And Yet Another Book Loot…

Somebody stop me!

My reading has slowed down once again, I keep hogging all these books from the library and I continue to buy books. *sigh* Life is difficult sometimes.

Book Loot

• Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl (I first heard about this on Reading Matter’s Triple Choice Tuesday).
• East Lynne – Ellen Wood (this wraps up the Sensation Fiction list).
• Women in Love – D. H. Lawrence
• On Liberty and Other Essays – John Stuart Mill
• Shades of Grey – Jasper Fforde. A prize from Gaskella. It’s signed!
• Stoner – John Williams. Another prize from On My Porch. I had free reign on Book Depository and I picked this.
• The Humbling – Philip Roth. I got this for $1 during the final stages of a Borders sale.
• Past the Shallows – Favel Parrett.
• Caleb’s Crossing – Geraldine Brooks. I won these two titles from Boomerang Books.

Looks like June was my month for winning books! 🙂

And what’s with Book Depository being sold to Amazon?!!!

Something Lost, Something Gained

So: Borders is really and truly closing down with the few exceptions of some stores in the main city centres across the country. The one closest to me is/was at a shopping centre. With its forthcoming closure (merely days, I think) and with the closure of its sister store, another chain called Angus and Robertson, I realised that it left me without a close bookstore. The closest bookstore, any bookstore, be it chain or independent, would be either in the city or along my favourite shopping strip, Brunswick St, filled with eclectic bookstores and the best vegetarian eatery in the world. Despite the failures of Borders, I am quite sad that I won’t be able to pop in somewhere bookish to escape from the shopping crowds for awhile. Now, the only bookish place will be at large chain stores like Target and Big W.

At the moment, Borders is having a massive closing down sale. Everything MUST go and they truly mean it. Everything including shop fittings, shelves and furniture! Even wall decor are for sale. The stock was slow to receive a reduction. Even at 40% off the original price, their items were still so much more expensive than most places which is ridiculous. But over the last few weeks, it’s become 50 – 60% off and there had been some really good stock. I guess they’re really digging out the corners of the storeroom. So, while I’m sad that Borders is going, I’m pretty happy with my massive book splurge especially since I didn’t get a chance to go Book Town this year.

Presenting my book loot and also a some great bargains I found at the fabulous Brunswick St Bookstore.

Book loot!

From left to right, up and down:

• Crimes Against Humanity – Geoffrey Robertson
• The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea – Randolph Stow (highly recommended by Reading Matters – twice)
• Death in Venice and other stories – Thomas Mann
• Sadopaideia – Annoymous
• Austerlitz – W. G. Sebald
• Call Me By Your Name – Andre Aciman (I’ve been wanting to read this since A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook reviewed this and I found it by chance! On sale!).
• The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald. I haven’t had the most luck with Fitzgerald but this edition is simply gorgeous.
• The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle. I still haven’t read much Sherlock.
• All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque. I won this awhile back from Reading Matters for World Book Night and I received it yesterday!
• Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
• The Sorrows of Young Werther  – Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
• She – H. Rider Haggard
• Middlemarch – George Eliot
• The White Castle – Orhan Pamuk
• Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
• Philosophy in the Boudoir – Marquis de Sade
• The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir. It’s the new translation and I got it for a measly price of $12.95. Whoa!

So that’s my loot. I don’t think I would mind being locked in my room for a few months.

New Books!

I really should be saving some money but darn Book Depository and their tempting extra ten percent off voucher. I also found an Australian website that had Perspehones for sale! Persephones!

New Books!

The titles are:

• What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt. I’ve heard so many good things about this book, I got a cheap edition to take it travelling with me. I hope it’s good because I’m only taking two books!
• Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
• Little Boy Lost – Marganita Laski
• The Victorian Chaise-Longue – Marghanita Laski (not pictured)
• The Law and the Lady – Wilkie Collins
• A Game of Hide and Seek – Elizabeth Taylor
• And an awesome Penguin tin I got on sale at Borders that has Breakfast at Tiffany’s on one side and …

Gatsby!

The Great Gatsby on the other. Pretty nifty but I still don’t know what I’m going to put in it.

Santa Got Lost

A quite belated catch up post (also, happy new year! So says she a mere eleven days into the new year…) on what Santa bought me over Christmas. Some were a gift to myself and the rest were picked out for myself on behalf of others who didn’t know which books to get me. :-p

Ta-dah!

The titles are:

• Therese Raquin by Emile Zola
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
• Emma by Jane Austen (which I’ve already broken in and halfway through)
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
• The Monk by Matthew Lewis
• Candide and Other Stories by Voltaire
• Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
• The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

A nice loot and something to get the year off to a strong start. I’m also seriously running out of room. And, of course, I forgive Santa for being late with the presents…

Poetry Galore!

 

The books I won from Oxford University Press in a twitter (go follow them!) competition a few weeks ago finally arrived earlier this week. I received five volumes of poetry galore which is rather ironic since poetry is the one type of literature that I have immense trouble with. However, flicking through the collection, I am warming up to it and have read quite a few already.

The prize:

• Poems and Prose – Christina Rossetti
• Selected Poetry – John Keats
• Aurora Leigh – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Selected Poetry – William Blake
• Selected Poetry – Samuel Coleridge

I’m very excited about the collection and I’ve always been partial to Christina Rossetti’s work. Here is one of my favourite Rossetti poems:

Song

When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me;

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor shady cypress tree:

 

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

 

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on, as if in pain:

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise nor set,

Haply I may remember,

And haply may forget.

It’s quite morose but it’s beautiful.

Birthday Book Loot

Another birthday past this weekend and I turned yet another year older (as one generally does when one has a birthday). To spoil myself, I gave my credit card and the various book stores a good work out and added to the increasingly overwhelming TBR pile!

• It’s Raining in Mango by Thea Astley.
• Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl. This was a free promotional copy that Penguin sent for signing up to their blog.
• An Accommodating Spouse by Elizabeth Jolley. Picked this up at the book market.
• Let’s Kill Uncle by Rohan O’Grady.
• Mrs Ames by E. F. Benson.
• Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim.
• The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy.
• Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. This one came from Book Depository quite squished. Not too happy about that.
• The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins.
• The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy. Building my Hardy collection quite nicely!
• Kitchen Essays by Agnes Jekyll.
• Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple. Ah, my first Persephones!

I love this loot but I have no idea when I’ll get through them. There are twelve books there and if I read an average of one a week, I’ll need three months. Ah well. Now all I need to is to go get that darn bookshelf.

New Books (and a trailer)!

The books I ordered from Book Depository all arrived this week. It started off with the intention of only buying a small present for a friend and ended up with me ordering myself a little loot.

• The Outsider – Albert Camus. This is a nice, hardback edition. My copy is from high school and filled with scribbles which can be distracting.
• The Infernal Desire Machine of Doctor Hoffman – Angela Carter. I love these Penguin Decades editions. Gorgeous covers.
• Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Speaking of covers, this one is lovely too and helps a good cause. It also carries on the existentialist theme.
• Beautiful For Ever – Helen Rappaport. I wrote a bit about Madame Levison and her influences on Wilkie Collins’ Armadale in uni and I love this topic. I wish I had this for a resource a few years ago. And again, isn’t this cover simply beautiful?

Finally, here is the trailer for the popular Australian Tomorrow series. The first movie is being released later in the year. The series was one of my favourite and memorable reads during high school and I was quite obsessed with it.

It looks ok but some lines seem a little corny. I really hope it’s decent! And I can’t stop thinking the lead actress is still that annoying girl she used to be in Neighbours.

More New Books

I couldn’t help myself and I bought myself more new books. Granted, I have been looking for these titles for awhile now and they’re pretty difficult to find in stores.

• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
• How the Light Gets In by M.J. Hyland

I had no idea Oxford Press published Wizard of Oz and I particularly love the cover. It makes it look a little more grown up when reading it on the train. I had bought Wizard of Oz previously but I kept getting the wrong version. They were either abridged, adaptations or variations of the original version. I would have liked the annotated Wizard of Oz but that’s a little too expensive at the moment. I’m a huge fan of the movies, including the lesser known Return to Oz, but I have never read the books. With How the Light Gets In I complete my collection of M.J. Hyland’s books. This title has been particularly hard to get even on ebay.

New Books!

I love new books. It’s amazing how the excitement still hasn’t left me hence the joyful exclamation mark in the title. New books always calls for exciting exclamation marks.

New titles are:

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.
• Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault translated by Angela Carter
• Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

There was a revival of Shirley Jackson’s gothic tales on the blogosphere last year. I’ve been looking for her books in various libraries, public and universities, but surprisingly, she is very difficult to find. I enjoyed my first foray into Sartre with The Age of Reason so I’m looking forward to tackling Nausea in the near future. Angela Carter’s translation of the french fairy tales by Charles Perrault is something I’m excited to read next. And Bill Bryson’s book is something I picked up on sale which made it cheaper than the already cheap $9.95 it usually sells for. These cheap Orange Penguins are fantastic because it allows you to dabble into literature that you mightn’t have considered before especially non-fiction.

I must gush about the beautiful Penguin Modern Classics covers. They are just so gorgeous and really inspires one to pick up their books which is important if titles or authors are unfamiliar.

I have to say my favourite is Angela Carter’s with Shirley Jackson’s running a close second.

Final Delivery Before Christmas

Well, the shopping centres here have been opened for 36 hours since yesterday (23rd) morning and have closed today at 6pm. This is to accommodate those last minute gift buying frenzies. I went along to one of the shopping centres and it is startling how terrifying the Christmas rush crowds are! I managed to pick up some books even though the last thing I ever need is more books. Those poor trees.

I got:

• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
• The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The mail also started coming through too since there has been a postal strike on for the last several days. Two of the books from the lot I ordered from the Book Depository have come through today’s post before the holiday break.

• Poor Miss Finch by Wilkie Collins
• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

I am most excited about Our Mutual Friend. Book Depository has been speedy in their delivery but I’m always dismayed the books turn up a little battered. They’re not as bad as the ones that appeared from Borders though. I’m always meticulous when picking out new books and even the slightest dents and bends puts me off. I like to do the damage to the books myself, thank you very much.

All in all, a nice little Christmas gift to myself.

Merry Christmas everybody!