Sunday, April 17, 2016

Recent Acquisitions

Durham County Library Book Sale

  • Imaginary Lands edited by Robin McKinley.
  • The 1981 Annual World's Best SF edited by Donald A. Wollheim. (Wollheim always had such odd taste, and this volume is no exception. About half his selections are quality; the rest are just completely mediocre and instantly forgettable.)
  • Moonsinger's Friends: Stories In Honor of Andre Norton edited by Susan Shwartz. (A festschrift. The editorial material is fannily fawning and overly gushy.)
  • Plutarch's Lives translated by John Dryden. (Modern Library; good condition hardcover.)
  • World of Our Fathers: The Journey Of The East European Jews To America And The Life They Found And Made by Irving Howe. (This big paperback looked in good condition until I got it home and was looking through it; then the spine cracked. Never trust a paperback. I ordered a used hardback online this morning.)
  • Mysterious New England by the editors of Yankee Magazine.
  • Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. (Modern Library. Do I ever plan to actually read any Lewis? Doubtful.)
  • The Decameron by Boccaccio. (Modern Library.)
  • War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy. (Modern Library. The Constance Garnett translation.)
  • The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings by Jan Harold Brunvand.
  • Gabriele d'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, And Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
  • Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction of the 19th Century edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh & Martin Greenberg. (As far as I can tell, Asimov only contributed the introduction, which cannibalizes other of his essays. The individual story intros seem to all be Waugh and/or Greenberg, since they are actually informative.)
  • The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout.
  • The Portable Renaissance Reader edited by James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin. (Despite what I said above about paperbacks, this one seems to be in good condition for its age.)
  • Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles And Tales edited by Sege A. Zenkovsky.
  • Conan Doyle: A Biographical Solution by Ronald Pearsall. (I think this is my third Doyle biography. Probably have that area covered now.)
  • Dreamtigers translated by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland.
  • A Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges.
  • As They Were by M.F.K. Fisher. (Essays.)
  • The Eye Of The Queen by Phillip Mann. (Have never heard anything about this one way or another; just got it because I used to see it listed in those Science Fiction Book Club ads in the SF mags. Who says advertising doesn't work - eventually?)
  • Skyscraper: The Making Of A Building by Karl Sabbach.
  • Talleyrand: A Biography by J.F. Bernard. (My second Talleyrand bio.)
  • Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life by Hugh Brogan.
  • The Swords of The Spirits Trilogy by John Christopher. (Found all three volumes scattered around on the table.)
  • Alastor by Jack Vance. (Omnibus of Trullion, Marune, and Wyst. Already had all three in individual pbs.)
  • Starfish by Peter Watts. (Brrrr!)
  • The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson by Daniel J. Boorstin.
  • A Diary From Dixie by Mary Boykin Chesnut.
  • The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 by Alistair Horne.
  • Quag Keep by Andre Norton.
  • Star Guard by Andre Norton.
  • "Our Crowd": The Great Jewish Families of New York by Stephen Birmingham. (The great German-Jewish families of New York, that is. Read this as a teen.)
  • Wilson by A. Scott Berg. (Woodrow Wilson, that is.)
  • Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence by Garry Wills.
  • 1948: Harry Truman's Improbable Victory and the Year That Transformed America by David Pietrusza. (Really tired of these hyperbolic subtitles. The worst one, I think, was one about the Garfield assassination: The Destiny of the Republic. Really? Really? Can't they just admit not every historical event is necessarily utterly transformative; maybe they can just be interesting? Isn't that enough?)
  • Alexander of Macedon by Harold Lamb. (Thought this was going to be pulpy historical fiction, which would be fun, but actually it's a biography. Oh, groan. Looks utter crap.)
  • The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah. (Ghanaian novel.)
  • Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South by Fawn M. Brodie.
  • Another Life: A Memoir of Other People by Michael Korda. (Memoir by the famous publisher. Inexplicably, stuck inside there's a postcard with the famous pic of Oscar Wilde in velvet breeches. Weird!)
  • Among The Believers by V.S. Naipaul. (Islamophobia avant la lettre.)
  • The Decline of Imperial Russia 1855-1914 by Hugh Seton-Watson.
  • The Works of Haggard by H. Rider Haggard. (King Solomon's Mines, SheAllan Quaterman, and Cleopatra in one omnibus volume.)
  • Drums Along The Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds.