Book Hauls!

[GOLLUM]

Originally Posted by creynier

I know it's not new but Umberto Eco's "Kant and the Platypus" is one of the best books i've ever spent money on and one day I'm sure I'll be able to read it! lol.

I have all of Umberto Eco's translated fictional work rather than his non-fiction work including this one which, as the subtitle suggests, covers 'Essays on Language and Cognition'. Still, given it's Umberto, it will no doubt be both highly erudite and entertaining at the same time.

Today I got....One of the latest in the SF Masterwork series as well as one title from the series apparently published late last year but only now appearing on our shores.

Odd John - Olaf Stapledon Blurb:John Wainwright is a freak, a human mutation with an extraordinary intelligence which is both awesome and frightening to behold. Ordinary humans are mere playthings to him. And Odd John has a plan - to create a new order on Earth, a new supernormal species. But the world is not ready for such a change.

Floating Worlds - Cecilia Holland Blurb:The Styths, a powerful and aggressive mutant race from the Gas Planets, Uranus and Saturn, have been launching pirate raids on ships from Mars. Earth's Committee for the Revolution has been asked to mediate, to negotiate a truce between the Middle Planets and the Styth Empire. The task of conducting the talks falls to an intelligent, resourceful and unpredictable young woman, Paula Mendoza. Her initial meetings with the Styth warlord and his unruly band of bodyguards and advisers are not promising. But then Paula adopts a less conventional approach. The consequences for her are considerable and she finds herself on the Gas Planets, the only tenuous link between Earth and the Styth Empire.

And the latest in the excellent long running and to my way of thinking indispensable Nebula Awards Showcase...

Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 *Blurb: The Nebula Awards Showcase volumes, which have been published since 1966, collect the year's Nebula Award-nominated and winning stories and poems, as voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This year's volume includes the winners of the Andre Norton, Dwarf Star, Rhysling, and Solstice Awards, as well as the Nebula winners.

[Randy M.]

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales of Terror by Robert Louis Stevenson (includes "Olalla," "The Body Snatcher" and some other stories; replaces a beat up older collection I have)

The Croning by Laird Barron (hope to read this within the next month or so)

And, over a month after they were supposed to ship, Barnes & Noble has alerted me these are finally on the way,
Where the Summer Ends: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner, Volume 1
Walk on the Wild Side: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner, Volume 2


Randy M.

[vanye]

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi
The Last Colony by John Scalzi

I really enjoyed Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades. And, to be honest, I got lots of giggles out of Agent To The Stars (now, why does that almost make me feel guilty?) ...

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Haven't read anything by Corey so far but this book looked like a good place to start. I'll probably read this next, right after finishing

The Road of Danger by David Drake

Another guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. Just made a start today, but looking good so far and I think I'll go back to it as soon as I can finish this.

Theories Of Flight by Simon Morden

Morden' s Equations Of Life was a great read, I thought.

Prophets, Apotheosis Book One by S. Andrew Swann

Another first, but the reviews on Amazon sounded intriguing.

Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds

What can I say? So far, I liked almost everything by him that I have read. What I do not like, however, is that he is not going to follow up on Terminal World.

Otherland, River Of Blue Fire (Vol 2) by Tad Williams
Williams' Memory, Sorrow And Thorn did not really do it for me. So, I left Otherland, City Of Golden Shadow (Vol 1) unread in my to-read pile for years. But what a pleasant surprise it was when I actually got around to reading it.

The King's Blood by Daniel Abraham
The first of the series, The Dragon's Path, was very promising. Great stuff.

Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
Same here. Great story.

[GOLLUM]

Over the weekend...

A day in the life of a smiling woman - Margaret Drabble *Margaret Drabble is the younger sister of the highly acclaimed English novelist Antonia (A) S. Byatt whose entire ouevre I've collected. I'm interested to read Drabble who has always I think to an extent lived in the shadow of her more famous sister despite the various accolades she has received, clearly indicating that she is likely a fine writer too. Blurb: Drabble’s novels have illuminated the past fifty years, especially the changing lives of women, like no others. Yet her short fiction has its own unique brilliance. Her penetrating evocations of character and place, her wide-ranging curiosity, her sense of irony—all are on display here, in stories that explore marriage, female friendships, the English tourist abroad, love affairs with houses, peace demonstrations, gin and tonics, cultural TV programs; in stories that are perceptive, sharp, and funny. An introduction by the Spanish academic José Fernández places the stories in the context of her life and her novels. This collection is a wonderful recapitulation of a masterly career.

Selected Stories of Merce Rodoreda *Rodoreda is considered the finest female writer to have come out of the Catalan region of Spain and this a good sampling of her short stories. Blurb: Collected here are thirty of Mercè Rodoreda’s most moving and inventive stories, presented in chronological order of their publication from three of Rodoreda’s most beloved short-story collections: Twenty-Two Stories, It Seemed Like Silk and Other Stories and My Christina and Other Stories. These short fictions capture Rodoreda’s full range of expression, from quiet literary realism to fragmentary impressionism to dark symbolism. Few writers have captured so clearly, or explored so deeply, the lives of women who are stuck somewhere between senseless modernity and suffocating tradition—Rodoreda’s women are notable for their almost pathological lack of volition, but also for their acute sensitivity, a nearly painful awareness of beauty.

Hav - Jan Morris *NYRB edn. I must confess I have never heard of this work which appears to be regarded a classic for a story that has all the ingredients of good SF by Ursula K LeGuin, who provides the introduction. Blurb: Hav is like no place on earth. Rumored to be the site of Troy, captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin, visited by Tolstoy, Hitler, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, this Mediterranean city-state is home to several architectural marvels and an annual rooftop race that is a feat of athleticism and insanity. As Jan Morris guides us through the corridors and quarters of Hav, we hear the mingling of Italian, Russian, and Arabic in its markets, delight in its famous snow raspberries, and meet the denizens of its casinos and cafés. When Morris published Last Letters from Hav in 1985, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Here it is joined by Hav of the Myrmidons, a sequel that brings the story up-to-date. Twenty-first-century Hav is nearly unrecognizable. Sanitized and monetized, it is ruled by a group of fanatics who have rewritten its history to reflect their own blinkered view of the past. Morris’s only novel is dazzlingly sui-generis, part erudite travel memoir, part speculative fiction, part cautionary political tale. It transports the reader to an extraordinary place that never was, but could well be.

[dask]

Spring book sale at the public library this week with today being half price day. Each book cost me fifty cents.



The Ten Schools of Painting is a box set of ten 44 page booklets covering the following schools: American, 19th Century French, Early Italian, 16th thru 18th Century French, Flemish, Later Italian, Dutch, British, German, and Spanish. Good quality color reproductions on the right page with explanatory text on the left.
I also got THE WORLD OF THE SHORT STORY: A TWENTIETH CENTURY COLLECTION, "selected and edited" by Clifton Fadiman, 62 stories in just under 850 pages, no dust jacket. No sf I needed this time around (except for the Verne, that is).

[GOLLUM]

Pretty good haul Dask.

Today I got the latest China Mieville novel...by all reports it's one of China's best efforts of recent times....

Railsea - China Mieville Blurb: On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory. But no matter how spectacular it is, Sham can't shake the sense that there is more to life than traveling the endless rails of the railsea–even if his captain can think only of the hunt for the ivory-coloured mole she’s been chasing since it took her arm all those years ago. When they come across a wrecked train, at first it's a welcome distraction. But what Sham finds in the derelict—a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible—leads to considerably more than he'd bargained for. Soon he's hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters and salvage-scrabblers. And it might not be just Sham's life that's about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.

[Extollager]

Originally Posted by dask

Spring book sale at the public library this week with today being half price day. Each book cost me fifty cents.

Wow!

Have you read any of Hardy's short stories before? He wrote several pretty outstanding macabre tales.

[Extollager]

Here are books I've received lately, in the order they've come in the mail (that's how I have to shop for books):
Got this one for Miriam Allen de Ford's "Transit of Venus" story in respect of the event to occur here on June 5. Haven't read the story just yet (I'll write about current reading at the May current reading thread).
I've requested this book, Rock Crystal, as an interlibrary loan on two occasions (and read it with much satisfaction), so, since I know I will want to read it again, and could get one at a good price, thought I should buy it. The author is Adalbert Stifter. He is also author of The Recluse.

[Extollager]

And then the letter carrier today brought this:
Longtime sf fan Ned Brooks put me on to this novel. Here are things he says about it in passing in his occasional 'zine It Goes on the Shelf:

----The original purpose of Joe Gould's `Oral History of the World', that he wanted to preserve the daily conversation of common people, is also a key element in the first part of one of my favorite novels, Rachel Maddux's The Green Kingdom (1957), where her character Arthur Herrick plans a vast compilation that he calls The Human Records. In both cases the impossible task fails--

---The Way Things Are by Rachel Maddux, ed. by Nancy Walker, Univ. of Tennessee Press, Knoxville 1992, 270pp.
Perhaps still available - the price is on the d/w only as a bar-code. Rachel Maddux (1913-1983) was the author of the fantasy The Green Kingdom and gave a wonderful speech as GoH at the 1969 DeepSouthCon. These are 24 stories left unpublished at her death plus 4 that apparently were published, but neither the introduction nor any note reveals where or when. I enjoyed reading them very much even though any fantasy element is in the oblique approach to the material rather than overt. They are rather like Flannery O'Connors stories, but set in the midwest rather than the south; or the recent collection by Shirley Jackson. [Someone reporting elsewhere about the Deep South Con wrote: "Guest of Honor was a lady named Rachel Maddux, who had written one fantasy novel, The Green Kingdom. She had no prior contact with fans or other fantasy writers, but gave an interesting talk about inventing your own universe and seemed to enjoy herself"]--

But I think he must have said something about it in a letter, too. Anyway, I suppose it is borderline fantasy. Has anyone here read it? I read about 3/5 of it in a library copy three years ago & was impressed.

[dask]

Originally Posted by Extollager

Wow!

Have you read any of Hardy's short stories before? He wrote several pretty outstanding macabre tales.

No but I forward to them. The introduction said he's mainly remembered as a novelist and poet but hardly anyone remembers he wrote short stories. The more forgotten the better sometimes.

[dask]

The six paperbacks were twenty-five cents apiece at a thrift store, the Durant was $10 at a used book store. Usually don't spend that kind of money on a used book anymore but I've had my eye on it for months and saved for it.

[dask]

Fifty cents each at the same thrift store as the six paperbacks above.

[Rodders]

Alastair Reynolds: Blue Remembered Earth
Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Ascension
Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Apocalypse.

All hardback covers ruined when i got caught in a really bad downpour in Lakeside.

[Mangara]

Not buying any books at present as money is tight (Weddings don't pay for themselves!) but I was given A Game of Thrones by my mother in law. Good start

[nomadman]

Home Fires - Gene Wolfe
Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick
The Complete Drive in - Joe R Lansdale
Harrowing the Dragon - Patricia McKillip
The Translator - John Crowley
Climbers - M John Harrison
Summer of Night - Dan Simmons