A quiet holiday: if the theory was that I shouldn't go anywhere because I had three articles to finish and a collection to edit, what really happened was more typical – although I didn't travel I also didn't work much. Today I got back to it, though...
But among all the holiday quiet (there's a phrase for you), the tree did get put up, there were a few gifts and cards, and I did spend a pleasant Christmas day with Michael and Andrew and their family.
At some point, a few days before Christmas, I thought: okay, if there won't be a lot of celebrating, I can easily justify treating myself. So I went online, went through various long lists of books I was thinking of buying (because I do keep such lists...); and I splurged – about fifteen or twenty books, around £200. Of course it's too chaotic to have packages mailed to my home (the exasperation of going across town to collect them, if I'm not lucky enough to be home for deliveries), so everything went to the office – and then the university was closed until today.
So: today included a bunch of boxes, packages, envelopes... Mendelsohn's new Cavafy translations, which are graceful and lucid, and in a more substantial/gorgeous binding than I'd expected. Another book of Red Pine's translations of Chinese poetry – also a beautiful edition.
Piranesi's drawings of prisons – those spooky distorted spaces; the newer Dover edition, though simple and inexpensive, is really large, with big, clear reproductions. Like so many books of the past decade, when visual processing/printing has taken such a leap forward, beautiful and yet ridiculously cheap.
Two more Tim Powers, and a Geoff Ryman: two of the finer, spookier fantasy writers, at their sharpest. Mann's Buddenbrooks – yeah okay it doesn't sound exciting, but this is the fourth of those John Woods translations, which are so brilliantly done that you realize that Mann is actually worth reading.
A huge collection of 'personal' essays – I've enjoyed personal essays much more in the past few years, for some reason; the usual publishing scuttlebutt is that no one ever wants to print them because they don't sell, but they can be wonderful. (No, I still haven't found an affordable copy of that Beerbohm set – the little ten-book collection; someday I will, though.)
Two Robert Walser collections – the new one of the microscripts is really an amazing thing: a beautiful edition with excellent illustrations, and graceful translations of these strange secret texts, which were lost for so long. (I wonder if it's worth buying the German edition of all of those texts?... but it's a good question whether I'd really get anything out of them. Worth a look, though.)
Yet to arrive – a bunch of Mark Doty's poetry; Tom Disch's last collection of stories – maybe a bit sad or grim, but there will certainly be some brilliant bits, and if he chose to be funny there will be some great pages; a children's book, though a clever/funny one, by Tellegen; and a few other fun things....
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