Last Book You Bought and Why

[Marbles]

Bought the following books recently.

Jhumpa Lahiri - The Namesake [I watched the film, like it, and wanted to read the media celebrated work to see for myself how good it is]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Autumn of the Patriarch [sheer brilliance of his art of storytelling]

Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood [heard good word, read it, liked it. Good book but not a spectacular piece of writing]

Dilip Hiro [ed. & tr.] - Baburnama [non-fiction/history: the autobiography of the founder of the Mughal Empire]

[Carmilla]

Hello!

The last book I bought is 'Daniel Deronda' by George Eliot.

Why? Because Eliot is one of my favourite writers.

[jashleigh]

The last book i bought was 'The Sorrows of Young Mike' by John Zelazny.

Because recently I am all about first time authors.

[Marwood]

À rebours, the 1966 Penguin edition, translated as Against Nature, because it crops up in Withnail & I and sounds similar to a piece I'm currently writing.

[uiscebeatha]

The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney. I don't usually read too many critics since I much prefer to form my own impressions and judgements. However, have read Heaney's poems since the late 1960's and just this once thought - 'I would like to see how far people do or do not see some of this as I do'.

[bouquin]

The Graduate (Charles Webb)
Group Portrait with Lady (Heinrich Böll)
Coming Up for Air (George Orwell)




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Currently reading: The Thinking Reed (Rebecca West)

[totoro]

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. I came on these forums, looking through the author section to see who had been talked about and who hadn't, and this author came up on the page and I noticed no one had started a topic on him so I thought I would read some of what he wrote so that in the future I could start a topic myself. Plus, its good to expand your horizons.

[tonywalt]

Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami:

[Jancarlo]

The Picture of Dorian Gray and Homer's Odyssey, they're classics and I hadn't read them yet. I finished Dorian and I enjoyed it very much.

[farnoosh]

Middlemarch by George Elliot.
There is this bookstore I go to that's 98 minutes from my house by bus, it's the only bookstore I like that brings classics and has a good atmosphere to it. And there is this cafe right next to it called Cinema Cafe; A great place to start the first chapter of the book I buy. Anyway, every time I go there I pick a book that I haven't heard of before and open the middle section of the book and read 2 pages. If I like it, I buy it. Just like that

[Lykren]

Middlemarch by George Elliot.
There is this bookstore I go to that's 98 minutes from my house by bus, it's the only bookstore I like that brings classics and has a good atmosphere to it. And there is this cafe right next to it called Cinema Cafe; A great place to start the first chapter of the book I buy. Anyway, every time I go there I pick a book that I haven't heard of before and open the middle section of the book and read 2 pages. If I like it, I buy it. Just like that

I'd say you got lucky this time. Middlemarch is a fantastic book.

[bouquin]

Tipping the Velvet (Sarah Waters)
The Colour (Rose Tremain)
London Fields (Martin Amis)




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Currently reading: I'm the King of the Castle (Susan Hill)

[Marbles]

In an age of grainy, pale, yellow-by-birth recycled paper and fragile paperbacks with crawling-ant font, I bought some beautiful hardbound English classics printed in Hungary on high quality paper by a German publisher, as if they have come straight from the old days, a celebration of good printing. These books were being sold at throwaway prices. Perhaps they couldn't meet sales in the German market and were too happy to ship them off to anyone who'd take them.

Books are from Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, William Makepeace Thackeray and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Plus I got a couple of second hand copies of John Updike [S, The Witches of Eastwick]. I also bought Milan Kundera's The Art of Novel, in English translation, to see what that wonderful artist has to say. Looks promising and it is the one I am going to start on first as soon as I'm done with what I'm already reading. Hallelujah.

[Spotted Fever]

The Purity Of Desire: 100 poems by Rumi

Rumi is a magnificently beautiful and simple poet who brings the greatest thoughts of love and understanding into my otherwise mundane life. A true master of the craft who keeps the otherwise rampant complexities of most poetry to a slight breeze through the branches of my imagination in what is usually a billowing sail on a roaring sea.

[bouquin]

Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
The Ambassadors (Henry James)
The Small Hand (Susan Hill)




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Currently reading: Agnes Grey (by Anne Brontë)