The OF Blog: A partial sampling of my October book porn to date

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

A partial sampling of my October book porn to date



For those curious to know what I receive, what I buy new, and what I find in a Nashville-area used bookstore, here are some of the books I've purchased or received over the past two weeks (there are few left out for a post later dealing mostly with a similar theme).  Since there are more than three dozen books here, I'll just make the pictures large and let you read them, with only stack hints to which is a review copy (the first picture here), which are books I bought new (the Sparrow art book series to the left in picture 2, and all the books in picture 3), and which are used books I bought for $10 or less (pictures 2 and 4, minus the Sparrow books to the left of picture 2).  Feel free to ask questions about what I thought about some of these books, if I have read/enjoyed the ones listed (I've read 16 of them to date), or anything along those lines.





The books whose titles you might not know are (second-from-top), Zoran Živković's Serbian original for his upcoming novella The Ghostwriter and (third-from-top) the fur-covered edition of Dave Eggers' adaptation of Maurice Sendak's (and of the screenplay Eggers and Spike Jonze wrote for the movie adaptation) Where the Wild Things Are, called simply The Wild Things (just finished it, loved it, might review it in the near future).


8 comments:

Harry Markov said...

You are making a lot of bibliophiles out there very envious and possibly making them salivate over what you have.

Larry Nolen said...

Ha! My collection is nowhere near that of some I know. They're the ones that sometimes influence what I buy on my own. :D

Harry Markov said...

I have seen that post and decided not to comment, because it would have involved a lot of .......... and 'is this for real?' If only I had the space I would have kept all my books and not have to give them away. My original collection from my early teens and esoteric non-fiction is currently hosted over a good friend of mine, good one hundred books or so.

Larry Nolen said...

One of these days, I'm going to post pictures of my entire collection (once I have a new place to stay, that is, so maybe in a few months?), just so people can believe me when I say that SF/F really doesn't make up more than about 1/3 of the books I own (well, minus the several hundred paranormal romances sent to me that I will probably never read :P).

But it is something like 2100 books now. But when I was in my early 20s, the number was something like 150 total, I believe, almost all being non-fiction or literary classics.

Harry Markov said...

This is a bit of a silly question, but have you wondered whether that can qualify as a Guinness record for biggest home library without being a millionaire to indulge yourself in owning a library building?

And I am all for the diversity in reading, although speculative fiction takes around 90% of what I read. I do enjoy the classics and mainstream.

Fabio Fernandes said...

I just bought The Drowning City, but I really had no idea if I was buying a good book. Glad to know you have it - now I know the answer to that! ;-)

Eileen said...

How is the Naked Lunch restored text different from the regular text?

Larry Nolen said...

Fábio,

I thought it was a decent first novel, but there are some flaws in how the plot and characterization were executed. I'd consider reading the upcoming second volume, but it won't be my favorite debut novel for this year.

E.L.,

What the editors did was to compare the previously-published American text with an earlier edit and reconciled the two when needed. Then there was a second part at the end of the novel where the discovered new text was added in an appendix. Not a bad read at all, although it's been a bit too long since I've read the Beat writers, so at times I was a bit confused until I began to remember how to read the text.

 
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