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Recent Additions

What I Bought

1. Derek Attridge’s The Singularity Of Literature (which was in fact rather costly)
2. Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise
3. An anthology of Nobel lectures that includes the Literature lectures for two decades
4. The reprint of Robert Frank’s classic, The Americans (double yay)
5. The Drop Edge Of Yonder by Rudolph Wurlitzer
6. Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes
7. Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
8. Lost In The Funhouse by John Barth
9. The paperback edition of Coetzee’s Diary Of A Bad Year (better late than never!)
10. Junot Diaz’s much acclaimed The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao
11. The Everyman’s edition of Lolita
12. And a few that are in fact gifts

What I Couldn’t Find

1. Beckett’s Disjecta
2. The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen III: The Black Dossier
3. Saramago’s Blindness (couldn’t find the edition I wanted)

What I Had To Give Up

1. William S. Burroughs
2. A Eugene O’Neill play
3. Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book
4. Dickinson and Eliot
5. The Everyman’s of Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience
6. Some other Saramago book
7. Some Cormac McCarthy book
8. Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
9. Stefan Merrill Block’s The Story Of Forgetting
10. Netherland, which I really wanted to buy this time but just couldn’t because I was short on cash

What I Paid

Over 350, actually, which seems a far cry from my usual 100 or 200 dollar budgeting plans. However, keep in mind that The Americans is actually a belated birthday present from myself to myself. And the gifts themselves are about 90 dollars.

What I’m Glad About

Mostly that I’ve finally added Raymond Carver to my library, along with Rudolph Wurlitzer, whom I very much admire. Also happy that I’ve added more academic texts, in the form of The Rest Is Noise, The Singularity Of Literature and the Nobel lectures. Finally, it’s great to see Nabokov take its place on my shelf alongside the likes of my other heroes, Joyce, McCarthy, Beckett, and even the more recent ones such as Saramago. The Americans too actually is great to have. Well, hmm, I guess you could say that every purchase was a point of happiness in its own way.

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© 2008 a modest odyssey.