Thursday, February 07, 2013

Incoming Books

A number of interesting books have made their way into my possession in the recent period overlapping with Christmas, by gift or purchase, used or new:

Fiction, or at least not quite non-Fiction:
The Roving Shadows by Pascal Quignard (translated from the French by Chris Turner; Stephen Mitchelmore's excellent review brought this book to my attention; already read)
Divorcer by Gary Lutz
a clutch of old, cheap, used, mass-market paperbacks, mainly science fiction:
And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ (already read)
The Zanzibar Cat by Joanna Russ (stories, partly read)
Souls by Joanna Russ/Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr. (two novellas in one volume)
Time and Again by Clifford D. Simak 
Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban (Riddley Walker wasn't available; this was $2, looked interesting)
a couple of impulse purchases enabled by a discount coupon:
Mathilda by Mary Shelley (Ethan mentioned this in private conversation, and has been a key influence in my ongoing interest in Joanna Russ - and is totally responsible for my knowing anything at all about Clifford Simak. . .)
Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin (eh, figured I'd give one of his books a whirl; this was the one I remembered Stephen Mitchelmore liking. . .)
and I want to include Heroines by Kate Zambreno in this section, for reasons that remain somewhat obscure to me, yet are nonetheless consistent with my practice of including "sufficiently literary memoir" in the fiction section of my annual year-end accounting - many people have been talking about this excellent book, with good reason, so I don't know who was responsible for bringing it to my attention, but many thanks to whomever that might have been. . .

Non-Fiction:
Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf (used; already read)
Hegel by Frederick Beider (thanks to Mark Thwaite for recommending this one; partly read)
The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks (thanks to Kurt Newman, and others, for making me aware of this)
Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader
Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State by Chandan Reddy (Kurt Newman mentioned this somewhere, too, I think)
The Portable Malcolm X Reader (another impulse purchase)
Political Writings, 1953-1993 by Maurice Blanchot (translated from the French by Zakir Paul; Stephen Mitchelmore was responsible for this one, too)

2 comments:

Lee G said...

There was a nice little film made out of Turtle Diary, but I haven't seen it in many years. In fact, it appears it's never been released on DVD.

Richard said...

Cheers!

In fact, the copy I bought was a movie tie-in edition, with Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley on the cover (indicates screenplay by Harold Pinter, too).