Book Hauls!

From a couple of charity shops
Dune - Frank Herbert - £1 (Yes I confess it, I've never read Dune!)
Enchantress - James Maxwell - £1.99
Runelight - Joanne M. Harris - £1.49
Scottish Folk Tales - £1.49 - always a good source of inspiration
Wormwood - G.P. Taylor - £1.99
Tersias - G.P. Taylor - £1

I must admit I'd never heard of G.P. Taylor, but the blurb in Tersias revealed he is from my neck of the woods, so I thought I'd give him a try.
 
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It's been a great Tolkien week. Two days ago The Fall of Gondolin arrived, and today the LotR set with the Reader's Companion arrived in their box.
 
That's my retirement kitten, Tess, 14 weeks old, brought home from a semi-farm location. Not really named for she of the d'Urbervilles; just sounded like a good name for her. There's a little of the dark calico, Sachiko, in front of her, whom one of my daughters brought home from the local campus, where she seemed to be wandering around homeless, years ago.
 
Really nice first Tor edition for $3.49 at Value Village. Wasn't sure I needed it as I haven't yet read everything by the Master himself but figured if I could find the space to store it the price was right.
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Picked up a second-hand edition of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. It will be interesting to see how this holds up to a re-re-read. Miller was popular amongst a group of us at university, aged about 19. I think it was the prose style as well as the contents. There was similar admiration for Lawrence Durrell.

My father was amused when I mentioned it: he felt the book was overhyped by the fact that, back in the day, one basically had to go to Paris (or a dubious shop in Soho) to obtain a copy, and that many, expecting an uncomplicated spicy read, were disappointed to find a densely-written piece of literature.

I think that what we also found appealing was the romantic idea of a bohemian existence in Paris, hanging out in the cafes of Montmartre, listening to jazz, debating existential things, smoking Gauloises and drinking absinthe and generally being cool.

Of course, when we did turn up in Paris after our finals, Henry, Anais, Simone and Jean-Paul were long gone, and absinthe was illegal. Montmartre was pretty cool, though.


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Browsing in the local second-hand shop, I found a 1977 US leather-bound edition of Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, with a letter inside authenticating it as having come the collection of actor Jack Palance. The shop owner hadn't spotted the letter, so I might have got a bargain ... or not, given that I'll probably never read it.
 
Metro 2034 and Metro 2035 by Dmitri Glukhovsky. (I read and enjoyed Metro 2033 a lot, but never picked up the sequels.)

The Accidental War by Walter Jon Williams. (Again, I read the Praxis Trilogy a while ago and thought that it was pretty good space opera. I'm hoping that this is as good.
 
After many days touring England, I am heading home with a bunch of books, including four more Discworld novels, The Compleat Discworld Atlas, The Flavour Thesaurus (my 2nd favourite book on food), a massive 1978 exhibition catalogue on Dadaist & Surrealist magazines, and two scifi books that I forget the details of.
 
Arrived today: Flynn's Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days that Shook San Francisco and Hopkirk's Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire.
 
We went back to Mckay's, a used book store I've discussed before. I picked up The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection* (2016) edited by Gardner Dozois, and two novels by Michael Bishop: No Enemy But Time** (1982) and The Secret Ascension or Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas*** (1987).

*More than 300,000 words of fantastic fiction, as the cover says.

**Nebula Award winner for Best Novel.

***The cover just says The Secret Ascension; the author's preferred title is just Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas.
 
Today's mail brought two new books, Eugene Vodolazkin's Solovyov and Larionov and Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus (Underhill translation, Penguin Classics).

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Received Horatio Clare's Something of His Art: Walking to Lübeck with J. S. Bach new, and a box of used books and a discard or two from a friend, including three Graham Greene books, a collection of pieces by Bruce Chatwin, Charles Lamb's World War II memoir To War in a Stringbag, and Francis Spufford's Golden Hill, a novel about New York City in the 1700s that I'm looking forward to.

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