What did you buy today? April 2007 edition

Navrante zomer by Cola Debrot, a book of poems by an author who is better-known for his prose works;
Voor wie ik liefheb wil ik heten by Neeltje Maria Min, a book of poems that made a sensation back in 1966; I didn't buy it at the time, because it was a bestseller (wrong reason, put right after four decades);
Koning Oidipous (=Oedipus the King) by Sophokles in Evert Straat's Dutch translation.

King of Lies - new mystery/thriller, looks good
and three Lindor Balls :)

One Taste by Ken Wilber just came in the mail from amazon today. Technically I didn't buy it, it was a gift from my spiritual mentor, but same difference. I was just interested to Integral Theory a couple days ago, and can't wait to read this book.

In the mail, today:

Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter, in a lovely 1918 edition.

I walked in to the bookstore to buy No way to treat a first lady by Christopher Buckley (on the recommendation of a co-worker). The store didn't have a copy. So . . . I left with Elantris, The Book Thief, books 1 and 2 of the Sisters Grimm, and all three volumes of Nora Roberts' Circle Trilogy. Hey, I had a 30% off coupon and the Nora Roberts books were buy 2, get one free. Can't beat a deal like that!

Library Thing is going to be the death of me. 72 books on the TBR shelf (shelves) and counting . . .

hi all - i just ordered the 9 volumes of the dresden files- cant wait to start these

In the last week i've managed to acquire several new books:

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell - As part of a book forum, I was sent a copy to read - yay!
The Tea Rose by Jennifer Connolly - My Mam read this one recently and has loaned it to me.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

I recently listened to an audio book of Northanger Abbey and decided to try another couple of Austens, and these two were only £1 each so I couldn't resist!

I spent € 5 on books today:
De zomermaan, a book of japanese verse in dutch translation;
The poems of Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, the Aldine edition (1871);
Requiem by Rilke.

Picked up a copy of that moldy oldie "SS Armor" by Robert C. Stern at a library sale.

My wife went to Homebase (garden centre) so I hopped off to Borders and bought On Chesil Beach and Killing Johnny Fry - both on my 'wants' list as a result of press comments.

Today, from the library store:

Apple of my eye by Helene Hanff
The lifted veil: the book of fantastic literature by women
Mystery for Christmas
An anthology of erotic prose
Bertie and the seven bodies by Peter Lovesey
The gorgeous isle by Gertrude Atherton

From B&N:

The Princess Bride by William Goldman
The second Mrs. Darcy by Elizabeth Aston

**some of the touchstones worked, some did not...fancy that!

After two weeks without bookshopping while on holiday, I needed a fix. The want list (as ever) is long, especially with a lot of books I've had my eye on now coming out in paperback. I limited myself to David Mitchell Black Swan Green, William Dalrymple The Last Mughal and Hisham Matar In the country of men. At least I managed to clear a few off the to be read shelf while away!

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen part of the Great Discoveries series. Past Perfect by Susan Isaacs, Death Valley in '49 by William Manley. 2 from B & N and one over the Internet.

I got an order from Ebay recently. Six Dear America books. West to a Land of Plenty, Survival in the Storm, Christmas After All, Valley of the Moon, Seeds of Hope, and Mirror, Mirror on the Wall.

On my weekend vacation I stopped at a Half-Price bookstore and got nine books for thirty dollars.

The Cry of the Icemark by Stuart Hill
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Time Enough For Drums by Ann Rinaldi
The Woman in the Wall by Patrice Kindl
Calico Captive by Elizabeth George Speare
Greater than Angels by Carol Matas
The Silver Crown by Robert C. O'Brien
Odysseus in the Serpent maze by Jane Yolen
Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink

Today I bought, for € 0.50 each:
Michelangelo : a self portrait,
Een zachte fluittoon by Bob den Uyl (dutch, stories),
Medieval English Verse.
I had some hesitations about the last book, because it contains only translations, without the original versions; but then, it was only fifty cents.
This morning I received a message from Amazon: The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry is on its way!

Yesterday, in the mail from Ebay, a 1907 copy of The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Yesterday I bought:

A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown

Tomorrow I pick up on hold at Borders (cause I can use my Rewards account dollars and they were on the 3/2 table)

The Ghost Orchid by Carole Goodman
Intuition by Allegra Goodman
The Accidental by Ali Smith

I walked down to the independent bookstore on my lunch in the sleet/snow/rain today thinking I would order the anthology Prom Nights from Hell which was just released yesterday. I was surprised to see they had it on the shelf, they rarely seem to have the books that I want to get actually in stock. So, I just had to buy it. No sense in ordering something that was already there!

I went to some charity shops today and bought
2001 A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
On Beauty by Zadie Smith

I won't mention the four I bought last week:)

At our local bookstore I bought Dichters hebben vele moeders, a bilingual (Ancient Greek/Dutch) selection of 150 epigrams about poets from the Anthologia Graeca.

I hit the Arlington Co. (Virginia) library sale today and did pretty well, buying:

1. "Hot Rods" by Kevin Elliot.

2. "Grand Strategies in War & Peace" by Paul Kennedy.

3. "Luftwaffe" by Williamson Murray.

4. "Far Distant Ships" by Joseph Schull.

All in excellant shape for $16.00.

hi all- i just ordered the heart shaped box by joe hill based on all the comments ive read on lt-

This morning The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry arrived from Amazon.
Interesting and instructive preface.
And: another version to add to my Li Bai project.

I supported our local little bookshop today and bought the bilingual version of The Time Machine / 时间机器 by 威尔斯 著 as well as the trilingual (Chinese, English, French) version of 小王子（中英法60周年彩色纪念版）/ Le petit prince/ The Little Prince.
This evening, biblioholism forced me to return to aforementioned bookshop to buy 巨人的花园/ The selfish Giant and two huge red books about chinese papercut: 中国民间剪纸（上）——中国民间美术丛书 and 中国民间剪纸（下）——中国民间美术丛书

Luckily books are cheap here. Altogether I spend around 12 US$

Told myself that I shouldn't buy any more books until they can all fit on the TBR shelf, but alas I bought -

Life Mask by Emma Donoghue
The Inner Circle by TC Boyle
Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman
and
Pirates: Most Wanted to go along w/the other Pirates book by John Matthews.

Less than $25 for the lot. Sigh. They will have to go on the floor.

Good haul, Bookmarque, the Boyle 'Kinsey' novel is great fun, and Seven Types of Ambiguity was one of my favorites from a couple of years ago.

Am hopefull about the Boyle & the Perlman - both new Authors for me. Glad to hear that you liked them both.

Arriving at my door on Saturday from BAM was Randy W. White's Hunter's Moon, Laura Lippman's What The Dead Know, Masha Hamilton's The Camel Bookmobile, Kim Harrison's For A Few Demons More and C.J. Sansom's Soverign. On Friday from Amazon UK I received Richard Montanari's UK release Broken Angels.. just couldn't wait for the US release.

Oh well, I must confess that Yesterday I splurged, between the Tarrytown Library sale and the Persephone Books tea, in NY City.
Here are the books I got:

Oranges are not the only fruit by Jeanette Winterson
The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader
The unknown Sigrid Undset
Tipping the velvet by Sarah Waters
The Old East Side: an anthology by Milton Hindus
Asimov's guide to Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov
Fierce Pajamas, an anthology of humor writing from The New Yorker
Leaving New York, writers look back edited by Kathleen Norris
The country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
About time by Jack Finney
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
The Moscow Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam
English Country House Murders
Dorothy Parker: what fresh hell is this? a biography by Marion Meade
Two lives by Vikram Seth
Radiant days, haunted nights by Joachim Neugroschel
First American edition of both Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K.Rowling, in perfect condition (including dustjacket) and each one of them for the incredible amount of $3!!!!!

At the Persephone tea:

Fidelity by Susan Glaspell
Kitchen essays by Agnes Jekyll

I just picked up Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito at my local used bookstore.

Just went to the new remainder bookstore and got
The Death of Achilles by Boris Akunin
Murder on the Leviathan by Boris Akunin
Six Wives The Queens of Henry VIII by David Starkey
Cucina Ebraica by Joyce Goldstein and one new book
Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin

On Saturday, from Three Lives & Company in NYC:

The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
African Vistas by Marie Thomas

From the Persephone Tea:
Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C.Sherriff
Mariana by Monica Dickens
The Persephone Notebook (blank book)

#29 aluvalibri.....that's some haul! Lucky Girl!

torontoc what is a first remainder bookstore? Sorry I am from the UK:)

Ordered from Amazon Digging to America, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows...it had to happen!

Hi #33 A remainder book store is one that sells books that are overstock from publishers ( remainders ), second hand books ( the store buys books from the public ) and reviewer's copies of new books.I have found some good finds in this particular store that just opened a new branch this year. Hope that helps

From the Lambs Bookshop on Lambs Conduit Street, The Wedding Group by Elizabeth Taylor and The Virago Book of Women Travellers, both half price!

Thanks torontoc, I understand now!

a.book.in.the.life #33:
As you're in UK a good source of remainders is Postscript which run a postal/internet service. Unlike some High Street remainder shops they have a very eclectic stock which includes a lot of academic books of fairly limited interest (I got Burkes Peerage for £80 which sounds expensive but publisher's price was £399). A monthly catalogue with no obligation whatsoever — I've gone several months without a purchase. Web address http://www.psbooks.co.uk

Thanks Possman, will have a look at the website now!

For € 2: Pieter Geyl's Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse stam in six volumes (the touchstone is to the first). I owned this work since the fifties, but somehow it got lost.

From Amazon today (they had a special offer on paperbacks and I couldn't resist):

Reading 'Lolita' in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Digging to America by Anne Tyler
How Proust can change your life by Alain de Botton
Some Hope by Edward St. Aubyn
The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
and Nightwood by Djuna Barnes.

Ooooh, please let me know about How Proust can change your life, I have read about it and am quite interested.

:-))

Hi, my name is Riva, and I'm a Biblioholic.

Today I bought:

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
The Expected One by Kathleen McGowan
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
and the sequel Rebel Angels
The Scent of Shadows by Vicki Pettersson
and its sequel The Taste of Night
and
The Princes of Ireland by Edward Rutherfurd
and its sequel The Rebels of Ireland

(anyone see a pattern here??)

Now, I did get some from the 3 for 2 table, and I had a 10% off coupon, and I had a gift card to use. But, I have over 70 books on my TBR stack (not on a list - in a physical stack). 70+ books staring at me, wondering why I'm not reading them!!

Someone, PLEASE stop me before I shop again!!

(Oh, did I mention that the library sale is this weekend??)

I will do aluvalibri. I confess it's my short cut to finishing Proust. I am about half way through the second volume - and have been for the last 15 years. The bookmark's still in there. I haven't yet declared defeat. It's just that other things keep getting in the way...

Well, Proust is certainly NOT a lightweight. I have not read any of his books yet, but I plan to. I would like to read them in Italian, though, as my French is not adequate and, for some kind or reason (which is obscure to me as well), I have the idea that I would enjoy them more in Italian than English.....go figure!

I found an amazing library booksale and for the lovely price of $20 I walked away with all of these. I also bought about 8 more books for presents for people. Happy Friday for me!

The Thirteenth Tale
Cross
4th of july
5th horseman
Lonesome dove
cloud atlas
Down Under
The Camel Club
The Outsiders
Rise and Shine
Dear John
The Lincoln Lawyer
Judge and Jury
This Christmas
The Plague
Fighter Boys

I went on a bit of a classics spree this week and purchased:

Anthony Trollope - Doctor Thorne and The Way We Live Now
Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby

Also grabbed some more modern works - Book Lust by Nancy Pearl; Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See and the LT-inspired Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman :)

(Touchstones are acting up a bit tonight!)

I received 2 books in the mail today and i bought a couple of books at Barnes & Noble.

1) Then His Voice Shook The Earth: Mount Sinai, The Trumpet of God, and The Resurrection of the Dead in Christ BY: David W. Lowe
2) Hakluyt's Promise BY: Peter C. Mancall

Now for my Finds in B & N

1) The Reluctant Fundamentalist BY: Mohsin Hamid
2) THe Secret of Lost Things BY: Sheridan Hay
3) Skin BY: Ted Dekker
4) Showdown BY: Ted Dekker
5) Forty Signs of Rain BY: Kim Stanley Robinson
6) Fifty Degrees Below BY: Kim Stanley Robinson
7) Event BY: David Lynn Golemon

I just got The Ruins by Scott Smith which says "it does for Mexican jungles what "Jaws" did for New England beaches." How can you resist that?!

Also bought the first Dredan file book, "Storm Front" by Jim Butcher to see if the series is worth the hype.

I just ordered from Amazon:

Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix
Murder she Wrote: Coffee, tea or murder? by J. Fletcher
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
Martin the Warrior by Brian Jacques
Mariel of redwall by Brian Jacques
The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martínez

#50> Nemo3344, Inkheart is great! (and Harry Potter too, of course :-)))

The Children's Hospital Book Market started yesterday, and my poor TBR list is now very, very bloated. I usually spend about $20-30 at the yearly sale, but this year I decided to treat myself as I've finally got a good job. I bought everything I saw that I wanted; the most expensive book was $3.65, while the cheapest was $0.50. Yesterday I got twenty-seven things that I'm too lazy to list again; today I went back and got five more:

Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey - I read this more than ten years ago. It was cheap, so I thought I'd give it another go. It was the first Pern book I read, and I remember being rather disappointed with the others after this introduction to the series.
Blood Price by Tanya Huff. Someone on here once said they were surprised I didn't own anything by Huff, so I figured I'd give her a try. I'm sharing this with my mother, who's really into paranormal romances/otherworldly detective novels.
Beauty by Robin McKinley. Partly on the strength of LT recommedations, partly because of how much I enjoyed The Hero and the Crown when I reread it a couple of weeks ago.
Voyage to Venus by C.S. Lewis. Because his stuff is fun and quick.
Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb. I read and loved the first of these ages and ages ago, but for some reason I never got any further in the series. I plan on giving them another try, so I've bought the second and third ones to have on hand after I obtain and read the first one again.

It was bag sale day at my local library's Friends sale (all the books you can stuff in a grocery sack for $10). Some of the women in my office have adopted a platoon serving in Afganistan, and I went specifically to pick up a bunch of paperbacks to send to the boys. I wasn't going to get anything else; I don't NEED anything else - my TBR pile is pushing 80 books!! Well, I got a bag of books for the boys (Louis L'Amour, Tom Clancy, Ian Fleming, Elmer Kelton, and lots of other westerns, spy novels, and a little hard Sci-Fi). Was I smart enough to leave it at that. NO - of course not. I took that bag to the car and then went back to the sale. I walked out with a number of ARC's (including a copy of Half of a Yellow Sun on the strength of recommendations from LTers), a few sci-fi titles (including some Harry Turtledove titles that I didn't own yet), and some other titles that just sounded fun. (If anyone is interested in the complete list, feel free to check my catalog and sort by date added).

Anyway, I'm hoping this quenches my desire to buy books for QUITE a while. I really do need to whittle down that TBR pile.

Today began the weekly books and antiques market in our town that will be held each Monday until the end of September. There are only a few booksellers, but one of them, who sells his books for only €1, has a large collection, so each week you can find new books at his stall. This week he offered many books of classical literature.

I bought:
two volumes with Sophocles' works in Greek with French translations: Tome I : Ajax, Antigone, Oedipe-Roi, Electre. and Tome II : Les Trachidiennes, Philoctère, Oedipe à Colone, les Limiers.;
a Latin edition of Vergils Bucolics and Georgics: P. Vergili Maronis Bucolica et Georgica, edited by J. Mehler;
a Dutch translation of the Iliad by C. Vosmaer, containing an ex libris of J. Mehler;
a book of essays on the works of the poet Willem Kloos by Peter van Eeten: Dichterlijk labirint.

received American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century by Christine Stansell in the U.S. Mail. wonder how that happened? ;)

I went to the Persephone shop on Lamb's Conduit Street last night. I had to buy three of course, because they're very slightly cheaper that way. I just couldn't decide, but in the end came away with:

The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Far Cry by Emma Smith and
Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary by Ruby Ferguson.

I'm already planning to pop back to get a couple of presents (and, of course, another book for myself!)

At last! Verzameld werk, deel 4: Late lyriek (Volume 4 of Hans Boland's dutch translation of the works of Pushkin) arrived. The first volume came out in 2001; still five volumes to go, so in about ten years the translation might be completed.

Well, unlike finebalance (#56), I cannot go to the Persephone's shop (luckily, because otherwise I would do A LOT of damage to my wallet), sooo I had to content myself with the library bookstore, and walked away with:

Samuel Pepy's Penny Merriments selected and edited by Roger Thompson
Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance by Thadious M. Davis
A Christmas secret by Anne Perry
and
Zoia's Gold by Philip Sington

I purchased:
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
Lost Santos de Agua Mansa, California by Alex Espinoza
Firmin by Sam Savage

From Bookmooch:
Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin
All Cracked Up by Patsy Clairmont
The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies
The Last Secret of the Temple by Paul Sussman

This afternoon....

Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos

A lunch hour jaunt - and much fun!

#58 aluvalibri....you must own stock in the Field Library...without a doubt!!

#61> bleu, one thing is certain: I ALWAYS manage to find something there!

OKB Tupolev showed up via half.com.

ahhhhh!!!! I haven't bought any books in a entire two days and I think I'm going through withdrawals... think maybe I have a problem?? :-)

Went to The Book Eddy and bought The New York Public Library Collector's Edition of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Its a really nice edition that also includes The Secret Agent. I can't wait to add it to my shelves!

received
3rd ed. of Photoshop restoration & retouching by Katrin Eismann
and
Larry R. Bradley's Neither Liberal nor Conservative Be: An Action Plan for People Disgusted By Polarized Politics
in the mails, purchased on abe.com

In our local bookstore they have one shelf with Italian books. Today I found there Le avventure di Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. I read this some years ago in a bilingual edition. Now I own the Italian version with an essay by Italo Calvino.

#67> Aren't you lucky? I must track Calvino's essay somewhere, it should be very interesting...

>68 aluvalibri:
Calvino's essay was first published in la Repubblica in 1981 and has been included in his Saggi 1945-1985. At least, that's the information I found in the book.

Thanks henkl! Now I can look for it.

:-)))

I went to the Friends of the Library sale here in Phoenix today. Paperbacks 4 for $1 and children's books $.50 each. I picked up a pristine copy of a pop-up book (Puss and Boots) to add to my collection and the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes for $.50 each. I spent $32 in total, some for me, some for my mom, some for my niece. I got some travel books for Prague and Bulgaria (my August vacation) and a gazillion romances and mysteries. And if you think that I probably don't have room for them all, you would be right.

#64: You do have a problem; you didn't buy a book!

As for myself, I picked up a small stack of Osprey publications at the Fairfax (Va.) Library System. These include The Age of Tamerlane, Aces of the Mighty Eighth, Mosquito Aces of World War 2, M18 Hellcat, and U.S. Army Tank Crewman. This is a real pleasure as I usually find these booklets a little overpriced for what you're getting; color costs though.

Two days ago, I bought Skin by Ted Dekker, and House co-authored by Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti. Both were excellent!

Today was such a great book day! To begin with, the Children's Hospital Book Market closed today, so all the books were super cheap if you bought lots of them. Trade paperbacks were 10 for $5, while mass market paperbacks were 20 for $5. The kicker was that you had to buy a full ten or twenty in order to get them for so little. I bought ten TPBs and added three regular pbs to my mother's bag:

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (an ARC)
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Master & Commander by Patrick O'Brien
Sula by Toni Morrison
Bangkok 8 by Jorhn Burdett
An Earthly Knight by Janet McNaughton
Children of God by Mary Doria Russell
Second Nature by Alice Hoffman
Hoot by Carl Hiassen
the many lives and sorrows of Josephine B. by Sandra Gulland (I already have the second and third books in the trilogy, so now I can finally get started!)
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (really just so we'd have the 20 books we needed)
Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman
Seventh Heaven by Alice Hoffman

I then headed off to a garage sale at my aunt's church. A local artists' council was having a garage sale of their own across the street, so I stopped there first and found:

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson (Horray! I really, really, really wanted a personal copy of this)
Sunwing by Kenneth Oppel (I already owned it, but my copy was a former library book. This one is in much better condition)
and a free copy of a fun-looking vegetarian magazine

The church garage sale yielded a few more additions to my extensive, (and now, almost complete!), Agatha Christie collection:

Murder After Hours
Murder in Three Acts
A Pocket Full of Rye
Three Blind Mice and other stories
Double Sin
and The Live-Forever Machine by Kenneth Oppel

I just hope I don't have any of the Christies. I can't find my master list of what I have, and her books have been published under so many different titles that it can be difficult to tell whether or not I've already got something. Still, they were only $0.25 each and all the money goes towards community projects, so I figure it's no big loss if I already have one or two. I'll just put them up on BookMooch.

My usual weekly foray to the library bookstore resulted in:

Volumes 1 & 2 of The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye
Ghosts of New York by Susan Blackhall
Flashman and the tiger by George MacDonald Fraser
Virginia Woolf, an illustrated anthology by Jane Dunn
The Marquise of O by Heinrich von Kleist
Great Ghost Stories
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
The Judge by Rebecca West
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson