Monday 21 June 2010

Book haul

List of recent book purchases from Oxfam Books in Chorlton. Probably the best bookshop ever, pretty much every time i go in there i find something that i really, really want. Good finds include David Foster Wallace, Anais Nin, Orhan Pamuk, Anne Enright and some awesome poetry compilations. Recently these:

Thomas Mann:
Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice
Martin Amis: Heavy Water and Other Stories
David Crystal:
The English Language
Primo Levi: The Mirror Maker, If Not Now when
Angela Carter:
Wise Children
Samuel Beckett:
Waiting For Godot
Milan Kundera:
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Italo Calvino: The castle of crossed Destinies

Currently reading the Calvino, the book is compromised of short tales as told through tarot cards by a group of travellers who have lost the power of speech. The book is set in a strange castle in the middle of a forest. I suspect the travellers are all dead, but I'm not sure yet, I have a feeling its probably slightly more complicated than that. The Amis short stories were also pretty good, though I preferred The Information and Experience, which is actually his autobiography. Highly recommended, his prose is to die for. Wise Children I found a light and entertaining read but not a patch on her short stories, not at all. It was a beautifully written story, full of sumptuous description and the magic of the theatre, but I got two thirds of the way through and became impatient for it to end. Death in Venice dark and delicious, as expected.

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