Recent Acquisitions

[prunesquallor]

Durham County Library Book Sale:

• The Kennedy Imprisonment by Garry Wills.
  
• Black Holes And Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy by Kip S. Thorne.
  
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen W. Hawking.
  
• Night Has A Thousand Eyes: A Naked-Eye Guide to the Sky, Its Science, and Lore by Arthur Upgren.
  
• The Randolphs of Virginia by Jonathan Daniels.
  
• Islamic Art by David Talbot Rice.
  
• Maya Art and Architecture by Mary Ellen Miller.
  
• Brueghel by Walter S. Gibson. (I'm probably going to have to get another Brueghel art book at some point, as the pics in this one are too small and low-definition.)
  
• Babylon by James Welland.
  
• The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel.
  
• Handbook To Life In Ancient Egypt by Rosalie David.
  
• A History of South-East Asia by D.G.E. Hall.
  
• In Our Image: America's Empire in the Phillipines by Stanley Karnow.
  
• Under The Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy.
  
• The Penguin Book of Eighteenth Century English Verse edited by Dennis Davison.
  
• Under Fire by Henri Barbusse. (French Great War memoir.)
  
• The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility by William L. Moore & Charles Berlitz. (It's getting harder and harder to find these fun craptastic pseudoscience books from the seventies.)
  
• The Best of S.J. Perelman. (Modern Library edition. After browsing this and another Perelman book I picked up a few years ago, I see why he's a mostly forgotten comic writer. His humor is very much an acquired taste - a polite way of saying he's not very funny.)
  
• The Fifties by David Halberstam. (I read this one years ago and remember really enjoying it. I wish I could find social histories of the sixties and seventies of a similar caliber.)
  
• No Exit And Three Other Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre.
  
• The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner by Alan Silltoe.
  
• Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout.
  
• The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky: The Screenplays, Volume 1 (Marty, The Goddess, The Americanization of Emily). (Too bad I didn't find Volume 2, with Network. But then again, that volume also has Altered States - ugh - so I'll count my blessings.)
  
• Robertson Davies by Judith Skelton Grant.
  
• Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davidson.
  
• First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong by James R. Hansen.
  
• China: A New History by John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman.
  
• The Red And The Black by Stendhal. (Purchased to have the Modern Library edition.)
  
• Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd. (The biography?!)
  
• William Shakespare: A Biography by A.L. Rowse. (This is just a biography. So sad.)
  
• A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh. (A few years ago I decided to pick up some Marsh - whom I've never read - and grabbed Light Thickens purely at random. That turned out to be her last published novel. Then I grabbed this one, again purely at random, and it turned out to be her first Roderick Alleyn novel. Still haven't read a word of either one.)
  

Other recent purchases from other sources:

• Other Earths edited by Nick Gevers & Jay Lake.
  
• This Republic of Suffering: Death And The American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust.
  
• Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme.
  
• Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales by Greer Gilman.
  
• The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.
  
• Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand.
  
• Regenesis by C.J. Cherryh. (This will have to wait until I reread Cyteen.)
  
• The Scholars of Night by John M. Ford.
  
• Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald.
  
• Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link.
  
• Wireless by Charles Stross.
  
• Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America by Robert Charles Wilson.
  
• Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin.
  
• Lurker In The Lobby: A Guide To The Cinema of H.P. Lovecraft byAndrew Migliore & John Strysik. (To qualify, apparently all you have to do is mention "Cthulhu" in the movie.)
  
• Last Week's Apocalypse by Douglas Lain.
  
• The Imago Sequence And Other Stories by Laird Barron.
  
• A New Universal History of Infamy by Rhys Hughes.
  
• The New Space Opera 2 edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan.
  
• Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith by C.L. Moore.
  
• The Legend of Sigurd and Guderun by J.R.R. Tolkien. (The relentless drive to publish every dribble from Tolkien's pen continues.)
  
• Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. (Ashamed to admit I hadn't read this before. It makes a perfect bathroom book and I've been working my way through it a few pages a day for the past month or so.)
  
• Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of The British Boffin by Francis Spufford.
  
• Legends of The Bible by Louis Ginzburg. (This is heavily abridged - reduced from six volumes - and retitled - originally it was called Legends of the Jews. You can get the complete text online, but I like owning dead trees.)
  
• The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.
  
• Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver.
  
• Netherland by Joseph O'Neill.
  
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.
  
• Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary & Language Companion by David Crystal & Ben Crystal. (Really fascinating to browse through.)
  
• Best New Horror 19 edited by Stephen Jones. (I don't collect every volume of this series the way I do Datlow/Link/Grant, Dozois or Hartwell, but I pick them up when I think about it and feel like it. I do like Jones' dry wit in his summations a lot better than the others' American earnestness.)
  
• Tales of Old Japan: Folklore, Fairy Tales Ghost Stories And Legends of the Samurai by A.B. Mitford.
  
• Hitler As Military Commander by John Strawson.
  
• The Great Terror by Robert Conquest.
  
• The Art of Memory by Francis A. Yates.
  
• Project Orion: The True Story Of The Atomic Spaceship by George Dyson.
  
• In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and other stories by William H. Gass.
  
• Shakespeare After All by Marjorie Garbler.
  
• Lincoln and Douglas: The Debate That Defined America by Allen C. Guelzo.
  
• A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich. (I really enjoyed Lord Norwich's trilogy on Byzantium, so this ought to be fun too.)
  
• The English Eccentrics by Edith Sitwell.
  
• The Public Domain: Enclosing The Commons of the Mind by James Boyle.
  
• Alabama Curiosities by Andy Duncan. (I was in Alabama once for less than a minute, and I think that was a sufficiency - I don't plan on ever returning.)
  
• Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America by Peter Washington.
  
• Wasn't The Future Wonderful: A View of Trends and Technology from the 1930's by Tim Onosko. (Source texts for the Gernsback Continuum.)