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What awesome books did you get (or give) for Christmas? Someone brought up the question in another forum, and I thought that I'd post a thread here. I got a lot of great books for Christmas: VALIS, The Country of the Pointed Firs, the University of California's edition of Huckleberry Finn, Marian Schwartz's new translation of Anna Karenina, and Ulillillia's incomparable The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters. I got a Barnes & Noble gift card too, which I spent on Kafka on the Shore today. I also gave out Wolf in White Van, Fields of Fire, and High Fidelity to my family, and I gave Storming the Reality Studio and The Throne of Bones to a particularly goony friend. This was a really good Christmas for me, and I hope it was for everyone else here too.
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Dec 27, 2016 00:41
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Oh cool, you beat me to making this thread. What's the new Anna Karenina like? Here's the Secret Santa wrap-up post showing who got what. I also got a pop maths book by Ian Stewart from my parents, and treated myself at the second hand shop. I picked up Absolom, Absolom, As I Lay Dying, Finnegans Wake and an anthology of criticism cheaply. Both the Faulkners are heavily annotated for the first twenty or so pages and clean as a bean thereafter. I gave my sister a Roget's, and Children of Time, The Star Diaries by Lem, and a ton of little Penguin Classics in Secret Santas, which seemed to go down well.
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Dec 27, 2016 07:27
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Sham bam bamina! posted:VALIS VALIS is cool, but it also hits you like a ton of bricks and I had to stop reading it due to it mixing badly with my depression at the time. I'd like to return to it, someday, as it's really something incredible - the scene with the therapist still lingers after months. I hope you enjoy it! For my Christmas, I got a giftcard and went shopping for A Matter of Oaths, The Dragon Never Sleeps, Darkwar, Shoggoths in Bloom, a Warhammer 40k novel, and Messiah Node. In other words, a lot of genre fiction.  As for giving - just one book for my dad: The Registration of Baroque Organ Music - he wants it for study, and hopefully it'll be something he can use in his playing. 
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Dec 27, 2016 11:31
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Safety Biscuits posted:What's the new Anna Karenina like? It's fairly similar to the David Magarshack translation, which was my previous favorite, but it retains a lot of specific phrasing that Magarshack streamlined, and there are many little differences in individual word choice. It's more faithful without being excessively so (like David MacDuff's scrupulous but labored Dostoyevsky translations). A nice touch is that it preserves the gender of female characters' surnames, which I wish more Russian translations would do. StrixNebulosa posted:VALIS is cool, but it also hits you like a ton of bricks and I had to stop reading it due to it mixing badly with my depression at the time. I'd like to return to it, someday, as it's really something incredible - the scene with the therapist still lingers after months. I hope you enjoy it!
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Dec 27, 2016 19:28
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I got The Fleet at Flood Tide by James D. Hornfischer. Sadly, this one wasn't up to the standard set by his previous books - it's his first attempt to talk about an entire campaign within the Pacific War rather than an individual battle or series of battles for the same objective, and I don't think he does well with the larger scope. Still a great book if you're really interested in the Marianas Islands campaign, but I think Hornfischer would have been better off restricting the book's focus to just that series of battles rather than trying to cover that and the strategic bombing and Okinawa and Iwo Jima and the atomic bomb and the occupation of Japan.
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Dec 27, 2016 19:59
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Complete Proust in one volume... 
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Dec 27, 2016 22:45
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Gave my wife The Traitor Baru Cormorant.
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Dec 28, 2016 01:37
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I got the first two books in the All the Wrong Questions series by Lemony Snickett. It's been interesting so far, with a very different style of storytelling but fitting into the greater universe - the basic ideas are still there, the pessimism inherent to the Unfortunate Events books is still intact, but the difference is that Lemony (the books follow an adventure he had when he was 12 years old) is trying to actively do something. He and his sister Kit have separated on purpose, but unfortunately, unbeknownst to them, while they are doing things and asking questions, Kit, as the second book puts it, is "Doing all the Wrong Things" while Lemony "Asks all the wrong questions". Another point of contrast is the villain - Olaf was overt - the Baudelaires knew exactly who they were up against but were trying to escape him, Lemony has no idea who Hangfire is or what he is up to, but he is actively fighting trying to stop him from doing it. It also does a good job building the world - Lemony mentions that he had an "unusual education" and you initially assume he learned on the streets without his parent's knowledge, however he mentions when asked if he can pick locks that "No, [he] got an incomplete". He went to an ACTUAL academy with Actual classes in picking locks and eavesdropping and other things - he literally had an unusual education. I immediately wanted to know more - what academy was it, who runs it, who else attended? Are Esme Squalor and Olaf alumni? etc. It interested me. Also Lemony is himself being mysterious - noone knows his true intentions, not even the reader can get into his head. He belongs to an "Organisation" but he will not elaborate, all that can be inferred is that it is a third one, neither the VFD, nor the newly revealed Inhumane Society. It's definitely an interesting contrast. Spoilered despite being old books now because of the upcoming Netflix series.
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Dec 28, 2016 14:02
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BioEnchanted posted:It also does a good job building the world - Lemony mentions that he had an "unusual education" and you initially assume he learned on the streets without his parent's knowledge, however he mentions when asked if he can pick locks that "No, [he] got an incomplete". He went to an ACTUAL academy with Actual classes in picking locks and eavesdropping and other things - he literally had an unusual education. I immediately wanted to know more - what academy was it, who runs it, who else attended? Are Esme Squalor and Olaf alumni? etc. It interested me. This is kind of old hat if you've explored the supplementary materials to ASOUE. The Unauthorized Autobiography goes deeply into the activities and recruitment process of VFD. The Beatrice Letters details some of Lemony's time in his training years, which he spent with many of the other children that we know later as adult VFD members. You're lucky to be only on the first two and really enjoying it. I was skeptical at first, but the third and fourth are incredible.
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Dec 28, 2016 21:24
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Bandiet posted:Complete Proust in one volume... You sure someone didn't just get you a cinderblock with a sleeve on it?  Got a few neat little things. Got the Complete Illuminated Blake which is neat. It's paperback and not the nicer hardback version, but it's the thought that counts. Also got a big book of Dore illustrations which is also amazing. The best book I got though was a Slavoj Zizek jokebook my sister bought me. quote:In the mid-1930s, a debate is raging in the Politburo of the Bolshevik : will there be money in communism or not? The Leftist Trotskytes claim there will be no money since money is only needed in societies with private ownership, while the Rightist partisans of Bukharin claim that of course there will be money in communism since every complex society needs money to regulate the exchange or products. When, finally, Comrade Stalin intervenes, he rejects both the Leftist and the Rightist deviations, claiming that the truth is a higher dialectical synthesis of the opposites. When other Politburo members ask him how this synthesis will look, Stalin calmly answers: “There will be money and there will not be money. Some will have money and others will not have it.” It's got some real rib-ticklers in there.
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Dec 30, 2016 20:07
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