You are currently browsing the start narrative here posts tagged: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Book Loot: Week Ending August 8th, 2010

August 8, 2010 Book Loot
2 comments

Witch StoriesThis week:

A few months after purchasing it on ebay, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald finally arrived. I’d accepted that it had probably been lost in the post, and emailed the seller who was on holiday at the time. When they returned from their trip they told me that the book had been sent back to them as my address had been rubbed off the package! Very pleased that it wasn’t the victim of some sort of postal conspiracy.

This is the 52nd Book Loot post, which means that Start Narrative Here has been around for almost a year! (And I don’t even want to think about just how many books have been amassed in that time.) My first review was posted on a wordpress hosted site on the 11th of August, 2009 – and I decided that I wanted my own space and bought the domain a week later on the 18th of August, 2009. Starting a book blog was a project aimed at learning to express myself again after a really horrible year, and it has quickly become much more than just a nerdy recovery method. It has reinvigorated and reaffirmed my love of the written word. To anyone that has commented, read, recommended, emailed or even lurked over the past year, thank you so much.

Image from tumblr.

Book Loot: Week Ending 6th June, 2010

June 6, 2010 Book Loot
1 comment

A Book Loot: Week Ending 6th June, 2010rather decent haul this week. There seems to be a trend among book bloggers at the moment of self-imposed book buying bans but obviously I laugh in the face of trends.

With the Larkin so-called Collected Poems I really should have done some research before buying this edition. The edition I worshipped at the university library was much thicker than the one I received which confused me, and some cursory research revealed that the earlier edition contains much more of Larkin’s unpublished, uncollected and juvenile poetry. Whereas my edition contains his four main poetry books, and a handful of uncollected poetry – all kept in Larkin’s own ordering for his poems rather than chronological. I know there are some poems in the earlier edition which are necessary, so it looks like I’ll be hunting down a copy of the earlier edition as well. I can’t help but feel that Larkin deserves a better treatment but I am a completist.

Links!:

  • Driven to Distraction: Cate Kennedy on the internet and the writing life is now online at Overland. When there were excerpts posted online a few months ago, I was totally adamant that she had things utterly wrong, but the full article is a lot more persuasive, the argument fleshed out more than the “controversial” soundbites listed in mainstream newspapers.
  • There is now an Australian Book Blogger Directory. Hopefully this will become a really useful resource, I wonder if this means we are a step closer to seeing an Australian Book Blogger Convention?
  • I have such a crush on this post from My Girl Friday. Steph has made polyvore sets for characters from young adult novels, and the results are so fantastic and creative! I might be awed because I have a complete lack of fashion sense, black goes with black right? I’m one of those Melbournians with a monochromatic wardrobe.

Book Loot: Week Ending May 30th, 2010

May 30, 2010 Book Loot
No comments

The last of my Fitzgerald’s are filtering through and my, my they do look lovely all together! The photographs on the covers are a little bit kitsch, I’ll take a photo of them when they’ve all arrived.

This week’s loot links, other than this thorough feminist reading list, are all videos:

  • Dale Campisi from Arcade Publications talks about E.W. Cole (you can read my review of the book he’s discussing, Lisa Lang’s E.W. Cole: Chasing the Rainbow here) and what independent booksellers can learn from Cole’s approach to bookselling. I might use this video to convince my boss that our book store really needs a monkey enclosure.
  • Are you ready for the self-referential joy that is this youtube video? Here is Andrew McCarthy reviewing Bret Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms. “What? What do I care what Blane from Pretty in Pink cares about a book?!” There was a film version of Less Than Zero and Andrew McCarthy played the lead character, Clay. Imperial Bedrooms is a sequel to the original novel Less Than Zero, which opens with a discussion of the film version of their lives from the perspective of Clay, AND Andrew McCarthy is the narrator of the Imperial Bedrooms audiobook. This might just be a cleverly self-aware, effective bit of marketing hype, but I kind of love it.
  • And finally, the dulcet tones of Damon Albarn reading Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Book Loot: Week Ending May 9th, 2010

May 9, 2010 Book Loot
No comments

The Debutantes by Marta Aronssohn-Danzig (c1889)A few more of my Fitzgerald set have been arriving this week, only a couple more due in and then I’ve completed my whole set and sense of fulfillment and happiness will surely follow.

And, a whole bunch of links of good reading for you all.

Picture credit: The Debutantes by Marta Aronssohn-Danzig (c1889); nothing to do with anything, really, I just like the look on their faces: “really Jess?, you’re talking about Carson McCullers again? Sigh.”

Book Loot: Week Ending May 2nd, 2010

May 2, 2010 Book Loot
4 comments

A warning to all, especially those on self-imposed book buying bans, this post features an obscene amount of books. First, some ebay packages arrived. Then I found out one of my favourite secondhand bookstores in the city was going out of business and selling all their books for $1. Yes, $1. I set myself a modest limit of $20 and let loose, coming out with only (cough, only? My shoulder and hands disagree) 19 books. The day after the sale ended, my sister happened to be wandering by and they were chucking books into a dumpster; she scored some really good stuff too.

And then, yes, that’s just my loot from during the week, there was Clunes. I came well under budget, spending much less than I thought I would. It was a great day, lovely surrounds and buildings, a good vibe, a few friendly dogs and lots of books.  Here’s my haul:

And, a few interesting articles from the week:

Book Loot: Week Ending April 25th, 2010

April 25, 2010 Book Loot
5 comments

by Charles Dana GibsonThis week I’ve decided that I want to complete my collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald novels and short stories. Not only have I decided I want to complete my collection, but seeing as the two novels are of a similar design, I want my entire collection of Fitzgerald’s to be from this particular printing from the mid-1970s. Bless eBay and Abebooks1.  Does anyone else get like this? It doesn’t even make sense because my books aren’t properly shelved, so it’s not as though they’ll look pretty lined up together on a shelf. Crazy. I really don’t understand it, but even thinking about buying the same title from a different printing seems completely impossible. Thank God I don’t get like this with every book I buy, it’s rather stressful.

Less than a week until Clunes! To keep you happily distracted while I work out my game plan (seriously, what would be the ideal method for carrying my new books around – I’ve considered getting one of those granny shopping carts and pimping it up a bit! That’d be so badass, even if I was the only one that thought so.) for next weekend:

“When the private world of reading and the public world of performance mesh happily, all parties benefit: musicians appearing cerebral, writers appearing hip, readers and listeners feeling smart.”

  • A romantic look at the independent bookstore in the digital age, some of the reasons put forward here are the same that were espoused upon the emergence of digital music versus record stores; comments like this:

“Independent bookstores remain a sensual and social experience that will be tough to replace. Going to a bookstore is as much about physically browsing. As smart as Amazon’s ‘Customer’s Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ metadata is, it’s no replacement for mooching around the fiction section and skimming novels yourself. Or the serendipitous eye-catching of a face-out cover or flipping through several books without laggy downloads.”

  • are eerily similar to what we were saying about the physical aspects of music less than ten years ago, you know, incessant whining about cover art and whatnot. While I agree with the sentiment, ignoring the realities and implications of a changing business landscape isn’t going to help the future of the physical bookstore.
  • The Miles Franklin Award shortlist was announced during the week (almost tempted to try and read all of the nominated novels, I’m still contemplating it.) and Alex Miller had a few choice words to say about the lack of relevance of the literary award.

1 Speaking of Abebooks, do you think of it as Abe, as in Abe Simpson, Abe Lincoln, and all those other famous Abes; or A.B.E.? I’ve always thought of it as Abe, but I was speaking to a more experienced bookseller this week and he referred to it as A.B.E. and my whole world fell apart. But, then I got to talk at length to a little kid about the upcoming Iron Man film and then I was okay again.