you regret only the ones you did not buy
i need one more bookshelf. my repressed and starved soul from ten weeks of juvenilia and atrocious handscrawls on tattered foolscap more or less exploded during the just-ended one-week september holidays.
james fenton, the strength of poetry: oxford lectures
mark strand, the weather of words: poetic invention
john ashbery, selected prose
samuel beckett, 3 novels: murphy; watt; mercier and camier
samuel beckett, waiting for godot
colm toibin, the master
haruki murakami, birthday stories
czeslaw milosz, to begin where i am: selected essays
czelaw milosz, the captive mind
james & elizabeth knowlson, beckett remembering remembering beckett
elie wiesel, night
ralph waldo emerson, essential writings
c.s. lewis, reading the classics with
john fowles, wormholes: essays and occasional writings
harold bloom, the western canon
a.s. byatt, on histories and stories: selected essays
seamus heaney, opened ground: poems 1966-1996
jack kerouac, the subterraneans & pic
terry eagleton, literary theory
anais nin, delta of venus
umberto eco, on literature
john bayley, a memoir of iris murdoch
anatole broyard, kafka was the rage: a greenwich village memoir
paul auster, collected prose
ernest hemingway, a moveable feast
hmmmm.
actually having bought them a few at a time over the week it didnt seem numerous. i cannot help it. if i've one last dollar in my pocket it will still be used to finance a book. and i dont have many places to wander on this island so i go to the bookstores. and once i enter bookstores i invariably stumble upon books hitherto undiscovered. my fates with books have always been serendipitous, uncanny, apocryphal. i stand with jeanette winterson who incants:
if you love books as objects, as totems, as talismans, as doorways, as genii bottles, as godsends, as living things, then you love them widely. this binding, that paper. strange company kept ... the world of the book is a total world and in a total world we fall in love.
i didnt buy too many novels this time round, the purchases veering towards the poets and literary essays/criticism (or both: essays of poets). i enjoyed fowles immensely, and am in awe of milosz's intellect, and i'm looking very very forward to ravishing fenton, strand, and ashbery.
hemingway was a terrific steal at $1 i chanced upon in the school library. how anyone would want to throw this brand new paperback which would otherwise cost almost $20 is unfathomable and utterly embarrassing.
otherwise, of special mention is paul auster's collected prose, which was truly love at first sight. this binding that paper. i love the cover, the texture, and his writings especially those of french poetry and poets inspired deeper interest, and i suspect, opened an eye.
also reading alfian's unpublished collection of poetry completed five years ago, the invisible manuscript. it is brilliant, absolutely brilliant, an incandescent manifesto.
i'll end with yet another winterson:
... i have not for a minute regretted it. that is the way with books. you regret only the ones you did not buy.
:)
james fenton, the strength of poetry: oxford lectures
mark strand, the weather of words: poetic invention
john ashbery, selected prose
samuel beckett, 3 novels: murphy; watt; mercier and camier
samuel beckett, waiting for godot
colm toibin, the master
haruki murakami, birthday stories
czeslaw milosz, to begin where i am: selected essays
czelaw milosz, the captive mind
james & elizabeth knowlson, beckett remembering remembering beckett
elie wiesel, night
ralph waldo emerson, essential writings
c.s. lewis, reading the classics with
john fowles, wormholes: essays and occasional writings
harold bloom, the western canon
a.s. byatt, on histories and stories: selected essays
seamus heaney, opened ground: poems 1966-1996
jack kerouac, the subterraneans & pic
terry eagleton, literary theory
anais nin, delta of venus
umberto eco, on literature
john bayley, a memoir of iris murdoch
anatole broyard, kafka was the rage: a greenwich village memoir
paul auster, collected prose
ernest hemingway, a moveable feast
hmmmm.
actually having bought them a few at a time over the week it didnt seem numerous. i cannot help it. if i've one last dollar in my pocket it will still be used to finance a book. and i dont have many places to wander on this island so i go to the bookstores. and once i enter bookstores i invariably stumble upon books hitherto undiscovered. my fates with books have always been serendipitous, uncanny, apocryphal. i stand with jeanette winterson who incants:
if you love books as objects, as totems, as talismans, as doorways, as genii bottles, as godsends, as living things, then you love them widely. this binding, that paper. strange company kept ... the world of the book is a total world and in a total world we fall in love.
i didnt buy too many novels this time round, the purchases veering towards the poets and literary essays/criticism (or both: essays of poets). i enjoyed fowles immensely, and am in awe of milosz's intellect, and i'm looking very very forward to ravishing fenton, strand, and ashbery.
hemingway was a terrific steal at $1 i chanced upon in the school library. how anyone would want to throw this brand new paperback which would otherwise cost almost $20 is unfathomable and utterly embarrassing.
otherwise, of special mention is paul auster's collected prose, which was truly love at first sight. this binding that paper. i love the cover, the texture, and his writings especially those of french poetry and poets inspired deeper interest, and i suspect, opened an eye.
also reading alfian's unpublished collection of poetry completed five years ago, the invisible manuscript. it is brilliant, absolutely brilliant, an incandescent manifesto.
i'll end with yet another winterson:
... i have not for a minute regretted it. that is the way with books. you regret only the ones you did not buy.
:)