Book Hauls!

[Diggler]

Took off to the local op-shop (which I haven't been to in a while) and picked up.

Barabbas by Par Lagerkvist
Cape Fear by John Macdonald
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Plus a few old westerns for the Wife's father.

[murphy]

Arrived today:

Tales of the Otherworld by Kelley Armstrong
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Desert Spear by Peter Brett
Much Fall of Blood by Lackey, Flint & Freer

[GOLLUM]

An interesting haul today that I would like to detail a little.....

Kingdom Of This World - Alejio Carpentier *Whether this great Cuban novelist is seen as the true father of magic realism or its principal progenitor this acclaimed novel is generally accredited as being the first time the term was ever implied/named in literature (marvelous reality). An historical work it tells the story of the Haitian revolution and its aftermath through the central character, exploring reality's prism through variant cultural perceptions of subjects including voodoo, nature, violence and history.

Tommaso and the Blind Photographer - Gesualdo Buffalino *Not the novel Night Lies I had anticipated but still a well regarded novel and the last by the great Sicilian fabulist. This clever story represents the musings of its eponymous narrator, a former journalist who's become a "Voluntary Trappist and general factotum in a block of flats" still under construction. Tommaso joins his photographer friend Tir (after Tiresias, Sophocles' blind seer) in meditative observations of the landlocked ship of fools that their errant neighbors comprise, in a wistfully amusing tale that's equal parts love story, murder mystery, and gentle parody-of social and criminal organizations, the limitations and pleasures of voyeurism, and the infuriating haphazardness of writers' runaway imaginations.

The True Deceiver - Tove Jansson. *NYRB edn. A work by possibly Finland's most famous writer of children's tales who also wrote adult literature. The lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others is the subject of this, Tove Jansson’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson takes a darker look at the subjects that animate the best of her oeuvre. Snow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody’s talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for the white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, appears to be Katri’s opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has something Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna’s life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusion.

Soul Of Wood - Jakov Lind *NYRB edn. A writer described whose work in general is described as part nihilistic, metallic, absurd, intricate, black and bestial in nature, Soul of Wood made Jakov Lind’s reputation as one of the most boldy imaginative postwar German writers and remains his most celebrated achievement. In the title novella and six subsequent stories, Lind distorts and refashions reality to make the deepest horrors of the twentieth century his own. Set during WWII, the title story revolves around one Wohlbrecht, a peg-legged veteran of World War I, who smuggles a paralyzed Jewish boy to a mountain hideout after the boy’s parents have been sent to their deaths. Abandoning the helpless boy to the elements, Wohlbrecht returns to Vienna, where, having been committed to an insane asylum, he helps the chief psychiatrist to administer lethal injections to other patients. But Germany is collapsing and the war will soon be over. The one way, Wohlbrecht realizes, that he can evade retribution is by returning to the woods to redeem “his” hidden Jew. Others, however, have had the same bright idea.

[Daisy-Boo]

Originally Posted by Diggler

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

I've read all three books in the Millennium series (the 3rd one is The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest) and I enjoyed all three books very much. Larsson's research was impeccable and Lisbeth Salander is one of the most intriguing literary characters I've ever encountered.

[Mouse]

I've just bought a Garth Nix book for £1.99! Bargain. Also bought a grammar book.

[Talysia]

From the library:

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
And Another Thing, Eoin Colfer
The Queen of Sinister, Mark Chadbourn

[murphy]

Arrived yesterday:

Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis (It's 1939. The Nazis have supermen, the British have demons and one perfectly normal man caught in between.)
A Taint in the Blood by S. M. Stirling

[HoopyFrood]

Small library haul:

Horror: The Film Reader - a collection of critical essays about...well, horror film, funnily enough.
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen: Collected Screenplays 1 - Just to see how the professionals do it.
This House is Haunted: The Investigation into the Enfield Poltergeist - Hoping to write a film involving ghostly things and investigation into such, plus I just like reading about this kind of shizzle.

[Talysia]

Also from the library:

Divine Endurance, by Gwyneth Jones
Changes, by Jim Butcher. Been waiting for this one!

And from a charity shop: Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies.

[Daisy-Boo]

This Dead Body - Elizabeth George (the latest Inspector Lynley novel)
The Last Theorem - Arthur C Clarke & Frederik Pohl
Far Cry - John Harvey

[Mouse]

I had arrive today my bargain Garth Nix book The Fall. And the Oxford Book of Grammar and Punctuation.

Also had a book for my birthday today from my bro called Jane Slayre which is basically Jane Eyre with vampires.

[Connavar]

New books haul.

The Klondike Tales by Jack London -i liked this qoute:

“He was an adventurer and a man of action as few writers have ever been . . . the excellence of his short stories has been almost forgotten.”—George Orwell

Swords From The West by Harold Lamb

[CyBeR]

I swore, I really swore I wouldn't get anymore books for a while. The pile next to the bed keeps staying the same size, no matter how much I read from it.
Ufff...
Got today:

Thomas Morus - "Utopia" -> I always did wonder about this work, and I found it cheap today...sooo, you can guess.
P.G. Wodehouse - "Right ho, Jeeves" -> until I'll let my mom have it, I'll read it...feel in love with this character.
Arthur C. Clarke - "2001: A space odyssey" -> some dude was selling this rather cheap on a forum and I couldn't let it slip by; it's even in English.

[GOLLUM]

Today...

Ice – Vladimir Sorokin *NYRB The contemporary “Master and Margarita”. Drugs, sex, and violence are the currency of daily life in Moscow. Criminal gangs and unscrupulous financial operators run the show. But in the midst of so much squalor one mysterious group is pursuing a long-meditated plan. Blond and blue-eyed, with a strange shared attraction to a chunk of interstellar ice, they are looking for their brothers and sisters, precisely 23,000 of them. Lost among the common herd of humanity, they must be awakened and set free with a crude hammer fashioned out of the cosmic ice. What is Ice? A gritty dispatch from the front lines of the contemporary world, a gnostic fairy tale, a hard-boiled parable, a New Age parody, a bitingly funny fantasy in the great Russian tradition that begins with Gogol and continues with Nabokov, a renegade fiction to set beside those of Philip K. Dick and Michel Houellebecq, and the most ambitious and accomplished novel yet by Vladimir Sorokin, the stylistic virtuoso and master of provocation who, in the words of The Moscow Times, is “the only living Russian author who can be called a classic.

A High Wind In Jamaica – Richard Hughes *NYRB The acclaimed novel that was the first published in the NYRB line and described by Alice Sebald as a “psychological deconstruction of childhood innocence, a fever dream, a laugh-out-loud comedy”. Richard Hughes’s celebrated short novel is a masterpiece of concentrated narrative. Its dreamlike action begins among the decayed plantation houses and overwhelming natural abundance of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, before moving out onto the high seas, as Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of a crew of down-at-the-heel pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.

Envy – Yuri Olesha *NYRB One of the delights of Russian literature, a tour de force that has been compared to the best of Nabokov and Bulgakov and considered by Nabokov as the greatest Russian novel to ever come out of the Soviet Union., Yuri Olesha’s novella Envy brings together cutting social satire, slapstick humor, and a wild visionary streak. Andrei is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of the food industry who intends to revolutionize modern life with mass-produced sausage. Nikolai is a loser. Finding him drunk in the gutter, Andrei gives him a bed for the night and a job as a gofer. Nikolai takes what he can, but that doesn’t mean he’s grateful. Griping, sulking, grovelingly abject, he despises everything Andrei believes in, even if he envies him his every breath. Producer and sponger, insider and outcast, master and man fight back and forth in the pages of Olesha’s anarchic comedy. It is a contest of wills in which nothing is sure except the incorrigible human heart.

A County Doctor’s Notebook – Mikhail Bulgakov. With the ink still wet on his diploma, the twenty-five year old Dr Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of rural Russia which, in 1916-17, was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone or electric light. How his alter-ego copes (and fails to cope) with the new and often appalling responsibilities of a lone practitioner in a vast country practice - in blizzards, pursued by wolves and on the eve of Revolution - is described in Bulgakov's delightful blend of candid realism and imaginative exuberance.

[dask]

Originally Posted by GOLLUM

Today...


A High Wind In Jamaica – Richard Hughes *NYRB The acclaimed novel that was the first published in the NYRB line and described by Alice Sebald as a “psychological deconstruction of childhood innocence, a fever dream, a laugh-out-loud comedy”. Richard Hughes’s celebrated short novel is a masterpiece of concentrated narrative. Its dreamlike action begins among the decayed plantation houses and overwhelming natural abundance of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, before moving out onto the high seas, as Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of a crew of down-at-the-heel pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.

Just read about this in Stephen King's DANSE MACABRE today, said great things about it making me want to look for it next time out. Glad to hear you liked it, too.

As for me: VATHEK by William Beckford, another from the list of Gothic must-haves J.D. supplied me with. Unfortunately it's neither the Penguin nor Ballantine he recommended, but a 2009 Wordsworth; but in the soup kitchen of the secondary market you take what you're handed with a grateful nod. This is actually an anthology, the full title being THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO VATHEK & NIGHTMARE ABBY. Castle I have already, Nightmare I'm not so sure unless it's tucked away in another anthology somewhere. Five dollars in near mint condition with an extremely nice cover painting by Jonathan Barry, "The Borgo Pass". Edited with a six page introduction by David Stuart Davies.