Book Hauls 5: So many books, so little room

Another haul from Savers:

Times Square by William Sherman -- about a beat cop in 1978 Times Square. Should be appropriately sleazy.
The Once and Future King by TH White
Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates
Charlemagne: a biography by Derek Wilson
The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds

Ah Sharon Olds. Nice.

Still on the prowl for a copy of Middle Age: a romance by Joyce Carol Oates. But seem to be finding the occasional random book by her and her massive prolific canon.

From a local library for $2.00, all paperbacks in very good shape:

The Diary of Anais Nin; Volumes I, II, III, IV, V, VI spanning the years from 1931- 1966

Under a Glass Bell by Anais Nin

Children of the Albatross Anais Nin

Collages Anais Nin

Anais Nin by Deirdre Bair

Anais Nin Reader edited y Philip K. Jason

:::Gloat...Preen::::::

That is a truck-load o' smut. You lucky dog.

Just added about 40 or so books I got from a friends Late house mate.
They were just going to be thrown out, but I said I'd have a look.
Well, I thought this man would have "westerns" and "thrillers". Yes a few of those but also some adequate WWII histories, with some Australian tales I hadn't heard of.

Overall I am quite pleased. The fictions I will donate to a charity.

My once-a-season Bemidji bookshop was today. A nice haul from Goodwill first.

Night - Elie Wiesel
John Adams - David McCullough
Ring of Bright Water for a comfort read.
Mystery on the Moors, a gothic by Barbara Michaels for the same.
South Sea Tales - Jack London
The Counterfeiters - Andre Gide
The Last of the Just - Andre Schwarz-Bart
Gaudy Night - Dorothy Sayers; hope it's better than Strong Poison....
The Aeniad in the Robert Fitzgerald translation; to be compared to the Allen Mandelbaum I already have.
Collected Poems, 1931-74 - Lawrence Durrell
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
Going after Cacciato - Tim O'Brien
A Soldier of the Great War - Mark Helprin
Accordion Crimes - E. Annie Proulx
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer.
The Innocent - Ian McEwan
The Fourth Man - K.O. Dahl, a Norwegian thriller.
The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield, a pig in a poke.

On to Books n More.

The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron, Pulitzer, hardcover.
Selected Poems - W.H. Auden
Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives - Frederick Karl biography.
When I Whistle - Shusaku Endo, hardcover.
Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri stories, hardcover.
The Hill Station - J.G. Farrell's unfinished last novel.
An Insular Possession - Timothy Mo
The Wanderer - Knut Hamsun
The Investigation - Peter Weiss
Steps - Jerzy Kosinski; I've acquired a nice little collection of his books in drugged-out old Bantam editions. Maybe I should actually read one.
Gregorius the Good Sinner - Hartmann von Aue
Mating - Norman Rush
Suspects - Thomas Berger

Holy moly. Fan-tastic haul.

Four stars. At least a year of fine readin'.

From Savers:

The Best of Rumpole
Wicked Good Words by Mim Harrison
Gerald's Party by Robert Coover
Irons in the Fire by John McPhee
Kinflicks by Lisa Alther

From the Salvation Army store:

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers
The Lady who liked clean restrooms by JP Donleavy
Elaine's Book by Jay Wright
Sabbatical by John Barth
Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Back in town for my regular Saturday trip to the FOL Used bookstore for some fiction:

Already Dead by Denis Johnson (now in hardcover)
Songdogs by Colum McCann

and a few choice memoirs:

The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So by Mark Vonnegut, M.D.

Also, picked up a couple dupes to give away:

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
The Magicians by Lev Grossman

From Goodwill:

The Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Money & Investing
The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles
The Cid/Cinna/The Theatrical Illusion by Corneille
The Kings and Their Gods by Daniel Berrigan
The Lords and the New Creatures by Jim Morrison
Trouble for Trumpets by Peter Cross

From the Salvation Army:

The Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook
Appointment at Samarra/Butterfield 8/Hope of Heaven by John O'Hara
Will You Always Love Me? by Joyce Carol Oates

In a grab of mostly average stuff I also found The Painter of Battles and True Cross at the local library friends sale.

From an online bookseller:

The Falcon by John Tanner.
Bundling: Its Origin, Progress & Decline in America by Henry Reed Stiles.
Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje.
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdich.
And all of these titles by Salman Rushdie: East, West.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
Fury.
Grimus.
Midnight's Children.

Small haul from the FOL used bookstore:

This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann (a dupe for gift giving)
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer (Was a Kindle Daily Deal yesterday, got it in Hardcover for $1)

I showed restraint.

I was going into book haul withdrawal today from not being able to shop at college, and wouldn't you know, a group of us went to Goodwill this afternoon. Unlike where I used to live, this one actually has a fairly nice selection of books...

The Under-Dogs by Mariano Azuela - Signet Classics edition, in great shape
Legends of the Rhine by Wilhelm Ruland
The Kingdom of Matthias by Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz
In a Perfect World by Laura Kasischke
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - looks practically brand-new
And I'm regretting passing up a book of stories by Edward Everett Hale.

Amazingly, they also had a copy of Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov. I've only seen it one other time in a store (and I bought it then, of course).

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (Booker winner)
Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes (as coming highly recommended by various LTers)
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Hotel New Hampshire John Irving
The Running Man by Michael Gerard Bauer (a random shot in the dark)
The Tigers Wife
The Blue by Mary McCallum
By Nightfall by Michael Cunnignham
Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee (illustrated large format hardcover)
Blue Shoes and Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith (for a friend as my opinion of the author is average at best)
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Season of Comfort by Gore Vidal
The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds (Shortlisted for Booker 2009)
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (Silver Penguin Classic, love these)
The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls (as a gift for SiL)
Mao II by Don DeLillo (been looking for this for ages)
Empire Falls by Richard Russo (Pulitzer winner 2002)
Possession by AS Byatt (Booker winner 1990)
A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, a teeny little golden edged pocket edition, brand new
Eucalyptus by Murray Ball
The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Siege by Helen Dunmore (already read, but will give as a gift along with the Betrayal, once I read it too)
The Betrayal
American Notes by Dickens
Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick
Jake's Thing by Kingsley Amis
An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul
East of the Mountains by David Guterson
In the Kitchen by Monica Ali
The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman (I loved his book From Beirut to Jerusalem)
The Fall of Light by Niall Williams
Book for Dangerous Boys (lovely new cloth bound large format)
The Healer by Greg Hollingshead

All from the recent Rotary book sale, total of $69.
And a new book case too, an additional $40. Thank you very much.

Today:
All the Names- Saramago
The Double- Dostoyevsky
With a Poet's Eye: A Tate Gallery Anthology
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets- Herge
Tintin and Alph Art- Herge

Last couple of weeks:
M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio- Robb
Tinisima-Poniatowska
Savage Detectives-Bolaño
Little Big Art Book
The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart-Bly
Poems of Nazim Hikmet
Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art-Rosenblum
The 20th Century Art Book
Myra Breckinridge/Myron-Vidal
Lord of the Rings-Tolkien, one volume edition

Impressive, folks.

Yeah 16, that is, well, wow. I know my bookshelves are already groaning and I am now trying to cull before buying more... But, I have to say, if you think the Lexus book will be at all like Beirut to Jerusalem, I think you need to run. now. The mustache of understanding has become completely banal since he wrote his one good book many decades ago.

>19 anna_in_pdx: oh really? Interesting. Thomas Friedman was appearing at a writers festival here recently, and it got him in my head again. I loved From Beirut to Jerusalem but hadn't heard he'd slipped.

The Lexus book was ok pages 1-4, haven't got further than that yet :)

Found these at a St Vincent charity shop in Madison, WI:

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart -- Not the kidnapping victim, but an author who has been compared to Djuna Barnes.
Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett
Sunflower by Rebecca West
The Final Days by Bob Woodward
The Palace Guard by Dan Rather -- a hc upgrade.
The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court

Everything was $1, except the Oxford Companion to SCOTUS, which was $2.

A thoughtful review of The Lexus and the Olive Tree is here:
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/friedman/files/NYR_T_Friedman.pdf

I am sorry for sounding quite that negative in 19: I mixed it up with The World is Flat it seems, so it is not quite that bad but based on the above review, it still it does not sound like the type of book I would enjoy, and I very much enjoyed From Beirut to Jerusalem.

One of the funnier reviews I have ever read is Matt Taibbi's evisceration of Hot, Flat and Crowded.
http://nypress.com/flat-n-all-that/

ETA: Sorry not the first book about the world being flat, the second book. Good god. What a maroon.

Back to share this excerpt, found in the Wikipedia entry on The World is Flat, from Taibbi's actual review of THAT one:

"Matt Taibbi of the New York Press wrote a scathing review, saying that "On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country", adding: "Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you say it. And that's basically what he's doing here. The internet is speeding up business communications, and global labor markets are more fluid than ever. Therefore, the moon is made of cheese. That is the rhetorical gist of The World Is Flat. It's brilliant." Taibbi also takes issue with the title, noting that "The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world." He concludes, "473 pages of this, folks... Is there no God?"1."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat

I am sorry to be like this, but Friedman is one of my betes noirs going back to when I lived in the Middle East and my well meaning mother used to clip his inane columns and send them to me.

Wait, there is still people who care about what Thomas Friedman says? Well, he does work at the New York Times and has been awarded Pulitzers. I guess people would find that persuasive. Then again, despite his accoutrements, 2000 years of tradition, and being absolute ruler of a sovereign state doesn't make any of the Pope's flim-flammery true either.

The World Literature Today magazine is based out of my college campus, and when I went to their monthly book club today they were like "See those two shelves there? That's all the review copies or duplicates we get and don't want. Take some." So, naturally, I did:

Good Offices by Evelio Rosero
The Green Corn Rebellion by William Cunningham (presumably there because it's from the univ. press)
The Prophecies by Nostradamus (nice Penguin edition)
Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
The Irresistible Fairy Tale by Jack Zipes
Voyage to Kazohinia by Sandor Szathmari
This last one is the best find, I think. It's a Hungarian dystopia from 1941, just translated in July. I hadn't even heard of it yet...

No recent hauls as I've been in a culling phase. However, while wandering the internet this morning, I came across an image in a Warehouse 13 guest star slideshow that seemed a portent. ...
http://www.syfy.com/_cache/images/assets/warehouse13/2011-08/gueststars1_1314633...

>21 kswolff: St. Vinnies ,as it is known in Madison, has been prime scouting territory for local booksellers and scouts for years. The book sales bring in lots of money that gets to people who need it.

>22 anna_in_pdx: that review is priceless! Thanks for the link.
I had no idea about Friedman as a person, or the controversy around hm, or much at all apart from his one book I have read. A rich Mall Tycoon huh? Interesting.

From the Salvation Army:

The Talented Mr. Ripley
I'll Take You There by Joyce Carol Oates
CG Jung Speaking
Dreams by CG Jung
The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Canaletto by Christopher Baker -- a nice volume by Phaidon

From Savers:

Flannery O'Connor: the Complete Stories
Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
History of Joseph Smith by his mother -- not a joke, this book totally exists.
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
None Dare Call it Conspiracy by Gary Allen -- the Council of Foreign Relations is bad, or so he says.
Our Heritage -- a history of the LDS by the LDS
Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: George Albert Smith
Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: John Taylor
No Exit and three other plays by Sartre
Man is the Measure by Reuben Abel
Old and New Poems by Donald Hall
More Matter: Essays and Criticism by John Updike

Love to get my hands on that volume of Don Hall poems. Lucky bugger.

OUTER DARK is...magnificent.

30: Of late, I've been actively seeking out poetry volumes at thrift stores. Contemporary poetry is my weak spot. Still haven't found any volumes by Robert Hass, another fave. Prior to buying poetry books, I usually read a poem or two and decide if it's my thang. And if a poet can't sell me with a short poem of two or three stanzas, then he or she probably isn't worth bothering with.

I'm enjoying the Updike reviews and essays, especially as a wannabe amateur reviewer. He has a review of The Discovery of Heaven, but I probably won't read it, because I don't want to have the plot spoiled. But I did glance at a couple of passages and he said a character borrowed her name from Nabokov's Ada -- now there's a good sign!

More from Savers:

Freedomland by Richard Price
The Female of the Species by Joyce Carol Oates
The Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Personal Finance
The First and Second Rumpole Omnibus (omnibuses? rhinoceroses?)
Warhammer: Vampire Counts
Warhammer: the game of fantasy battles

A perfect admixture of hi- and lobrow fare. And a steal, considering the Warhammer books were $2 each. Those books can cost as much as a downpayment on a Saab when they are new.

Another Saturday haul from the FOL used book store:

two finds to make me happy--
Letters to Friends, Family and Editors by Franz Kafka
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, illustrated by Ed Young

and some paperbacks of owned e-books and hard covers--
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Off to Vancouver next week. Any recs for bookstores/hauls?

There used to be a terrific employee-owned/co-op bookstore in Vancouver but the name escapes me. Perhaps someone else...?

#33

Used Bookstores in Vancouver

Lawrence's Books - 41ave and Dunbar. Inventory is a little tired in some areas, but if you're looking for fiction, a good place to look - if you can make it out that far from downtown. Some of the paperback fiction (lit fiction) are older editions but price very reasonable. OK hardback selection if you collect. Weird hours. Four or five hours a day. Opens at 1:00, I think.

McLeod Books - downtown, corner of Pender and Richards. Good fiction, philosophy, art, religion, history sections plus any other categories. What you want in a used bookstore. Collectible editions in many areas. Probably best poetry section in the city, BUT you have to venture downstairs for most of it, along with drama, and much of the "area studies". Downstairs is an absolute disaster. Stacks of books on floor to ceiling in aisles. Don't go down if claustrophobic or unable to silence that internal voice that keeps reminding you just how screwed you'll be in the event of a fire. :-) Don't worry, though, upstairs is truly delightful.

Pulp Fiction - close to downtown on Main St., between 8th ave and Broadway. Well organized store, and thorough fiction selection in trade paperback. If you want to stock up on paperback classics in older editions for little money then you'll also be in luck. Also sells collectible pulp novels, from fifties. Some new stock - beats, arts, pop philosophy, the kind of stuff that appeals to the hipster/'artistic'/gentrified neighborhood. Fun, rewarding experience.

There are more used stores in Vancouver. I think there are a coupe of stores in town that specialize in fantasy, mystery, new age spirituality etc.

Value Village on Hastings - east of Commercial so its perfectly safe in day time. Decent selection if you want the thrift store experience. See also the Value Village on Victoria St., somewhere around the mid-40s.

Hope this helps.

Pulp Fiction is a favorite of mine -- where I got my first editions of Rock Springs and Ninety-Two in the Shade. Well worth a visit.

ROCK SPRINGS...(Sigh)

A GREAT collection of stories. One o' the best.

Had a store credit from last January and finally decided to go for the gusto: Jorge Luis Borges Poesia Completa

(With tears in his eyes) You are a true snob.

And it looks like you are the sole owner of that book on LibraryThing.

Lucky thing.

Hehehe, I'm just learning from the true snob masters in the group.

I spent well over an hour over the bins at the Goodwill Outlet (not a pricey Goodwill RETAIL store, mind you), which is sorta like a cross between Barter Town and the Fall of the Saigon.

Among the hauls: yet another (this one's the 1903 Bibliophilist Library) edition of The Decameron, Another Part of War, Snow. Travels in Hyper Reality, Zen Poems of China and Japan, The Drunken Universe (signed), Salvation on Sand Mountain. Bound for Glory, and the infinitely campy, not at all snobbish, Chop Wood Carry Water.

God, I love thrift shops. Well done, dawg.

A thrift Center!

I doubt I ever read it, but I bought White House Diary by Jimmy Carter the other day because it was signed. I suppose there are worse ways I could spend a dollar. Other than that I haven't found anything too amazing to pass up lately as I really am trying to limit how many books follow me home.

Signed by da Prez? Good grab.

I'll never forget Mr. Carter's nationally televised address to his nation, excerpted in Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story", where he upbraided Americans for their consumerism and superficial spirituality.

And, of course, Ronald Reagan went on to annihilate him in the 1980 election because most folks don't wanna HEAR that kinda shit...

Condition-wise it's only about 8 out of 10 and it's got a gift inscription "To Mom, Christmas 2010" so it'll never be particularly valuable. But for only a dollar it was pretty neat to find.

I'm a little too recent to have any memories of the 1980 election. My earliest memories relating to the presidency is when Reagan was shot.

I think I hear my bones creaking...

I was 11 during the 1980 election and I was watching the returns at home as my mom was out voting. Dan Rather told the West Coasters that it didn't matter what we did. I was really mad and also being young and raised by liberals I thought we should start making tracks for Canada now that the unthinkable had happened and Reagan had gotten elected. I was crying by the time my mom got home.

Yeah, back then I was about 0 for 4 in terms of my votes for successful candidates. I do remember voting for John Anderson....

Had a motley collection of finds from a couple antique stores in Tomahawk, WI:

Five Red Herrings by Dorothy Sayers
Maigret Has Scruples by Simenon
The Swords Trilogy by Moorcock
The Spider's Web and Zipper and his Father by Joseph Roth
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Agee and Walker Evans
Complete Works and Other Stories by Augusto Monterroso
The Island of Crimea by Vassily Aksyonov, translated by the late Michael Henry Heim

And 4 Choose Your Own Adventure books:
The Cave of Time
The Mystery of Chimney Rock
Deadwood City
You Are a Shark

University library sales are now my favorite place to shop. For $21 total:
Stones, Bones, and Ancient Cities by Lawrence H. Robbins
Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski
Time Among the Maya by Ronald Wright
In the Shadow of the Ark by Anne Provoost
The Heartsong of Charging Elk by James Welch
The Epic of Qayaq by Lela Kiana Oman
Folk Songs of Europe by Maud Karpeles
Spiritual Folk-Songs of Early America by George Pullen Jackson
The Medieval Popular Ballad by Johannes C.H.R. Steenstrup
The Troubadours by Robert Briffault
The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child by Carolyn L. Karcher
The Idea of History in the Ancient Near East by Robert C. Dentan
The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt
The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours (Penguin Classics)
And some YA stuff:
A Drowned Maiden's Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz
The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

For $21.00?

That's a great haul.

The local library also had a good book sale this weekend; I only went through one of the rooms:
The New Golden Bough by James George Frazer
Mountain Jack Tales by Gail E. Haley
Lucinda: or, The Mountain Mourner by P.D. Manvill
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly
The Lore of the Unicorn by Odell Shepard
Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaic Ages by M.I. Finley
The Devil in Massachusetts by Marion L. Starkey
The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins
The Prehistory of China by Judith M. Treistman
The Mountain People by Colin M. Turnbull
Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman
Bear Chief's War Shirt by James Willard Schultz
Indeh: An Apache Odyssey by Eve Bull
Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Michael Strogoff by Jules Verne
Rave New World by Lynne Hansen (I think the idea of writing parodies of classic books as SAT vocab practice is hilarious)
An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction - Oxford World's Classic
Pamela by Samuel Richardson
The Hollow Earth by Rudy Rucker
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Now if only I had the time to read all these...

I also went to my library's book sale. This is what I found:

Zuckerman Bound: a trilogy and epilogue by Philip Roth
Lysistrata/The Acharnians/The Clouds by Aristophanes
Moise and the World of Reason by Tennessee Williams
The Roaring Girl and other city comedies -- Oxford World's Classics
The Flanders Road by Claude Simon
Two Brothers by Bernardo Atxaga
Recapitulation by Wallace Stegner
An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears -- Decided to get it after much positive praise by fellow snobs.

From the Salvation Army:

Four Short Novels by DH Lawrence
The Dogs Bark by Truman Capote
The Message in the Bottle by Walker Percy

A few scores in Edmonton (thanks to our pal/colleague Beardo for forwarding me a list of great bookstores). Was in town for a wedding but managed to squeeze in a visit to Old Strathcona Books. Very nice ladies working there, book-lovers both, superb collection of books. Nabbed:

OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE by Tim Scott
FULL DARK HOUSE by Christopher Fowler
FIVE DECADES: POEMS 1925-1970 by Pablo Neruda (Translated by Ben Belitt)
TRAGICALLY I WAS AN ONLY TWIN: THE COMPLETE PETER COOK by, guess who, Peter Cook

Also snagged a few titles at a fundraising book sale sponsored by our local Sports Hall of Fame, including Dylan's CHRONICLES. Cheap books...catch me, I'm swooning.

Wow, lots of big lists of findings. The local Salvation Army came up with a batch of turn-of-the-century potboilers which I passed over along with some woefully water-damaged old Dickens. There was one gem among them, a well-preserved copy of Three Men in a Boat. I look forward to reading it.

'Tis the season for book sales around campus, apparently. I had to anxiously sit through two classes before I had time to run over to a fundraiser sale some student organization was having.

Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton
Autobiography of Brook Farm ed. by Henry W. Sams
Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart
Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America by Jack Weatherford
The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Ogala Sioux ed. by Joseph Epes Brown
The Upper Amazon by Donald W. Lathrap

I mean it this time, no more acquiring books. I'm out of room...

The autumn trip to the bookstore.

Goodwill:

Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth, Modern Library edition.
Columbine by Dave Cullen, hardcover.
Daughter of Fortune, Allende hardcover.
Will You Always Love Me?, stories by Joyce Carol Oates, hardcover.
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion.

Over to Books n More:

Rosshalde, Hesse in a delicious old Bantam edition. Love those.
Washington, D.C. by the late Gore Vidal.
August, 1914, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, hardcover.
The Quincunx by Charles Palliser, hardcover.
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney.
Plus two upgrades from mass market editions to hardcovers - The House of Mirth and The Vicar of Wakefield.

From Goodwill:

The Quest of the Sacred Slipper by Sax Rohmer
Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone
The Superior Person's Book of Words by Peter Bowler
Uncentering the Earth by William T. Vollmann

From Savers:

Runaway: stories by Alice Munro
The Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics by David Crystal
Once Upon a Telephone by Ellen Stern

... and a Don Ho rocks glass.

From the local Library Bookstore:

Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock
The Space Wolf Omnibus by William King
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
At Random by Bennett Cerf
The Futures by Emily Lambert

From the Salvation Army:

Snow by Orham Pamuk
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

I picked up the Fallada book at a recent sale as well--why is everyone dumping their Fallada?

61: Because, by and large, the human race is found wanting, as illuminated in the pages of Ferdinand Celine, Thomas Bernhard, and Karl Kraus

I fail at avoiding getting new books - lasted less than a week this time. There was another campus fundraiser sale, this time hosted by the anthropology graduate students, so how can I resist buying books for my own major?
The Columbian Exchange by Alfred W. Crosby
New Lives for Old by Margaret Mead
Sex and Repression in Savage Society by Bronislaw Malinowski
The Outline of History Vol. II by H.G. Wells
Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents by Robert Wauchope

And then I scooped up some of the free discarded review copies of World Literature Today:
Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles by Fabio Bartolomei
The Island of Last Truth by Flavia Company
Land and Blood by Mouloud Feraoun
Exile by Jakob Ejersbo

Gotta have that world lit! Well done.

A nice haul from Savers:

Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates; the Wonderland Quartet, Book 1.

And a peculiar selection of used CDs:

"I Get Wet" by Andrew WK
"Beethoven/Liszt"
"12 Inches of Snow" by Snow -- remember him? Had that 90s song "Informer."

And from Barnes & Nobel as a birthday present for myself:

Building Stories by Chris Ware

Oooooh Building Stories. I'm envious!

Stopped by the Goodwill Outlet to see if there was any "fresh" material. After all, I'd been there over a week ago. To my dismay, they yanked all the bins before mine eyes, wheeled them behind some magical swinging doors and replaced each one with 6 new, 60-cubic foot shallow tubs piled with new selections. This is apparently done daily.

How am I ever to return to work, knowing this is happening?

Among the haul of 0.25 books were still more stories, The Canterbury Tales and Hard Candy.

67: To quote a character from The Wire: "All in the game, yo." To assuage your angst, it is heartening to know that the bookshelves at Goodwill (and Savers and the Salvation Army) are 90% crapola. It's scoring that sweet 10% that's so fun and challenging. My buying habits are completely different at a thrift store than, say, Half Price Books and/or a library book sale.

So right you are Karl. But that 10% represents hundreds of titles. I kick myself in the ass (not an easy musculoskeletal feat) every time that I recognize a book previously purchased for some ghastly sum, like 2 or 3 bucks.

At the last used book sale at the Rochester Hills Library (Michigan), I got:
Serena, In the Lake of the Woods, A Reliable Wife, and Practical Magic.

Stumbled onto a local Goodwill sale of ALL books at 49 cents each! Not much time to browse but got

Naked Lunch
Winter's Bone
The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
13 Million Dollar Pop
Wake of the Perdido Star
White Jazz

some classics mixed with some newer fun fiction.

71: That is a deliciously eclectic mix.

Whee, Just got 6 ex. library books for $5.20.

Hot six ok, ok not that much, but for 20c.
Backyard Insects Australian!
Riddled with Life
The Demon Under the Microscope "Sulfa", an underestimated drug before Penicillin.
Mammals of Victoria Aussi AND Victoria!
Snake oil Science one of my pet peeves, especially Homeopathy. Well debunked.

Finally I can hold my head high in this august group
with your envy inducing buys :-)

My city's university publishing house had a clearing sale recently. Yesterday I went to their place to pick up the goodies. 14 books, 1e each. My back still hurts me ; )

But I got lots of different good stuff. From a bilingual edition of Petrarch's Itinerarium to various writings of Galileo, to a dissertation on Lem's philosophy, to a bunch of books on the history of Polish Jews, to books on economic history.

Great haul ; )

From the Salvation Army:

Music on Film: Cabaret by Stephen Tropiano
They Would Never Hurt a Fly by Slavenka Drakulic
The Wanderers by Richard Price
The Essential Gandhi
Tales of the Old World, a Warhammer anthology.
Shibumi by Trevanian
Otherwise by Jane Kenyon
... and 4 classical music CDs.

From Savers:

British English from A to Zed
Fox's Book of Martyrs -- a 1926 edition.
Morgan by Jean Strouse
... and 3 classical music CDs and Twisted Sister's epochal "Stay Hungry" (1984).

From the local Library bookstore:

Indiana by George Sand
Embers by Sandor Marai
The Fall of the House of Habsburg by Edward Crankshaw
Waterlily Fire by Muriel Rukeyser
Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

35 - thanks for the Vancouver recs, turns out there is a lot more to do in that city than hunt bookstores, but I did make it to McLeod's. My wife thinks that is the way our home library is headed. Could have spent all day in there, but we left without anything before the stacks fell in on us. Actually, I was looking for Douglas Coupland's City of Glass, but they didn't have the revised edition. Picked up a new copy from one of the campus bookstores downtown.

53 - Jealous of the Ignatius Donnelly. Someone needs to write a bio on this Renaissance man. I read every novel of his I could get my hands on while in law school. Even found someone's dissertation on him. If I came across Doctor Huguet, I might knock someone over to get to it.

59 - would love to find a copy of the Vollmann. I'm currently trying to finish the David Foster Wallace entry in the series (on infinity).

76: I couldn't believe my luck either on the Vollmann. Maybe because I wasn't actually looking for that book of his. I'm still trying to find Riding Toward Everywhere

76: I wasn't aware of Donnelly as a novelist other than Caesar's Column. Are any of his other works still in print?

I was really happy to find his Atlantis book at the library sale. It's the only time I've run across his works in a physical store or sale, though I picked up The Destruction of Atlantis when it was 75% off on Dover's website a couple years ago.

@ 4: HOLY COW! You're a lucky fellow! I have all these except the last two and it took me some months to gather them (I bought all used too, so the price was very good).

I love Under a Glass Bell! I love almost all her stuff, to be completely honest. I'm totally biased when it comes to Anaïs! Get the 7th The Diary of Anais Nin if you find it for a good price too - it has photos. :)

Well, as for me, I'm very happy I found two out-of-print books for very good prices on eBay:

Morrison, a Feast of Friends
Jim Morrison: An Hour For Magic

Erm, yeah I love Jim. Waiting for these two beauties to arrive in my den!

I also got Basic Writings of Nietzsche... I have read many of his books already, but for space reasons I wanted ONE book with his most important writings and there, I got it. And the translation is superb! But it was rather expensive, unfortunately. *snif* Libraries here in Brazil seem to think that books (imported ones, specially) are a luxury item, for some reason.

I only resent that the book does not include The Anti-Christ and Twilight of the Idols which I love to bits. But I may just try to find two cheap editions of these ones, they are very slim books and won't clog my already limited space.

All in all, a great purchase! :D

More free books from World Literature Today:
Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos
The Eyes of Venice by Alessandro Barbero
Almost Never by Daniel Sada
Phaedra by Marina Tsvetaeva
Islands: How Islands Transform the World by J. Edward Chamberlin
The Obscene Madame D by Hilda Hilst
The City of Bohane by Kevin Barry

78: It looks like some have been in print recently or as e-books (they are out of copyright). I came to him by discovering Doctor Huguet in my University library. Written in the 1890s, it tackles the reconstruction race question in an interesting, thought-provoking manner. I just found a nice article discussing the novel at http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/41/v41i06p286-294.pdf.

From various and sundry antique stores, used bookstores, etc. around Tomah, Sparta, and Necedah, WI:

Ritual of the Order of the Eastern Star
Gaslight Gaieties
Diogenes the Cynic
The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch
Inside USA by John Gunther
The Lost City by John Gunther
House of Light by Mary Oliver
The Women Troubadours by Meg Bogin
Poison Penmanship by Jessica Mitford
Days and Nights by Konstantine Simonov

Got a great haul from a little used bookstore while off visiting relatives.

Felix Mendelssohn: A Life in Letters, hardover. This had been sitting there since the early nineties and the lady at the register gave it to me free on account.
George Orwell: A Life by Bernard Crick.
The Nancy Mitford Omnibus, four novels in one.
Kristin Lavransdatter in three volumes by Sigrid Undset.
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim.
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories by Carson McCullers.
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulk.
A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White.
The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric.
Ulysses by James Joyce.

A trip in to Saskatoon yesterday and (finally!) a decent book haul to report. From ValuVillage, Turning the Tide and McNally Robinson:

WOLF HALL by Hillary Mantel (heard a lot about this one)
A GENTLE MADNESS by Nicholas Basbanes (examining book-lovers and bibliophiles down through history)
THE FRY CHRONICLES by Stephen Fry
TALES OF PIRX THE PILOT/RETURN FROM THE STARS/THE INVINCIBLE by Stanislaw Lem
JAMES JOYCE by Edna O'Brien
BAD LAND (AN AMERICAN ROMANCE) by Jonathan Raban

Also made sure the latter two stores were well-stocked with my latest titles for the on-rushing Christmas season. Plus a great meal and a chance to hang out with my wife most of the day.

All in all, a great trip.

A major post-Black Friday haul.

From the Library Bookstore:

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery -- SIGNED!
Candle in the Wind by Solzhenitsyn
Bodies in Motion and at Rest by Thomas Lynch
The Late Mr. Shakespeare by Robert Nye
Great Private Collections of Imperial Russia

From the Salvation Army:

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian by Wallace Stegner
On Germany and Britain by Tacitus
Blood and Guts by Roy Porter
Sermons by Peter J. Gomes
Black Holes and Baby Universes and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
The Magical Chorus by Solomon Volkov

From Savers:

Terrorist by John Updike
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
On the Yard by Malcolm Braly -- a NYRB Classics edition
Faulkner: the man and the artist by Stephen B. Oates
Fu Manchu's Bride by Sax Rohmer

Nice haul. Good luck with Fu Manchu.

86: I just finished writing my homage to penny dreadfuls for a recent podcast, so I've become more fascinated with Rohmer's Yellow Peril pulps.

I scored the second signed copy of Mr. Citizen by Harry Truman that I've found at thrift stores. I live in the Kansas City area which is Truman's old neighborhood so maybe it's not that amazing. I owe this one to a leaking faucet and the sneaky asshat that stole a piece out of the first box of parts I bought. I stopped at a hardware store to buy more parts and checked out the nearby thrift store since I was already there.

I also picked up All the Traps of Earth by Clifford Simak. Simak really does shine in comparison to other SF that was being written at the time.

I developed an appreciation of Truman after reading David McCullough's bio. A man who really grew into the presidency.

A friend sent me Oliver Sacks' latest, HALLUCINATIONS. Makes my fingers tingle just looking at it.

He was the speaker at my college graduation back in 1990.

Smart man. Must have been a terrific speaker.

A nice haul from Goodwill:

An Altogether New Book of Top Ten Lists by David Letterman
A Hazard of New Fortunes by William Dean Howells
'Tis a Pity She's a Whore by John Ford
DDR Design by Taschen
Mega Machines: the biggest machines ever built
Battlestar Galactica 2: The Cylon Death Machine by Glen A. Larson
"Our Crowd": the great Jewish families of New York by Stephen Birmingham
Catechism of the Catholic Church -- which includes a back cover blurb by Pope John Paul II, "I laughed, I cried, I plotzed!"

Where do you find ROOM for all those books, Karl? I live in a house and we're sorely pressed for space with maybe 3,000-3500 books.

Lots of bankers boxes. Plus I have a bunch still at my parents home back in Wisconsin. Things are getting a tad snug.

Got a hardcover copy of Riding Toward Everywhere by William Vollmann via Alibris for $1 plus shipping.

I haven't been here for a while...

A local bookstore was having a buy-one-get-one-free sale on Everyman's Library books, so I grabbed Orwell's essays and Asimov's Foundation trilogy.

Took 30-40 books back to the house over Thanksgiving break and another trip home, only to buy some more at yet another campus book sale:

Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki
To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia (NYRB Classic; there was a surprising number there, about 5, but most I wasn't interested in)
The Work of Reconstruction by Julie Saville
Envisioning Cahokia
Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn
With William Burroughs: a report from the bunker
Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac
A Devil in Paradise by Henry Miller
Prose Works other than Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy

The Sorrows of Young Werther, and a few other virtually-free titles, from the local library. A nice Penguin Classics copy.

From the Rochester, MN Library bookstore:

A Russian Gentleman by Sergei Aksakov
Clinging to the Wreckage and The Summer of the Dormouse by John Mortimer, Vols 1 and 3. Drat! Now I have to find vol. 2.
A Dictionary of the Underworld by Eric Partridge
Dark Wood to White Rose by Helen M. Luke

Couple of good books, picked up cheap:

BOXER BEETLE by Ned Beauman
BONHOEFFER: PASTOR, MARTYR, PROPHET, SPY by Eric Metaxas

Thank you, Santa!

Stopped in at the Goodwill.

Upgraded from mass markets of Dubliners and The Age of Innocence to a hardcover and good trade, respectively.
Maigret in Holland, hardcover.
Stoner by John Williams.
A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry.
The Reader to see what the fuss is about.
Water for Elephants to see what the fuss is about.
84 Charing Cross Road.
Erotic Poems compilation, an Everyman Pocket Poets edition, hardcover.
History of Art by H.W. Janson, beautiful Abrams oversized hardcover.
Red-Color News Soldier by Li Zhensheng, photographs of the Cultural Revolution.
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, hardcover. Well, if Francine Prose liked it....
To Make a Duck Happy, a pet memoir, gift for my mother. Hardcover.
Eleni by Nicholas Gage.
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass, a social study of the poor in Britain.
The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche, to join the "forgotten disasters" part of the library (a sizable subset).
Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire, to join the same.
If By Sea: the Forging of the American Navy from the Revolution to the War of 1812, hardcover.
Civilization: A New History of the Western World.

Then went to Books n More.

Peer Gynt.
Four Jacobean City Comedies, Middleton, Jonson, Massinger, Marston.
The Genius of the German Theater, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Buchner, Wedekind, Brecht.
A Streetcar Named Desire, library binding with photos from the original included.
The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.
Across the River and Into the Trees, Hemingway.
Winter in Majorca, George Sand translated and annotated by Robert Graves.
O Pioneers!.
The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag.
Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende, hardcover.
P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words, hardcover.
Rumor and Reflection, the wartime diary of Bernard Berenson.
The King Arthur Trilogy by Rosemary Sutcliffe.
Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn.
And three more gothics by reliable authors Mary Stewart and Virgina Coffman: My Brother Michael, The Rest is Silence and a two-for-one Of Love and Intrigue/The Chinese Door.

The bookshop has by now capitalized on its "and more." Got eight DVDs out of the place as well (The Road, The End of the Affair, Perfume, Lars and the Real Girl, De-Lovely, The Musketeer (looks like trash but Tim Roth is in it), Jeremiah Johnson, Three Kings).

There, now I'm done bragging.

Like...wow. Amazing.

A nice haul from Savers:

A Run from the Mountain by William Groninger
How to Rule the World: a handbook for the aspiring dictator by Andre de Guilliaume
Among the Believers by VS Naipaul
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy -- found it in the Religion section.
Bloodbrothers by Richard Price
The Crimson Fairy Book by Andrew Lang

I think the Kindle store is bad for me... I have no self-control and if I can get a book at the click of a button, I just might...

A Moment in the Sun - John Sayles
The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay
The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt
A Naked Singularity - Sergio De La Pava
Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry

And I'm thinking - since I can never find a physical copy of the damn thing - of getting Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano as well.

A MOMENT IN THE SUN is magnificent. I also liked the DeWitt western, though not as much as a lot of other folks.

And what can you say about LONESOME DOVE...it's huge, epic, yet not a word wasted.

Good choices, all around.

My Christmas haul included Ulysses (with a lot of notes) and Team of Rivals - looking forward to some good reading come 2013...

#108--both smashing great.

My Christmas gifts included ON HISTORY by Howard Zinn and THE SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN by Stephen Greenblatt.

Smart reading for the coming weeks.

I just picked up a handful of (mostly 2nd-hand) books, including a 1968 copy of Gorky's Childhood from Progress Publishers, Moscow, "Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". It's in pretty nice condition, and in a fairly unique format (to me at least), scored for €4. I'm totally psyched!

With $50 of Barnes and Noble cash...

Sense & Sensibility
Don Quixote
The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories
Pere Goriot
The Tipping Point

That's the last of my book spree for a while...

My son and I made our traditional post-Christmas gift-card-bearing pilgrimage to Powell's yesterday. I picked up The Crying of Lot 49, Down and out in London and Paris, a novel by Hanan es-Shaykh (on Ian's recommendation) and a book of short stories called Conjugations of the verb to be that was on a sale shelf and looked interesting. He got an Asterix book and assorted fantasy titles.

That Orwell memoir is smashing. Just don't plan on dining out much, after reading it.

Found a copy of Pincher Martin by William Golding and an anthology of Bahai Prayers at a used bookstore in northern Wisconsin. And in Minocqua, WI, a tourist town, got a copy of The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm by William Manchester and Paul Reid.

A surprise Goodwill sale with all books at 49c! And very little time to browse, sadly.

The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch
Where River turns to Sky by Gregg Kleiner
The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll

LAND OF LAUGHS is Carroll's first book and still his best. I've read some Welch (years ago)--he's very good.

From Goodwill:

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk -- I'm a little wary because the title reeks of twee literary preciousness.
Pocket Guide to Chicago Architecture

A Sister Machine Gun CD and a 6-CD box set of classical CDs featuring Alfred Brendel, both for $2 each!

Grabbed a few books in Saskatoon today:

LEGACY OF ASHES by Tim Weiner (History of the CIA--National Book Award winner)
ONE MATCHLESS TIME: A LIFE OF WILLIAM FAULKNER by Jay Parini
OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL by Sean Wilsey
THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD by Kevin Brockmeier
MATTER'S END by Gregory Benford

Nice haul from FOL Used Book Store:

How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom
Circles by James Burke
Naked Came the Manatee a novel by Carl Hiaasen and twelve other Florida authors
Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
The Immaculate Deception by Iain Pears
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
JR by William Gaddis
Talking it Over and Nothing to Frightened of by Julian Barnes
Eleanor Rigby and Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

All for $10 (the Coupland's were nice foreign editions, $2 each).

Made a trip to central NC specifically for book-buying; stopped at Granddaddy's Antique Mall, which has several booths with cheap ($2-$3) history & anthropology books and at Fifth Street Books, a warehouse where everything is 99 cents. There's lot of nice Oxford World's, Penguin, and Virago Classics in this haul.

Lady Audley's Secret by M.E. Braddon
The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister by Aphra Behn
Corinne, or Italy by Madame de Stael
Idylls of the King by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Scholars by Wu Ching-Tzu
Egil's Saga
The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
Song of the Sparrow by Lisa Ann Sandell
Feed by M.T. Anderson
Early Irish Society by Myles Dillon
Long Before Columbus by Hans Holzer
Supernatural Horror in Literature by H.P. Lovecraft
The Search for the Tassili Frescoes by Henri Lhote
Work and Workmanship Among the Shakers by Edward Deming Andrews and Faith Andrews
The Ancient Kingdoms of Peru by Nigel Davies

Plus about half a dozen 18th century novels (Fielding, Swift, Goethe, Sterne, Goldsmith, Defoe) to sell through my family's re-enacting sutler business.

117> You clearly know nothing about Pamuk if you think one of his novels might be "twee literary preciousness".

121: I was referring to the title, not to the content therin.

One would wonder if the title translated well. It is sometimes very difficult to convey titles in translation because they may be an idiom of some cultural depth in the original without such connotations in the target language. Or, perhaps a marketing firm chose the title in English.

From the Rochester, MN library bookstore:

The Shadow Factory by James Bamford
Dictionary of Italian Slang
The Classic Theatre: Volume II, edited by Eric Bentley
The Gambit Book of Popular Verse
The Dying Animal by Philip Roth
Pillage by Brantly Martin
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry

From Savers:

The Reformation by George L. Mosse
Corker's Freedom by John Berger
Talk of the Devil by Riccardo Orizio
Moonchild by Aleister Crowley
And I found the soundtrack to Orlando, "The Very Best of Edith Piaf," and a Rachmaninov piano concerto.

Picked up a few history books the other day.

Richard the Lionheart by Anthony Bridge.
The Conquest of Morocco by Douglas Porch.
The Siege at Peking by Peter Fleming.

Also a novel by Barry Unsworth, The Rage of the Vulture.

And a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra from HalfPriceBooks.

Treasures from Wheaton Library bookstore:

An Outcast of the Islands by Joseph Conrad (Airmont)
In a German Pension and The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
The Three-Way Split pulp fiction by Gil Brewer
The Tale of Genji old Modern Library ed. with dust-jacket
Welcome to the Great Mysterious Lorna Landvik
Two Sentry Editions:
Names on the Land by George R. Stewart
The Emancipation of Massachusetts by Brooks Adams
The White Man in the Tree by Mark Kurlansky
A new Virago - South Riding by Winifred Holtby
and
Madame Tussaud by Michelle Moran

A nice New Year's haul.

From the Salvation Army:

Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates
Imperial Life in the Emerald City
Assembling California by John McPhee
Great Fortune: the epic of Rockefeller Center by Daniel Okrent

From Goodwill Outlet:

The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas
The Philosopher in the Kitchen
In Cold Blood
The War of the Roses The bloody Rivalry for the Throne of England
The Speckled Monster
Suite Francaise
Foucault's Pendulum

and a small pile of NYT bestsellers as fodder for swapping.

This semester's free books for informal Honors College reading groups:
The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach
Poems by Hermann Hesse
Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
Fairy Tales by Hermann Hesse

Broke my self-imposed ban on book-buying (why do I bother trying?) at Whitlock's Book Barn:

Henry James : Collected Travel Writings : Great Britain and America : English Hours / The American Scene / Other Travels (Library of America)
The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers by Lytton Strachey
Collected Poems by Auden
The Perfect Wagnerite by Shaw
Richard Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier: Comedy for Music in Three Acts (The Metropolitan Opera Classics Library)
a lovely book of color plates by Chagall
The Medium is the Massage
and The Unreal America Architecture and Illusion and Kicked a Building Lately? by the recently deceased and lamented architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable

130> I have tried the same ban with little success!

I caved and bought a few things from Barnes & Noble last weekend:

Culture and Value by Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Story of O and Return to the Chateau by Pauline Reage -- for my upcoming second CCLaP series (rationalization: for research!)
Homicide by David Simon

>130 gravitysbook:

Whitlock's??? The mecca of the Yalies? The Book Barn is indeed heaven. It is NPR-classical music-in-the-background nirvana. The root of all solace and bliss. And, afterwards, you can stroll down to the most magnificent Hemlock ravine in the Planet. You can read Apuleius while listening to the song of the Louisiana Waterthrush and the chip of chipmunks, amongst ancient circular millstones and shards of schist.

But my oh, my. Aren't we the one-per-cent-er.

OK, you want quantity instead of quality? From the West River Valley, drive over that ancient basaltic ridge, over to Skiff Street, to the Quinnipiac Marsh. You know, where the Bald Eagles roost out by the railroad tracks, just north of East Rock Park (more basalt) on State Street. The Goodwill Outlet sells bins of books for 2 bits a paperback, 4 bits a hard cover. It's a bit dusty, a bit dystopian, but oh, what fun.

Stopped in at Goodwill.

Ironweed - William Kennedy.
Swallow - D.M. Thomas, hardcover.
Single & Single - John le Carre, hardcover.
A Flag for Sunrise - Robert Stone, hardcover.
A Winter's Day - Henrik Tikkanen, hardcover. The first part of a very bitter and mocking family memoir by a Finnish author.
Journey Across Russia: The Soviet Union Today - another unbeatable set of photographs from The National Geographic Society, hardcover.
Shakespeare - Anthony Burgess.

Over to Books n More.

Poetry and Prose - John Donne.
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography - Eleanor Flexner, hardcover.
The Soccer War - Ryszard Kapuscinski, hardcover.
The Last Days of Pompeii - Bulwer-Lytton, hardcover.
Bread and Wine - Ignazio Silone.
Stories and Prose Poems - Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Galileo - Bertolt Brecht.
Luther - John Osborne.
Loot - Joe Orton.
Indian Ink - Tom Stoppard, hardcover.
The Plato Papers - Peter Ackroyd, hardcover.
Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry.
Crossing to Safety - Wallace Stegner.
The Dollmaker - Harriet Arnow.
Death in Summer - William Trevor, hardcover.
Half a Life - V.S. Naipaul.
The New Theatre of Europe 2 - Brecht, Grass, Schehade, Fratti.
Phineas Finn - Anthony Trollope, Oxford hardcover.

Also found three DVDs. The Life of Emile Zola, Algiers and...um...Ocean's Eleven.

Wow.

I have a couple of D.M. Thomas books but haven't heard of SWALLOW.

Robert Stone is one of my five favorite American novelists. OUTERBRIDGE REACH is...miraculous.

Fantastic grabs. Way to go...

#132: Homicide is so good, so darkly funny. But I still cant get over that the guy who played LT. Dennis Mellow in The Wire is Sgt. Jay Landsman from "Homicide. Not how I pictured him at all.

136: You are correct that Sgt. Landsman played Lt. Mellow. By Homicide, you mean the book, not the show, right? Since Landsman was the basis for Det. John Munch on "Homicide," the TV show.

137: Yep, David Simon's wonderful book.

I may have to read a bunch of police-related books, starting with Homicide. I have the New Centurions by Wambaugh (lightly fictionalized post-60s LA cops) and Times Square, about NYC beat cops in 1978. I did find it fascinating how Richard Price, in the Homicide intro, likens David Simon to Edith Wharton

I found Freud's Moses by Yerushalmi for a few dollars.

The Complete Nonsense Book of Edward Lear
Memoirs of Hadrian-Marguerite Yourcenar

A box arrived from BetterWorldBooks:

Buon Appetito, Your Holiness: The Secrets of the Papal Table by Mariangela Rinaldi.
Charlemagne's Tablecloth: A Piquant History of Feasting by Nichola Fletcher.
Culture of the Fork: A Brief History of Food in Europe by Giovanni Rebora.
Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonied Tsypkin.
Guillotine: Its Lore and Legend by Daniel Gerould.
Ibsen and Hitler by Steven F. Sage.
The Knights of Rhodes by Elias Kollias.
Young Nelsons: Boy Sailors During the Napoleonic Wars by D.A.B. Ronald.

Another campus book sale:
The History of Doctor Johann Faustus ed. by H.G. Haile
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
And I'm thinking of going back tomorrow and picking up Eva Luna, though it'll probably be gone by then.

Two much-anticipated arrivals today: Alexei Sayle's memoir STALIN ATE MY HOMEWORK and Andrei Tarkovsky's diaries, TIME WITHIN TIME.

>133 Sandydog1:

Re: Whitlock's. Beautiful description. But you forgot the horsies.

# 142: Ever try Thriftbooks?

Thrilled to find Liberty or Love! and Mourning for Mourning in the mail today!

105> Child of God by Cormac McCarthy -- found it in the Religion section. -- that's funny. And its for that very reason whenever I'm in a "thrifty" outlet I scan all the sections, even the "Romance" dreck. Had I not that one day, A Glastonbury Romance would not be standing on my shelves.

Recent one dollar grabs:

Don Segundo Sombra by Ricardo Güiraldes
Ward 7 by Valeriy Tarsis
Fontamara by Ignazio Silone
The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron by Janet Lewis
Raintree County by Ross Lockridge
Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis by Paul O'Keefe

CHILD OF GOD will absolutely put the fear of God into you--perhaps that explains its mis-shelving?

149: From the snippets of McCarthy I've read, he does master a beautiful hybrid of Faulknerian Gothic majesty and King James Bible Old Testament bloodthirsty Psycho-God, the mental 3-year-old with a handgun who hardened Pharoah's heart for shits and giggles and the one who enjoyed slaughtering thousands of Israelites for conducting a census.

I think the mis-shelving had to do with the clerk who put anything in religion with the words "God" and "Religion." I wouldn't be surprised if I found some Dawkins and Hitchens secreted away in those shelves.

Lester Ballard was truly a child of god.

An eclectic grab bag from Savers:

Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke
Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
Burmese Days by George Orwell

Some short stories from St. Vinnie's; The Devil's Larder by Jim Crace, Mr. Lincoln's Wars by Adam Braver and Home from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean.

Also another in a series I've been tracking down, The Drifter's Wheel by Phillip DePoy.

Selected letters of Pound and selected poems of Sorrentino, both brand new but on sale for a few dollars.

A nice haul from the local library:

A Tidewater Morning by William Styron
The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thompson
Don't Call It Night and Black Box by Amos Oz
The Spider's House by Paul Bowles
The Selected Stories by PG Wodehouse -- a vintage Modern Library edition from 1958. A Valentine's Day present for my wife.

Savers was having a sale, so you know what that means:

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
Slouching Toward Gomorrah by Robert Bork
Without an Alphabet, Without a Face by Saadi Youssef
Havana Style -- a Taschen book
The Dark Side by Alan R. Pratt
Neon Vernacular by Yusef Komunyakaa
3 Tragedies by Lorca
The Uncollected Wodehouse and The Most of Wodehouse
Vox by Nicholson Baker
The Torch is passed ... -- about JFK
Mormon Hymns and Meeting the Mormon Challenge with Love -- For my hobby of collecting Mormon ephemera.

156: Some rather obscure Wodehouse stuff there. I might have to follow you down that road. I started reading Wodehouse in no particular order in my teens (must have been on papyrus), and now have great difficulty remembering which ones I've read. It didn't seem to matter - there were plenty of them and would always be a new one to pick up.
Now, after extensive research, I have come to the shattering realization that I've read not only all the Wooster and Blandings books, except Summer Lightning, which I've just started, but also most of the other better known offerings. This is extremely depressing. Wodehouse is still fun to re-read, of course, but I'd love to miraculously discover a Bertie Wooster that I'd somehow missed.
Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure I haven't read Summer Lightning too.

157: I have not read any Jeeves and Wooster, but I did read Service with a Smile A dollop of sunshine to Evelyn Waugh's rather dour view of things.

#157 Have you read Wodehouse's THE WORLD OF MR. MULLINER? That's a nice, fat 600-page compilation.

158: I suggest you remedy your Wooster deficiency urgently. Right Ho Jeeves would have to be my favorite, if only because it contains the Market Snodsbury Grammar School prize-giving scene. I have always considered this the funniest thing I have ever read and recently found this view supported by none other than Stephen Fry:
"The masterly episode where Gussie Fink-Nottle presents the prizes at Market Snodsbury grammar school is frequently included in collections of great comic literature and has often been described as the single funniest piece of sustained writing in the language."

159: That's a good tip. I've read some of the stories, but not all by any means.

BIG haul of used books during our brief getaway to Regina and Saskatoon:

DREYER: IN DOUBLE REFLECTION
THE TRIAL (Film script of the movie by Orson Welles)
BOLIVIAN DIARY (Che Guevara)
THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA
THE HISTORY OF VIKINGS
THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY (Boethius)

etc.

From Whitlock's book sale last weekend:

Twenty Poems by Rupert Brooke
The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy
How to Become a Musical Critic by Shaw
The Western Canon by Harold Bloom
Benjamin Franklin: Silence Dogood, The Busy-Body, and Early Writings (Library of America)
The Life of John Maynard Keynes
an illlustrated edition of Strachey's Eminent Victorians
The Callas Legacy
and a smattering of ENO opera guides/librettos

Found a couple of cheap (=$4) DVDs at Savers:

Labyrinth, with David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, and a few Muppets.
A Kino Video collection of avant-garde films from the 1920s and 30s.

I need to check their DVD selection more often. Also of note, they had Veronica Mars, Season 2 DVD box set. Although not much use without Season 1.

More from Savers:

Rumpole and the Primrose Path by John Mortimer
Flying Saucers by CG Jung
Hermann Hesse Poems
Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks

Over the last few weeks I have scoured the op-shops and second hand places and come up with:

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Penguin Modern Classic), John le Carre
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, Paul Torday
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Famished Road, Ben Okri (Booker winner 1991)
Astonishing the Gods, Ben Okri
Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner (Booker winner 1984)
Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
The Time Machine (Penguin Classic), HG Wells
The Red Pony, John Steinbeck
The Antelope Wife, Louise Erdrich
Under the Clock, Tony Harrison (poetry)
Tales from the Arabian Nights

$48 worth in total, as all are in very very good condition for second hand.

Good score!

Does Thriftbooks online count?

Li Po and Tu Fu: Poems Selected and Translated with an Introduction and Notes (Penguin Classics)

The Risk Pool by Richard Russo

The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories (Family Happiness, The Kreutzer Sonata & Master and Man) by Leo Tolstoy

Jude the Obscure (Modern Library Classics) by Thomas Hardy

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

Notes from the Underground and The Gambler (World's Classics) by Fyodor Doestoevski

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Travels in Alaska (Modern Library Classics) by John Muir

The Virginia Woolf Reader

Sketches from a Hunter's Album (Classics) by Ivan Turgenev

A nice haul from the Salvation Army:

Battlestar Galactica by Glen A. Larson
Two Lives of Charlemagne by Einhard and Notke the Stammerer -- the latter sounding a character from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Why are We in Vietnam? by Norman Mailer
Galileo by Brecht
Occidentalism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit
Mormon Country by Wallace Stegner
The Tempting of America by Robert Bork
The Temple by Stephen Spender

'Got good and dusty at the Goodwill Outlet. 'Some of the take:

The Language of Life
The Mind Test
Selected Poems of Ezra Pound
The Collected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats
Before the Knife
Revolutionary Road
No God But God
The Fall of the Sparrow
...and a really bitchin' copy of Valmiki's Ramayana

This week I dreamt something about a used bookstore-antique shop. I remember seeing a copy of Richard Ellman's Oscar Wilde on a table. Imagine my surprise when I found the book today at my favorite thrift shop. I had to buy it.

In other news, last week I came across a used copy of Poetry of Survival by Daniel Weisbort on Amazon for $11.00 (with shipping and taxes) allegedly in "very good condition." It came in this week but it was kind of crappy. I was going to return it but they were nice enough to refund it. So I got a crappy copy but free. Not bad.

Quick run into the Big City (Saskatoon) to pick up my son at the airport--stopped at two thrift stores, nabbed the following titles:

THE STORIES OF HEINRICH BOLL (Translated by Leila Vennewitz)
WEREWOLVES IN THEIR YOUTH (Michael Chabon)
THE CASE FOR GOD (Karen Armstrong)
THE STORY OF FILM (Mark Cousins)

Gems.

Found a 1917 edition of Richard Carvel by Winston Churchill for $1.

Goodwill Outlet, less than $5:

The Death of King Arthur
The Jeeves Omnibus 4
Therese Raquin
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
Wives and Daughters
The Bishop's Man
Under the Net
Lucky Jim
Othello New Perspectives

et multi al

And, Bald Eagles are easily seen nesting in the nearby Quinnipiac Marshes.

It's not often, but Ya know Cliff, it's days like these, I'm glad I don't live in Saskatchewan!

I picked up a few from my local library bookstore this past weekend:

Birdsong
Man's Search for Meaning
All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians and Artists
Leaf Storm and Other Stories
The Mists of Avalon

I also picked up 2 kids' books for my 6-year old nephew and niece.

It's only a little space in a corner of the Santa Clara City Library branch but I tend to find certain gems like these..... I've yet to try their Friends of the Library Book Sale where they sell you grocery bags for $5 and you can fill them up with as many books as you want. I'm trying to make some room on my shelves before I go on that binge.

It was the hoarder (me) against the semi-pro pickers, at the Good Will Outlet Store, today. Another haul for less than $5. For an additional $5, I could have been the emperor of both Paperbackswap and Bookmooch. A target-rich environment. But I showed massive amounts of restraint.

The haul, including, but not limited to:

The Portable Hawthorne
The Ancestor's Tale
The Oak and the Calf
Loving Living Party Going
Black Narcissus
Talk to the Hand
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Enigma of Arrival
Rescue the Earth! - I've always loved anything by Farley
The every-campy US Army Survival Manual and Inside the Magic Kingdom

The nitrile-gloved cashier (the place is dustier than a mine near Yazzie Mesa) studied, studied, a beautiful hardcover, very early 20th century mushroom text. She asked, "is this like a book that's for college" I replied, "Mycology? Well, maybe post-grad.......no, please, I'll pay the full 50 cents."

"Suit yourself"

Picked up The Indians of New Jersey: Dickon Among the Lenapes (reprint of a 1938 anthropological novel) and the Pantheon Northern Tales for $2 each at an antique store, then ordered these discounted from Bookcloseouts:

Dominion by Calvin Baker
Brave Enemies by Robert Morgan
The Ballad of Tom Dooley by Sharyn McCrumb
No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel - goes well with A Guide to Being Born that should be coming from the March batch of Early Reviewer books
The Mirage by Matt Ruff
In Utopia by J.C. Hallman

A pile of remaindered books:

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
Traveler Of The Century
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates
Lost Everything
The Land of Green Plums
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
Make Room! Make Room!
Seeing the Light: Inside the Velvet Underground

The Sontag journals and Yates stories make me green with envy.

A little handful of European candy.

Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov.
Sarcophagus by Vladimir Gubaryev.
Anti-Semite and Jew by Jean-Paul Sartre.

From the Salvation Army:

The Titanic Disaster Hearings
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins

From Savers:

The Clown by Heinrich Boll
The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White
The Hat on the Bed by John O'Hara
Wilderness and American Night by Jim Morrison
The Castle, a translation based on the restored text.
Parzival
Daughters in My Kingdom: the history and work of relief society, an LDS product.
Tyranny on Trial by Whitney Harris

This is why I've given in to ebooks. There Just isn't enough space!

From Goodwill:

The Universe According to G.K. Chesterton
Company K by William March
Killing Mister Watson by Peter Matthiessen
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco
The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells
Last Words by George Carlin
Wormholes by John Fowles

As is traditional, I came back from last weekend's Eastercon with around a dozen sf paperbacks. As is perhaps less traditional, they were all by women sf writers...

Women of Wonder, Pamela Sargent
More Women of Wonder, Pamela Sargent
The New Women of Wonder, Pamela Sargent
Millennial Women, Virginia Kidd
A City in the North, Marta Randall
Journey, Marta Randall
Dangerous Games, Marta Randall
Star Rider, Doris Piserchia
Change the Sky and Other Stories, Margaret St Clair
Walk to the End of the World, Suzy McKee Charnas
O Master Caliban!, Phyllis Gotlieb
Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy

I have the WOMEN OF WONDER book, bought it at a library sale for 50 cents. Appears to be an interesting antho, look forward to seeing your review.

Drove the 40 minutes to town, stopped in for bookshopping.

Goodwill:
1776 - David McCullough.
In Search of Moby Dick: The Quest for the White Whale - Tim Severin, hardcover.
Marya: A Life - Joyce Carol Oates, hardcover.
Notes from Underground - Dostoevsky, Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.
A Train in Winter - Caroline Moorehead.
Plato's Republic: A Biography - Simon Blackburn, hardcover.
Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators and Waiting Rooms.
And I updated to a hardcover of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell while I was at it.

Books n More:
Saw The Hours in a non movie-tie-in edition for once and so finally made the purchase.
Macbett - Eugene Ionesco.
The Notebook of Trigorin - Tennessee Williams, hardcover.
The Night of the Iguana - Williams again.
The Lover, Tea Party, The Basement - Harold Pinter.
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Hemingway, hardcover.
Lantern Slides - Edna O'Brien.
Outerbridge Reach - Robert Stone, hardcover.
Lions, Harts, Leaping Does and Other Stories - J.F. Powers.
Michael and Natasha: The Life and Love of Michael II, the Last of the Romanov Tsars - Rosemary and Donald Crawford.

OUTERBRIDGE REACH is my favorite Robert Stone novel. Very, very brilliant...and bleak.

Great haul.

From the local library bookstore:

Another Life by Andrew Vachss
Writings from the New Yorker by EB White
The Age of Reagan by Sean Wilentz
Beautiful Necessity: the art and meaning of women's altars by Kay Turner -- since they couldn't find a price on it, it was free.
Superorganism by Bert Holldobler and EO Wilson

From Barnes & Noble:

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
Invitation to a Beheading by Nabokov
From the 50% off bin: Damage by Josephine Hart
Chinese Propaganda Posters by Taschen

Nonfiction from the 'ol Goodwill Outlet:

Civilization and its Discontents
A History of Ancient Greece
The Great Hunger
Birds of America (for 4 bits, I just couldn't pass up that great Fuertes artwork).

Speaking of birds, I dragged the pup to Beinicke Rare Book Library (Yale University) today, so we peeped at Audubon's elephant folio. We also had our noses over the Gutenberg Bible. Current estimate if that one ever comes up on Amazon: 35 million dollars.

...I guess that's about 280 million bits.

~waves hello~

My favorite bookstore, Housing Works Used Bookstore and Cafe, has a monthly 30% sale the first weekend of the month. I usually stop by and pick up a few things....

The 42nd Parallel and 1919 by John Dos Passos (now I must find the third)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (with the pretty pretty Coralie Bickford-Smith cover)
The End of the Story by Lydia Davis
Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann
Miramar by Najīb Maḥfūẓ

Now all I have to do is find the bookshelf space in which to put them :/

Great nabs!

First edition Poets in a Landscape for $5.

Great book, great find!

But for me, 'too much jang, DA; I wouldn't have knicked it for any more than 50 cents.

But then again, my TBR-owned pile is somewhere in the 600 range...

From Savers:

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Quite Honestly by John Mortimer
The Outcast Generation and Luminous Moss by Taijin Takeda
Young Men in Spats by PG Wodehouse
Selected Myths by Plato
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol -- a Pevear-Volokhonsky translation!
Reading Judas by Elaine Pagels
Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold
House of Holes by Nicholson Baker

And another 90 minutes of bliss in the filthy blue polyethylene bins of the Goodwill Outlet:

Favorite tales from the Arabian Nights' Entertainments
Propaganda and the Public Mind
Fatal Decision
The Jeeves Omnibus 4
Rosemary's Baby
The Annotated Huckleberry Finn

et multi al. 5 bucks

I got an Amazon gift card for filling out a survey thing, so I grabbed the new collection of Leo Strauss' writings about Maimonides.

From a local used book sale this morning:

The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
Push Comes to Shove: An Autobiography by Twyla Tharp
A nice book of Klee and Kandinsky prints

All in hardcover, plus a German/English dictionary, a recent Leonard Maltin movie guide, and a dvd. All cheap enough to pay for with some stray cash I found in the car. Nice morning.

From Goodwill:

Tartuffe and other plays by Moliere
The Information by Martin Amis
The White Plague by Frank Herbert
The Friends of Richard Nixon by George V. Higgins
Inez by Carlos Fuentes
Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane
The Supreme Court: how it was, how it is by William Rehnquist
Fanfare for the Area Man by the Onion

From the Salvation Army:

Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux -- in hardcover
My Mother, Demonology by Kathy Acker -- also in hardcover
The "Genius" by Theodore Dreiser
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
Memories of my Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Extra Terrestrials Among Us by George C Andrews -- Llewellyn's PSI-TECH series
Old New York by Edith Wharton
A Jacques Barzun Reader
Look of the Century by Michael Tambini -- a DK guide on design.

Damn, that's a good haul.

Someone recommended me Darconville's Cat a few months back. Still haven't found a copy, though.

Bit of an obscure Fuentes there - nice. I'm on the lookout for Vlad.

198: Splurging is so much easier when nothing costs over $3.50. Alexander Theroux is highly recommended, especially if you like word-drunk, curmudgeonly, Ivy League Catholic intellectuals who don't give a good god-damn about the literary mainstream. An Adultery is a good gateway novel, since it is Theroux's most straightforward plot-wise. I've read that and Laura Warholic, but have not yet tackled the Cat.

Not a bad book haul at the annual library sale today:

THE WINSHAW LEGACY & THE HOUSE OF SLEEP by Jonathan Coe
MILLENNIUM: THE HISTORY OF OUR LAST THOUSAND YEARS (Felipe Fernandez-Armesto)
THE CLOISTER WALK (Kathleen Norris)
THE GI'S WAR (Edwin Hoyt)
HISTORY OF THE ARABS (Tenth Edition) (Philip K. Hitti)
HOUSE OF MEETINGS (Martin Amis)
SOLAR (Ian McEwan)
THE WOLF OF THE PLAINS (Conn Iggulden)

plus a few others for Sherron.

The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. In four volumes, unabridged hardcover. Mardrus and Mathers, translated into French and thence to English. Pity about how they rendered the title but I'm happy with the rest of it.

Sounds lovely--covers gorgeous as well (no cover appears on the LibraryThing book page)?

http://www.magiccarpetbooks.com/shop_image/product/003987.jpg

Other than the gratuitous copyright, mine all look like this.

Simple and austere. Love it.

Oh yes, Housing Works Used Bookstore had their monthly sale this weekend, which I can rarely resist. So, I picked up:

Buddenbrooks
The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman
Caleb Williams
The Shadow Lines
The Summer Book

The local public library had a "better books" sale this weekend, and today everything was 1/2 price:

The Glittering Plain by William Morris (Newcastle Forgotten Library)
The Hidden Hand by E.D.E.N. Southworth
Rip Tide by Kat Falls
The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, all 4 vols., ed. by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris
El Cid: The Making of a Legend by M.J. Trow
Serendipity and the Three Princes ed. by Theodore G. Remer
The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah by J. William Harris
American Colonies (Penguin History of the United States) by Alan Taylor
"Bayonet! Forward" by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

grubbed through about 16 tons at the Goodwill outlet and snagged a few, amongst the 15.99 tons of children's books, cookbooks and Harlequin romances:

Solzhenitsyn by C Moody
Survival in Auschwitz
the Upstart Crow
On the Eve
A House of Mr. Biswas
Midnight Cowboy (the ubiquitous Book Club Edition)
The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley
Daily Life in Chaucer's England
Ireland

Bookcloseouts.com is having a 50% off sale on "all paperback fiction." Though it's not really "all" the paperback novels, I found several to scoop up at good prices:

Pyg by Russell A. Porter
One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus
The Harbor by Ernest Poole - Penguin Classics
Homo Zapiens by Viktor Pelevin
Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders
Deathless by Catherynne Valente
Edit: and The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong by Fanny Trollope

And I passed up on about a dozen more because I was trying to spend only about $25, including shipping...

>208 SusieBookworm:
I clicked right over to that sale, got distracted by a few other things, and when I returned my cart was empty. Probably a good thing, since so many of my books live in stacks on the floor, in boxes, or on the bed in the so-called spare room.

Gawd. I sound like a hoarder. It can't be true, I've got only two cats.

Irene: I went through an internal debate of buying-not-buying-buying when the sale went up, since I'm at the beginning of the "in boxes" stage. But I can't be a hoarder if books are the only thing I own an excessive amount of, right?

One person's "excessive" is another person's "barely adequate". At least I have the excuse of suffering from a chronic condition that prevents me from doing much of anything. I amuse myself with books.

Well, I found more to add to my "moderately adequate" book hoard today by accumulating a stack of tattered paperbacks from various used book and antique stores around town:

Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan at the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tik-Tok of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Glinda of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Across the Zodiac by Percy Greg - which upon closer inspection appears to be abridged, unfortunately
The Alteration by Kingsley Amis

From the Salvation Army:

Memoirs of Egoism by Stendahl
Wait until Spring, Bandini by John Fante
Mozart: traces of transcendence by Hans Kung
Emily L. by Marguerite Duras
Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos
Old Testament Student Manual and Church History in the Fulness of Times, both by the LDS

The library keeps bringing up more books to add to the book sale tables and so today I picked up a short story collection by one of my faves, Jim Shepard, as well as a door-stopper of a FILM ENCYCLOPEDIA, a collection of Italian folktales edited by Italo Calvino, the novella THE VANISHING (creepiest movie I've ever seen), Allan Massie's CALIGULA, collections of tales by Mary Amis (HEAVY WATER) and Edward P. Jones (ALL AUNT HAGAR'S CHILDREN).

And a couple of others. For five bucks. Love it.

From Savers:

Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de siecle by Elaine Showalter
Iphigenia in Tauris by Goethe
Existentialism and Human Emotions by Sartre
Age of Roosevelt by Arthur Schlesinger -- all 3 volumes, 1st edition, w/ dust-covers, in very good condition.
And a couple of Mormon teacher's manuals.

Seems to be a lot of Mormon-related stuff in Minnesota, Karl. Is your area a real hotbed for Brigham Young's people?

216: Well, Rochester is an ultraconservative bubo on an otherwise liberal state and there's no better embodiment for a conservatism frozen in amber than the denizens of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I regularly see pairs of missionaries riding around on their bicycles, looking a cross between Iowa insurance agents (they're so clean-cut and nice!) and East German Stasi (who also travel around in pairs, punch-drunk on their laughable repressive ideology).

It's also one more kooky branch of human existence I'm fascinated by: along with Nazism, South African apartheid, mass murderers, cults, UFOs, etc. And as co-authors (along with the Catholic Church) of California's evil Prop 8, I have an ulterior motive in looking into their indoctrination manuals. (And like Harold Bloom, I have a bent admiration for this "most American of religions" -- see The American Religion by Harold Bloom.) Know thy enemy and such.

217: We occasionally get Mormon missionaries coming down our road. We're a bit off the beaten track, and in the summer they can have worked up a sweat getting here, especially as they are not really dressed appropriately for a North Carolina summer. My policy is to offer them a sit-down and a glass of water, so long as they don't talk about Mormonism. So far, my offer has been gratefully accepted and we've had some nice chats about where they are from, etc.

...and you never, EVER bring up "South Park's" expert and savage dissection of Joe Smith and the idjits who believe his twaddle...

219: With two red-haired girls, I would never bring up South Park at all. The "Gingers" episode caused them a lot of grief at school. Nobody had ever thought of teasing them about their hair before. Especially as it is stunningly beautiful. No bias in that statement, of course.

And I'm the lucky Charlie Brown who actually got to marry his red-haired girl. Viva redheads!

Mormon and have impure thoughts? Well, just it 'Turn it off!':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiaO9rP46WU

@ 214: Is that The Vanishing with Sutherland and Bridges? Or the original, which I've never seen?

#223 The original Dutch version. The director, George Sluizer, got a call one night after its release and a voice said "Your film really creeped me out"...and it was Stanley Kubrick.

Talk about high praise.

I've seen that film once but I honestly could never endure watching it again. Powerful but utterly disturbing and harrowing. I don't think the re-make even came close.

Sluizer directed the remake too.

And Netflix has the original, and it goes to the top of the queue. They have the remake available for streaming, of course.

It's a horrible creepy film, but it's not one you can watch more than once.

I'm with you there, Ian.

'A real eclectic haul from the Goodwill Outlet today, including:

Petrarch's Lyric Poems
The Autobiography of Malcom X
Take a Girl Like You
Variety of Men
John Dewey the Political Writings
Arabian Nights
The Words
The Upstart Crow

Oh, and a 1943 printing of this 1916 gem:

Famous Hussies of History

I just couldn't pass that one, up.

229: I clicked on Famous Hussies of History and my jaw dropped to learn it was penned by Albert Payson Terhune, author of the collie stories I really loved reading when I was around 12. Man, that's hilarious. I hope there's a copy in my Goodwill someday.

Too bad the author wasn't Anthony Trollope.

From the Salvation Army:

The Onion Ad Nauseam
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
Goodbye 20th Century by David Browne
Brooklyn Noir 2
The Story of a Street by Frederick Trevor Hill
The Looking Glass War by John LeCarre
Aaron's Rod by DH Lawrence
Biggles in the Underworld by Captain W.E. Jones

From Savers:

Symbolic Logic and the Game of Logic and Pillow Problems and a Tangled Tale by Lewis Carroll
Poems, Protest, and a Dream by Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz
Ferdydurke, Pornographia, Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz
The Variety of Life by Colin Tudge

230

Lad, Chips, Critter, Wolf, Bruce

...Madame Recamier, Adrienne Lecourvreur, Helen of Troy, Peg Woffington, Cleopatra, Lola Montez, Lady Blessington, Ninon De L'Enclos, George Sand, Madame Du Barry, Madame Jumel...

233: Famous Hussies gets pretty good reviews on Amazon (well, one anyway), so I'm sold. It is now on my wishlist awaiting its opportunity to get bought.

-------

Picked up a few books from random online sellers:
In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner (which has been on my wishlist for a couple years).
Yvain: The Knight of the Lion by Chretien de Troyes.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
Crime and Punishment in Early Maryland by Raphael Semmes.
Sophocles I, a pristine copy of the Lattimore edition.

Also a DVD of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, directed by Julie Taymor. This will be my first opera. Hope it's good.

We were visiting Sherron's folks who live in a small town in Manitoba this past weekend and lo and behold their local library was having its book sale.

Someone came in and dumped their collection of old science fiction book-of-the-month titles like IMPERIAL EARTH, THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS, A SCANNER DARKLY, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP and numerous others. Twenty-five cents each, my friends, for first edition hard covers.

Sometimes I have dreams where this happens but seldom am I so fortunate in waking life.

Whoo-hoo!

The box from Hamilton arrived today. Four beauties for a song.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Scenes from the Bible,
Dore's London,
and Milton's Paradise Lost.

All hardcover, three from Chartwell (and Milton from Arcturus), all showcasing the illustrations of Gustave Dore. Ecstatic.

Lovely. I recently saw some of Dore's illustrations for Dante's INFERNO and was blown away.

237: Dore's Dante was meant to be in my order but they ran out of stock at the last second.

I'll get it someday though...

I can't recall who did the translation for that particular volume. It wasn't Pinsky...

Another sale at Housing Works Used Bookstore yielded:

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Diviners by Margaret Laurence
Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
The Busconductor Hines by James Kelman

From Savers:

Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger
D!rty Spanish by Juan Caballero
A Perfect Peace by Amos Oz

From the Salvation Army:

The Third World War by General Sir John Hackett
Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton
Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Collected Short Stories by Graham Greene
Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
Couples by John Updike
Caracole by Edmund White
The Romantic Rebellion by Kenneth Clark
Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
Down by the River Where Dead Men Go by George Pelecanos
The Control of Nature by John McPhee
Tales of Hoffman
Making History by Stephen Fry

And since it was a 50% off sale, I got all those for under $10!

232- three by Gombrowicz, nice.

I am consumed by jealousy. I have run out of space.

242: It was an omnibus edition.

243: I have no space. Books are consuming floor-space at an egregious clip. Then again, I live in Rochester, MN, which is basically an arts and culture dead zone. On par with Iran and Salt Lake City, except those two places have decent architecture. At least there's the occasional roller derby bout to break up the monotony and stultifying mall monoculture that eats at the soul and numbs the brain. Blecch, I can't wait to relocate to someplace less repressed, workaholic, and conformist. Like Levittown

>244 kswolff: Bad things happen when you leave them on the floor. Some of mine have gotten peed on.

I assume you can get decent medical care in Rochester.

I hear the Twin Cities area is nice. Ann Arbor.

245: They do have decent medical care, so long as one has no problem being in lifelong penury once one has been treated. But hey! America has the best health care in the world and it shouldn't be allowed to change or get reformed! It's like living in a corporate town a la DH Lawrence, except instead of a coal mine it's a giant sprawling hospital. Imagine the movie Bladerunner but with a voice-over track from a Pepperidge Farm commercial. (A corporate conglomerate spot-welded to a toxic small-town nostalgia.) Probably one of the few people who watched The Wire and said to myself, "Damn, I miss the suburban sprawl and intractable urban problems of Milwaukee" At least there are great ethnic markets here, so as to alleviate the stultifying homogeneity of whiteness.

While I know I have way too many books, I'm getting ready for a periodic purge. Mainly of review copies, a few LT Early Reviewers, redundant copies, etc. Good at the time, definitely enjoyed them, but not "keepers."

I had Storm of Steel on my Wishlist for a long time and was lucky to find a used Penguin edition at the local thrift store. I also discovered I have 2 copies of Couples by John Updike, so I'll drop the other copy off at Goodwill or something. No reason to have 2. Although I own 2 copies of Darconville's Cat and The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann.

246: I could use a copy of Darconville's Cat.