Book Hauls!

[D_Davis]

But shelves and shelves of Laurell K. Hamilton and Mercedes Lackey.

Gotta shelf what sells.

LKH must write a book every month.

 

[J-Sun]

Gotta shelf what sells.

But you can't sell what you don't shelve.

 

[D_Davis]

But you can't sell what you don't shelve.

They call this the bookseller's dilemma.

 

[thatollie]

Mother London - Michael Moorcock
The Difference Engine - Sterling and Gibson
A Case of Conscience - James Blish
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
The Naked God - Peter F. Hamilton
Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
The Hugo and Nebula Award Winners from Asimov's - edited by Shiela Williams

 

[Diggler]

The Wizard of Anharitte by Colin Kapp
Azael by Isaac Asimov (1st HC)
The Darkness On Diamondia by A.E.Van Vogt (I might have this already?)
The Toynbee Convector by Ray Bradbury (1st HC)
Envoy to New Worlds by Keith Laumer (1st HC)
A Wrinkle In the Skin by John Christopher (1st HC)
The country of the Blind (and other stories) by H.G. Wells
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
The Death of Grass by John Christopher
The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing

 

[thatollie]

The Darkness On Diamondia by A.E.Van Vogt (I might have this already?)

It's also not very good, but the rest of your haul makes up for it.

 

[Diggler]

It's also not very good, but the rest of your haul makes up for it.

It's one of his not so good ones I presume? I am very pleased with Wrinkle in the Skin, a great book that got an upgrade in my collection

 

[D_Davis]

Got this today:

Along with:

The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat, by Harry Harrison (a HB to replace my lost MM)
The Whisperer in Darkness: Collected Stories of HPL V.1 (Wordsworth Edition)
The King of the Elves: The Complete Short Stories of PKD, V.1
Leather, Denim, and Silver: Tales of the Monster Hunter, ed. by Miles Boothe

 

[Diggler]

I picked up.

A Game of Thrones for the wife
Chronicles of Narnia Collection

I also really like your score. I have yet to buy anything from Joe R. Lansdale, but I do want to check out his novels.

 

[D_Davis]

I also really like your score. I have yet to buy anything from Joe R. Lansdale, but I do want to check out his novels.

Start with his short stories - they are the most genre-focused, and I think that's where he's at his best.

***

Recently picked up.

A. Merritt:

The Fox Woman & Other Stories
The Moon Pool
The Metal Monster
The Face int he Abyss
The Ship of Ishtar
Dwellers in the Mirage

Manly Wade Wellman:

The School of Darkness
The Kingdom of Madison: A Southern Mountain Fastness and its People
Sherlock Holme's War of the Worlds

Frank Belknap Long:

The Man Who Died Twice and Three Others
The Horror from the Hills

and

Haunted Legends, ed. Ellen Datlow

 

[GOLLUM]

In my continuing quest for all things Nobel laureates I picked up...

Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis *The 1930 Nobel winner and the first to American recipient. Blurb: In the fall of 1920, Sinclair Lewis began a novel set in a fast-growing city with the heart and mind of a small town. For the center of his cutting satire of American business he created the bustling, shallow, and myopic George F. Babbitt, the epitome of middle-class mediocrity. The novel cemented Lewis s prominence as a social commentator. Babbitt basks in his pedestrian success and the popularity it has brought him. He demands high moral standards from those around him while flirting with women, and he yearns to have rich friends while shunning those less fortunate than he. But Babbitt s secure complacency is shattered when his best friend is sent to prison, and he struggles to find meaning in his hollow life. He revolts, but finds that his former routine is not so easily thrown over.

The Piano Teacher - Elfriede Jelinek *A controversial choice for the 2004 Nobel Prize and a novel definitely not for the faint-hearted that was also made into a film.Blurb: Teaching piano daily at the Vienna Conservatory is all that remains of Erika Knout's once promising career. Lately, however, her love for her star student, Walter Klemmer, is disrupting both her well-ordered professional life and her emotionally rigorous world at home with Mother. This neurotic love triangle, in which violence is confused with love, evolves toward inevitable breakdown as Erika finally defies Mother and, through Klemmer, excites chaotic slef-destructive passions. With her facility for metaphor and stylish narrative, Austrian Jelinek bears comparison to Schmidt and Boll at their best. A masterpiece.

The Flanders Road - Claude Simon *The 1985 winner of the Nobel Prize. Blurb: During the German advance through Belgium into France in 1940, Captain de Reixach is shot dead by a sniper. Three witnesses, involved with him during his lifetime in different capacities – a distant relative, an orderly and a jockey who had an affair with his wife – remember him and help the reader piece together the realities behind the man and his death. A groundbreaking work, for which Claude Simon devised a prose technique mimicking the mind’s flexible thought processes, The Flanders Road is not only a masterpiece of stylistic innovation, but also a haunting portrayal – based on a real-life incident – of the chaos and savagery of war.

Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann *Couldn't believe I did not have a copy of this in my library, so now rectified. The 1929 Nobel winner. Blurb: One of the most influential and celebrated European works of the 20th century and first published in 1929, Mann's novel tells the story of Hans Castorp, a modern everyman who spends seven years in an Alpine sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, finally leaving to become a soldier in World War I. Isolated from the concerns of the everyday world, he is exposed to the wide range of ideas that shaped a world on the verge of explosion, succumbing as he does to both the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.

 

[thatollie]

Hmm, I didn't insert that link in my post?

 

[dask]

H.G. WELLS, a biography by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie. Trade paperback, twenty-five cents at the Salvation Army. Bargain!

FROM OFF THIS WORLD: Gems of Science Fiction Chosen From "HALL OF FAME CLASSICS" edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend. 1949 Merlin Press, Inc. hardback, no dust jacket, funky splotch-like growths on cover and spine with browning on flyleaf. Still, no pages missing and beyond the flyleaf pages are remarkably clean. What the Hall of Fame Classics above refers to are stories reprinted in Startling Stories magazine. Each month SS would dip into the past and pull out an exceptionally good story from another magazine and reprint it as a HOFC. There are 18 in this 430 plus page blunderbuss of a book, all from either Wonder Stories or Thrilling Stories. Cool! Many by authors I've never heard of or only saw on covers of old Gernsback covers. A stunning find for anyone into this type of thing. Fifty cents at the Humane Society Thrift Store. I feel like Scrooge on Christmas morn. I can't help myself.

STARSHIP INVINCIBLE: Science Fiction Stories Of The Thirties by Frank K. Kelly. Trade paperback, three stories at 144 pages, fifty cents. Is this my day or what?

THE UNKNOWN CONAN DOYLE: UNCOLLECTED STORIES BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE edited by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green. One dollar for this hardback with dust jacket. Great shape, had to have it. "Thirty-three fascinating and diverse tales, the of them newly identified as the work of the master story-teller." Excuse me, I think I'm gonna faint again.

 

[J-Sun]

H.G. WELLS, FROM OFF THIS WORLD: Gems of Science Fiction Chosen From "HALL OF FAME CLASSICS"[,] STARSHIP INVINCIBLE: Science Fiction Stories Of The Thirties by Frank K. Kelly

I'm not jealous. Nope, not a bit. Especially not with them being so expensive.

Argh.

Great haul, dask!

 

[Rodders]

I just had the lastest Star Wars Hardback delivered from Amazon. "Fate of the Jedi:Conviction" by Aaron Allston. Nice cover. Looks like Jaina Solo's turned into a bit of a honey.

 

[D_Davis]

I just got my copy of Haunted Legends, ed. Datlow.

The quality is just terrible, especially for a $30 HB. The paper is just a tad better than news print, and the ink totally smudges with a gentle rub.

Had I known it was so cheaply made, I would not have purchased it.

 

[J-Sun]

D_Davis: who published it?

 

[D_Davis]

D_Davis: who published it?

Tor

It was this year's Bram Stoker winner for best anthology, and contains Lansdale's story "The Folding Man" which won the award for best short.

 

[J-Sun]

Tor

Huh. That sucks. I understand them to be a reputable publisher and I don't recall any specific problems with them in the past (though I don't know that I have a hardcover from them). Thanks for the warning.

The only book I recall being upset with recently was a Cosmos book (which is an imprint I'd never heard of before) that had incomplete text and an incomplete ToC and was just generally incompetently typeset, though it was a physically fine paperback (of Asher's The Engineer Reconditioned - which I'd definitely recommend in any other edition).

 

[D_Davis]

Yeah - it's a $30 HB with the paper of a really poor-quality mass market. Really bizarre, because, like you said, Tor is usually really good.