Book Hauls!

[j d worthington]

dask: could you send me some information on this one? I think I'd like to look it up....

 

[hardsciencefanagain]

Goulart,ed.:the Hardboiled Dicks
sligthly tattered,but boy,do i like it!
Vintage pulp detective fiction
this one is going next to my far too small Chandler collection..

 

[Extollager]

Dask, does your Great Letters book have any by Dorothy Osborne?

 

[Silver Owl]

I found an old copy of Half Past Human by T.J Bass in a charity shop for 50p

I'll get round to reading it eventually

Oh and I also found a signed paperback 1990 copy of Use of Weapons by Iain Banks for £1

 

[dask]

dask: could you send me some information on this one? I think I'd like to look it up....

Okay, working on it. Get back to you as soon as possible.

The obvious: 1940 hardback, 562 pages broken up into two parts: Letters Of Long Ago [from 334 B.C. to A.D. 1675] and Letters Of No So Long Ago [1747 to 1896]. Summary: "The characteristic and crucial communications, and intimate exchanges and cycles of correspondence, of many of the outstanding figures of world history, and some notable contemporaries, selected, edited, and integrated with biographical backgrounds and historical settings and consequences by M. Lincoln Schuster."

One of the reasons I went back and got it was for the letter from Aaron Burr challenging Alexander Hamilton to "meet him on the field of honor."

Dask, does your Great Letters book have any by Dorothy Osborne?

I don't think so. Her name doesn't appear in either the table of contents or the index.

 

[Extollager]

Thanks for checking. It's not that her letters are hard to find. There was an Everyman's Library edition with modernized spelling many years ago, and her letters are in a Penguin Classics edition with contemporary spelling. These are regarded as some of the best love letters in the language. I enjoyed the Penguin quite a bit some years ago.

 

[J-Sun]

One of the reasons I went back and got it was for the letter from Aaron Burr challenging Alexander Hamilton to "meet him on the field of honor."

Good timing. That was 211 years ago yesterday.

 

[Overread]

Bit a haul for myself over the past few days:

Knight of the Demon Queen by Barbara Hambly - I have the rest of the series in paperback and after someone mentioned Barbara in another thread I was prompted to check as; when I originally ordered the rest this one was missing. A few years and it seems Amazon got some stock in; and a couple are on Kindle as well, though since I had the rest in paper I got this in paper too.

Dragonlands Books 1-3 by Megg Jensen
Empire - Redemption Trilogy Book 1 - by Michael R. Hicks

Both on Kindle and both a gamble on new, to me authors. Started Dragonlands and it has a spooky/mysterious start to it and seems to be shaping up well as an adventure (I tend to class most things that are not going into Tolkien levels of detail on terrain/characters as "adventures")

Darkspell -by Katharine Kerr. Picked up the first book years back, though like Knight of the Demon Queen this was another "missing" book; only this time in kindle format rather than paperback. I'll have to go back to read Daggerspell as its been a long while that I need a refresher on the story.


Overall 2 "missing" books that let me get on with longer story series and 2 "unknown" publications.

 

[dask]

Had my eye on this for a long time and made the plunge today:



But heck, what's ten bucks today anyway?

 

[Vince W]

Ordered this yesterday:

It's the Babel-17/Empire Star volume. I would have used my kindle, but for some reason they don't include Empire Star.

 

[Peter Vida]

Re: Recent Buys

I bought Martin's "Clash of Kings" and the first book in Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series. The latter really just for writer research on Point of View use. Martin is good for writing research also, but not so much, and I really wanted to know what happens to the characters.

Wheel of time is one of my favorite series though he does go a bit to the extreme when describing a scene or a character.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Well, I asked for a few books for my birthday, mostly bought second-hand from Amazon, then bought a couple more from the charity shops.

So today I got four Lee Child books, two Lindsey Davis, a Ben Kane Roman trilogy, the second in Campbell's Lost Fleet, Fatherland by Robert Harris, and a few bits and bobs I wanted to try out: Emperor's Blades, Hereward, and Outlaw. Also Julian by Gore Vidal, and a couple of historical research books on mediaeval travel.

Should keep me going pretty well towards Christmas - I hope!

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Went to a local vegan restaurant which also has a place to donate/take/trade books, and dropped off a big pile of books, while taking only two: A collection of stories by James Baldwin, and this collection:

One interesting thing about this anthology is that it contains no less than ten very short stories from the science journal Nature.

 

[Overread]

Seems birthdays and books are aplenty at the end of this month! Got a few myself too

The Goblins of Labyrinth by Brian Froud - great book the only problem is the criminal practice of putting double page spreads of several big bits of artwork into it - totally obliterated middles to them (I still don't get why publishers do this!)
Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson (yes Hoopy if you're reading this post then yes I'm still reading this series slowly)
Nine Gates Breaking the Wall by Jane Lindskold
Fool's Assassin by Robin Hobb (shiny hardback)
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
Animals Real and Imagined by Terryl Whitlatch

 

[Randy M.]

Last week, wandering Corning, N.Y., found a small used bookstore on Market St. and picked up this,

and this, a former library book apparently not often borrowed,

Along with picking up Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta, Dressed for Death by Donna Leon and A Cold Season by Allison Littlewood, I broke my budget but don't feel all that bad about it.


Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

Randy, I've started a subforum on Russell Kirk here:

Russell Kirk: Princess of All Lands, Watchers at Strait Gate, Old House of Fear, Conservative Mind

The first posting includes scans of an interview with Kirk on the topic of the ghostly in life and fiction.

 

[Randy M.]

Thanks, Extollager. I had a feeling you'd be familiar with Kirk. I've only read one of his stories, and that so long ago that I don't really recall it. I'm looking forward to this one, maybe late this year as winter comes on.

Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

I liked most of the stories in that Kirk collection, but I'm not sure I finished the two Manfred Arcane stories ("Balgrummo's Hell," "Peculiar Demesne"). To the ones I recommended at the new Kirk thread I'd add "What Shadows We Pursue" as perhaps his most M. R. Jamesian story.

 

[Extollager]

A gentleman in Philadelphia occasionally sends me boxes of books to pick over, some to keep, some to pass to students. A big box arrived today. It includes the Ballantine Fantasy series issue of George MacDonald's Phantastes, de Camp and Pratt's Compleat [sic] Enchanter, Bernard Wolfe's Limbo (compared, to its advantage, to Brave New World and 1984 by a cover blurb -- has anyone read this? My copy's an old Ace edition), Hughes's The Fatal Shore, Trollope's London Tradesmen (I don't remember having heard of this book before), Johanna Drucker's The Alphabet Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination, and more -- some nice things to pass on to students too.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Bernard Wolfe's Limbo (compared, to its advantage, to Brave New World and 1984 by a cover blurb -- has anyone read this? My copy's an old Ace edition)

I read this some time ago. My initial reaction at the time:

It appears to be a darkly satiric story of a post-nuclear future where folks voluntarily have their limbs replaced by prosthetics. (Before we even find this out, we see a neurosurgeon who fled the war assisting some folks who live on an isolated island in the Indian Ocean with their custom of performing brain surgery on members of their group who are too aggressive.)

If memory serves, it was a very "literary" novel, with various typographical tricks and even some drawings.