Book Hauls!

[Extollager]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

Dale: I don't recall ever reading Munby (though I may have, many years ago). I'll have to look that one up. I do have Rolt's collection, though; and it is a fine addition to this school of supernatural fiction.

dask: Impressive! I envy you several of those items, I do....

Some or all of the Munby stories were written, I believe he said, for a "newspaper" that prisoners of the Germans during WWII were allowed to publish.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Extollager

That More Tales book was something I acquired when I was a kid. I have a memory, or maybe just an impression, of asking my eighth grade teacher to read the Hodgson. Anyway, this book was almost certainly my first encounter with the great M. R. James and with W. H. Hodgson. "The Book" was one of my first experiences of the "cool" effect of Latin. I remember that, having read Ransom and Merlin's Latin dialogue in C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, I told my 9th-grade English teacher that I would like to know Latin. His response was: Why? It's a dead language. Well done, Mr. Paulson.... NOT. (But he was a good guy anyway.)

Yes, it's a great book... and was one of the earliest anthologies of weird fiction I ever owned (the others being the previous title and one called simply Ghosts and Things, which also included writers such as Henry James, Arthur Machen, Oliver Onions, etc.) As for the Latin... yep. Sounds much like the responses I got when I expressed an interest in it. Due to that and other things, I never did learn it properly, but I still love the language and have picked up more and more of it over the years. I have also come to the firm conviction that we're a lot poorer for not learning both Greek and Latin... especially those of us who enjoy reading and are writers....

Originally Posted by Extollager

Some or all of the Munby stories were written, I believe he said, for a "newspaper" that prisoners of the Germans during WWII were allowed to publish.

Thanks for that information. I also ran into a reference late last night I had long forgotten about... a student of Bierce's who also wrote a book of ghost stories that I am going to have to look up: Emma Dawson's An Itinerant House....

[GOLLUM]

Today...

Sketches By Boz - Charles Dickens *This must be one of the most gorgeous ever looking bookcovers penguin has published in the black classic series. A magnificent Benjamin Robert Haydon painting adorns the cover with the shiniest black lacquer you're ever likely to see applied to a paperback. Inside accompanying the text are a series of wonderful black and white sketches of 1830s London. This is not one of Dickens most accomplished works being his first published 'book' but in combination with Pickwick Papers provides an instructive introduction to what was to follow and....I haven't got it, hence my excitement at having secured this copy. Blurb: Charles Dickens' first published book, "Sketches by Boz" (1836) heralded an exciting new voice in English literature. This richly varied collection of observation, fancy and fiction shows the London he knew so intimately at its best and worst - its streets, theatres, inns, pawnshops, law courts, prisons, omnibuses and the river Thames - in honest and visionary descriptions of everyday life and people. Through pen portraits that often anticipate characters from his great novels, we see the condemned man in his prison cell, garrulous matrons, vulgar young clerks and Scrooge-like bachelors, while Dickens' powers for social critique are never far from the surface, in unflinching depictions of the vast metropolis's forgotten citizens, from child workers to prostitutes. A startling mixture of humour and pathos, these Sketches reveal London as wonderful terrain for an extraordinary young writer. "Sketches" is a remarkable achievement, and looks towards Dickens' giant novels in its profusion of characters, its glimpses of surreal modernity and its limitless fund of pathos and comic invention.

[Devil's Advocate]

Just bought two books from the Kindle store. That's the bad part about ebooks - the convenience of buying them from the comfort of your own home could very well result in buying more and more... I actually had to make a conscious effort on my part to cut down on purchases in the last few weeks.

Anyway, the books are:

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

and

Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence

[Extollager]

BTW, click here to see an illustrated article about a London bookshop loaded with atmosphere:

http://onebookontheshelf.wordpress.c...rens-bookshop/

[antiloquax]

Bought Yoga 2.0 (on my Kindle). Interesting self-published book that challenges the way we look at Yoga in the west.

[HoopyFrood]

Got in from work about an hour ago and found an Amazon package for me. So confused. I haven't ordered anything in -- well, years, book-wise. I opened it to find a very early birthday present from a friend. It was Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way, the follow-up to his If Chins Could Kill. I really enjoyed this latter, so hopefully this one'll be just as awesome.

[Connavar]

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
The Sufferings of Young Werther by J.W Goethe
The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle(Vintage)
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov(Vintage)


The first 3 books i bought for my brother who wanted books as his birthday gift. Im hoping to make him like broader scope of literature and start liking classics and grow from there. He asked help with reading outside his comfort zone which is modern fantasy epics.

[j. d. worthington]

Good luck with that, Conn. You're certainly giving him a wide variety from which to choose, and I hope it does indeed send him off down many a fascinating path in years to come....

[pyan]

Payday yesterday, which means books! Completed my set of Amber Benson'snovels, with Death's Daughter and Serpent's Storm.

Anyone else found that the olde - er, more mature they become, the fluffier the reading? Or is it just me reverting?...

[dask]

Not since hanging around here. Now I'm delving into literary criticism/history, and old books for the sake of being old books --- not reprints but the real deal. Glad Halloween is coming as it's forcing me to break away and read some good horror like THE MONSTER CLUB. Sounds fluffy but it ain't. Almost cried when the humgoo got killed.

[Connavar]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

Good luck with that, Conn. You're certainly giving him a wide variety from which to choose, and I hope it does indeed send him off down many a fascinating path in years to come....

I need someone in my own family who shared my love for mainstream classic literature, other fields outside SFF.

He likes SF somewhat my brother so i was really disappointed i couldnt buy him 1984 because the book was sold out in the bookstore.

I was calculating saying Goehte is great epic 1800s, Heller is modern great/satire and Doyle is one of the best storytellers in his era. Werther was a book that moved me emotionally very much.

The best thing is my brother doesnt know which books i sent him since he lives in Umeå in Northern Swedish for Uni classes and he must read the books because they are gifts

[Allegra]

Originally Posted by Extollager

BTW, click here to see an illustrated article about a London bookshop loaded with atmosphere:

http://onebookontheshelf.wordpress.c...rens-bookshop/

It looks like a modern day fairy tale bookshop! Noted down for my next time in town. Thanks for sharing the link.

[GOLLUM]

OK, today...

Memoranda - Jeffrey Ford *Second of the trilogy by Jeffrey Ford, one of the best contemporary authors in the field. Pretty much everything Ford touches turns to gold in the form of multiple awards including Theodore Sturgeon award, multiple World Fantasy Awards, Edgar Allan Poe, International Horror Guild, Nebula and Hugo awards. Th influence of Kafka is fairly clear. Blurb: In the Well-Built City, the Master, Drachton Below, rules with total power and his justice is partially determined by Physiognomy, the pseudo-science of judging a person by his physical features. More than just an alternate history or Earth, the world of the Well-Built City is Ford at his finest, with bizarre creatures, trees, foods, drinks, customs—nothing is mundane in the writings of Ford. From the hallucinations of the drug, Beauty, to the destruction of buildings from a headache, the reader will find nothing like he has ever read before.

The Beyond - Jeffrey Ford *Final of the trilogy. Blurb: Jeffrey Ford's World Fantasy Award-winner The Physiognomy introduces Cley, master of a twisted and terming science in a nightmare city. In the brilliantly audacious Memoranda, the reformed physiognomist embarked on a surreal quest through the mind of the monster who imagined the dark metropolis. Now comes the third and final leg of Cley's bizarre life journey.

Crack'd Pot Trail - Steven Erikson *Fourth of the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas.

Hellstorm's Hive - Frank Herbert *Latest in the SF Masterwork series. Blurb: America is a police state and it is about to be threatened by the most hellish enemy in the world: insects.When the Agency discovered that Dr Hellstroms Project 40 was a cover for a secret laboratory, a special team of agents was immediately dispatched to discover its true purpose and its weaknesses - it could not be allowed to continue. What they discovered was a nightmare more horrific and hideous than even their paranoid government minds could devise.

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett *Classic crime fiction, part physiological novel showing Hammett's literary prowess. Blurb: This 1929 novel features the nameless detective employed by the Continental Detective Agency, and hence called the "Continental Op." The novel's plot combines four short stories that are not tightly linked. As the Op says, "Plans are all right sometimes. And sometimes just stirring things up is all right." The "stir-it-up" approach prevails in Hammett's first novel, which emphasizes brilliant scenes, a traditional first-person narrator, dialogue that is funny, and action that is highly stylized, rather than plausible plotting or characterization.

The Moon and the Bonfires - Cesare Pavese *NYRB edn. of the late great post-war Italian novelist Pavese's last and arguably greatest novel. Blurb: The nameless narrator of The Moon and the Bonfires, Cesare Pavese’s final masterpiece, returns to Italy from California after the Second World War. He has done well in America, but success hasn’t taken the edge off his memories of childhood, when he was an orphan living at the mercy of a bitterly poor farmer. He wants to learn what happened in his native village over the long, terrible years of Fascism; perhaps, he even thinks, he will settle down. And yet as he uncovers a secret and savage history from the war—a tale of betrayal and reprisal, sex and death—he finds that the past still haunts the present. The Moon and the Bonfires is a novel of intense lyricism and tragic import, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that has been unavailable to American readers for close to fifty years. Here it appears in a vigorous new English version by R. W. Flint, whose earlier translations of Pavese’s fiction were acclaimed by Leslie Fiedler as “absolutely lucid and completely incantatory.”

[Rodders]

I just picked up "The Lost Fleet: Beyond The Frontier" by Jack Campbell.