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Book Loot: Week Ending 6th June, 2010

June 6, 2010 Book Loot
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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received which confused me, and some cursory research revealed that the earlier edition contains much more of Larkin’s unpublished, uncollected and juvenile poetry.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 20th December, 2009

December 20, 2009 Book Loot
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Bookstore by shelbychicago [flickr][photo credit: shelbychicago at flickr]

I bought a whole heap of books this week. Stacks. The injuries acquired lugging them home will possibly require chiropractic care. With my bookstore closing and everything heavily discounted, plus staff discount, the accumulated loot only cost me about $3 a book, but I feel awkward and a little embarrassed displaying them here. (Not just because I may have bought some Gossip Girl books.) Instead of talking about the books I bought, this week, I’m going to gift you all with a number of links to some equally fascinating reading.

Jeanette Winterson reviews The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar at the New York Times. Highsmith is someone I have found myself increasingly drawn to, mainly due to her incredibly colourful personal history. I’m yet to read any of Highsmith’s fiction, but I imagine I will in the future, as well as a number of the biographies written about her. Winterson touches upon some of the intriguing aspects of Patricia Highsmith’s life in her review, so it is worth reading.

“Highsmith had a kind of archive-­attachment disorder; she adored lists. She chronicled, mapped, numbered and cross-referenced everything in her life, and even rated her lovers, but she wiped out what didn’t suit her and only vaguely acknowledged, when pressed by the more ferrety kind of interviewer, having conjured up a few story lines for Superman and Batman.”

Robert McCrum was invited to take a look at the Bodleian library collection of Kafka manuscripts – “What possible significance could a few boxes of manuscript have in the digital age? I was dead wrong.” – leading him to consider the many issues raised regarding the digitization of literature in general.

Margo Rabb surveys independent bookstores to find out which title is most often stolen from their stores. The answers and stories may surprise you.

“But this doesn’t mean that every reader is contributing to the bottom line. Only 40 percent of books that are read are paid for, and only 28 percent are purchased new, said Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry. The rest are shared, borrowed, given away — or stolen.”

A bit of a David Foster Wallace love-fest in the online literary world this week with “All That“, an excerpt from his unfinished novel The Pale King to be released in 2010, published this week in the New Yorker.  GQ published an interview with Deborah Treisman, Wallace’s editor, discussing The Pale King and her working relationship with DFW.

Lauren Leto has written a funny-because-it-is-(mostly)-true list of how to stereotype readers by their favourite authors.You will laugh and nod and say “oh my God, I know someone just like that!” to at least one of her stinging barbs.

And, finally, in I could have told you this but I don’t have the science degree and research funding to back it up, whiskey hangovers are officially worse than vodka hangovers. Consider this your friendly festive and completely scientific warning to take it easy on the booze over the Christmas period.