Oops. “I’ll just pop in and see if they have any Lucius Shepard” doesn’t work at the Book Exchange (Kloveniersburgwal, loads and loads of English-language secondhand, good sf section, highly recommended). Last week’s Primo Levi (The Periodic Table) has started me on a Levi kick: Moments of Reprieve, Other People’s Trades and his Auschwitz memoirs [...]
From the Boekenmarkt Spui: Allen Ginsberg, Reality Sandwiches > A naked lunch is natural to us, > we eat reality sandwiches. > But allegories are so much lettuce. > Don’t hide the madness. > –On Burroughs’ Work On the psychology of Military Incompetence, by Norman F. Dixon. This promises to be horrifying. > Finally, I [...]
From the Boekenmarkt Spui: Hugo Claus, “Het Verdriet van België” (“The Sorrow of Belgium”). A classic, apparently, recommended by Marijn. At a hefty 774 pages, this should keep me going for a while. “Sometime, Never: 3 Outstanding Tales of Science and Fantasy”. I can hear my mother sighing deeply… but this is good stuff! It’s [...]
Ok, there are some genuine holiday posts in the works, I promise. I’ve gone through the mountain of photos I took and picked out a molehill of good ones, so One Day Real Soon they’ll appear here. Today though, I’m rhapsodising (is that a word?) about my first Boekenmarkt Spui in three months. Whee! Flann [...]
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Only one this week, but it’s a doozy: Goudy’s type designs : his story and specimens : being a virtual facsimile of the Typophiles chap books XIII and XIV. This gorgeous pocketsize volume is accompanying me to New Zealand, where I can gloat over it at my leisure. Thanks very much Robert, glad you liked [...]
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (just too late to feature in a game of HipBone with some Kiwi mates) Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy These three from the Boekenmarkt Spui. Munchkin. I know it’s not a book. Get over it. It’s fun.
Thursday, December 7, 2006
It’s been two weeks, and quite a lot has arrived… I’ve read a good chunk of it, and I just cleared most of my pending reviews on LibraryThing, so I’ll be pretty brief here. Nobilis, R. Sean Borgstrom. This is an RPG (roleplaying game) but I ordered it for the backstory and world creation. Reviewed [...]
Thursday, November 23, 2006
The Annotated Alice, Lewis Carroll’s twin masterpieces annotated by Martin Gardner. Several years ago now I briefly owned a copy of this edition. I showed it to a girl I fancied, on the day I bought it, and she said “For me? How kind!” So of course I said “I knew you’d like it,” and [...]
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Still no City of Saints and Madmen. Marie Nilsenova’s PhD thesis, Rises and Falls: Studies in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Intonation. Again, it’s fun to know people who write books! Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games, which is about a different sort of game theorist. From the kringloopwinkel, where we also bought an [...]
Thursday, November 9, 2006
It’s started again… Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, much easier going than Pale Fire (I’m still working on that one though). I vaguely remembered this as not very impressive but I’ve totally come around about it — it’s not as beautifully written as Lolita but also not as emotionally difficult, and it has [...]