Last Book You Bought and Why

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Have been thinking about reading it since my days of obsession with Walker Percy 20 years ago.

The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan

and

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

both at the recommendation of a friend (2 different friends)

Finnegans Wake By James Joyce. Because I heard it was a pretty difficult book and I wanted to try it. Unfortunately, I couldn't finish it.

The 1942 edition of "A Conrad Argosy" first published in 1897. This 713 page tome contains 14 of Joseph Conrad's works and hundreds of illustrative woodcuts by Hans Alexander Mueller.
I purchased it because it contains several of Conrad's stories which I haven't yet read and also because its purchase price was a mere 50 cents in the used books for sale section of the Huntington Beach Central Library.
Everytime I am in this part of the library I am taken aback by the cultural shift its contents represent. Persons who in their youth, middle, and old age collected these great books in their home libraries are now dying off in droves and their semi-literate heirs have no use for them. I can practically smell the tobacco smoke and brandy and see the bell-bottoms, turtlenecks and sports-coats of these books' owners in their prime--back in the time when intellectual pretension was widespread amongst the Southern Californian bourgeoisie. Alas all that is gone. As dead as Dick Cavett and Michael Douglas. The great dumbing down is in full effect. Beautiful books may now be had for a pittance. I suppose one might say that the culture's loss is my gain, but it still makes me somewhat sad.

I've read Henry James's Washington Square last. I'm on his What Maisie Knew now, but going very slowly, though it is good. But the language is very demanding, so you need to be in an intellectual flow and not at an intellectual ebb to go through the mental routine that James puts you through: his gymnasium is all jumping through hoops and box splits.

Washington Square was a wonderful story of unrequited love. A beautiful, quiet girl, who the other characters considered unbeautiful and stupid. She was anything but. She was lovely: a picture of sanity and modesty in high society.

I didn't buy either of these books. I'm reading them free on gutenberg.org. Fantastic, the web can be.

I have ordered online The White Noise by Don Delillo after being recommended by people on this very forum on another thread posted by me. I want to explore postmodern fiction. That was why the post.

The Go-Between (by L. P. Hartley)




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Currently reading: The Home and the World (Rabindranath Tagore)

The last thing I bought was Dexter is Delicious in audiobook format so that i can enjoy via my nano while working. In fact, I'm going through the whole Dexter series via audiobook, because I can drive, work, work around the house, take a shower and do a whole bunch of stuff that I couldn't otherwise do if I were just reading a traditional paper bound book (or kindle edition).

I've been watching the Dexter series on Showtime, and while I am waiting for season 7 to air, I decided to listen to the audiobooks and for those who don't already know, the show and the books are quite a bit different. Between the books and the show, I am happily observing Dexter's existence in these parallel universes, and I can't wait to see where they both go.

Dexter is Delicious is read aloud by the author himself, and he does a good job, but I was getting used to and enjoying Nick Landrum's narrative style. I especially enjoyed the last book, Dexter By Design and I've been snickering about the poop van for days now, which I first heard about while working, and I had to stifle the laughter coming from my cubicle, because I didn't want to explain that I was laughing about the "Poop Van." I don't tell stories very well, and it would require quite a bit of lead-up to properly explain "Poop Van" to someone who wasn't listening along with you. So yeah, I am enjoying the Dexter series of books. Poop Van (LOL)

The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman by Sterne
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Moby-Dick by Melville (about the third time I've bought it...this time I'm really going to read the ****er)

Why? WHY? Because. They're them. And all that.

I'm also thinking about trading a few things in tomorrow to get -

Madame Bovary by Flaubert
Middlemarch by Eliot

Women in Love - D. H. Lawrence.

Because I just finished The Rainbow.

The Country Girls (Edna O'Brien)
The Enormous Room (E. E. Cummings)
The Waves (Virginia Woolf)
The Humbling (Philip Roth)
If This is a Man (Primo Levi)
The Truce (Primo Levi)
Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
She (H. Rider Haggard)
The Butcher Boy (Patrick McCabe)
The Pursuit of Love (Nancy Mitford)
Krik? Krak! (Edwidge Danticat)
The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros)
Les Braises (Sandor Marai)
Bliss and Other Stories (Katharine Mansfield)
Breakfast of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Trusting and the Maimed (stories by James Plunkett)
Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler)
Little Black Book of Stories (A. S. Byatt)
Divisadero (Michael Ondaatje)
Quartet (Jean Rhys)
The Third Man (Graham Greene)
The Fallen Idol (Graham Greene)
Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
Her Privates We (Frederic Manning)

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco - because it was recommended on the forum
Veggie Burgers Every Which Way: Plus Toppings, Sides, Buns and More by Lukas Volger - because I have a cookbook addiction

I also downloaded the following for Kindle because they were free:
Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
Oliver Twist
A Tale of Two Cities
Wuthering Heights
Dracula
The Old Curiosity Shop
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Three Musketeers
Don Quixote

''World without end'', Ken Follett

Why

I picked it up after finishing ''the pillars of the earth, by the same author. It is a book i appreciated so much, because it made me enjoy English, as a language i still learn (non native)

Samsa, I hope you enjoy Women in Love. I just had a Modernism exam yesterday and used Women in Love as one of my text about about consciousness. The Women in Love thread on here (although quite old now) is really informative and was great for my revision!

I just bought Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley. Bit of a mistake right before exam period, I've had to abandon it halfway through!

I bought it because after seeing the second-hand book fair at uni I figured I needed something new to read to distract me from bogged down with a lot of Modernist reading for my exam revision.

Murder Must Advertise (Dorothy L. Sayers)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Victor Hugo)
The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
The Master of Petersburg (J. M. Coetzee)
The Complete Father Brown Stories (G. K. Chesterton)
Vanishing Point (David Markson)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Trois Femmes Puissantes (Marie Ndiaye)




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Currently reading: BLISS and Other Stories (Katherine Mansfield)