two New Directions, and an NYRB Classic.
Aubrey wrote: "This month's haul:We Who Are About To... - Joanna Russ (!)
GayBCs: A Queer Alphabet - Rae Congdon
[book:We're Here, We're Queer, We..."
That's a great selection.
I was about skipping out of the bookshop when I found a copy of Água Viva.
The Kindness of Strangers is a wonderful book. Like Lesley Blanch's Journey into the Mind's Eye, I didn't expect it to be so well written and so subtly perceptive. I was planning on reading other books at the time I ordered it, but there was something about it that just pulled me in and kept me hypnotized.
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Catching up on Classics (and lots more!)
Books mentioned in this topic
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A Descent into the Maelstrom (other topics)
Girlfriend In A Coma (other topics)
Satantango (other topics)
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What the Wind Knows
This Bright Beauty
Liquid Rules: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives
Everything I Never Told You
Speaks the Nightbird
The Queen of Bedlam
Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide and the Criminal Mind
Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders
Those are my audiobooks
Love Lies: A True Story of Marriage and Murder in the Suburbs
Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America
Serpentine
A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A DiaryZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Those are my kindle books
Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution
On my nook
Then I downloaded a ton of public domain on my iPad, which I won’t list, but it’s stuff by Shelley, Moliere, Johnson, Plato, Milton, Lucretius, Augustine, Wilde, Pope, Emerson, Frost, Montaigne, Yeays, Pessoa, well that’s enough