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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

So, um, what books did you get or give for Xmas?

09:58 / 26.12.04

So did you get a big fat load of books for Xmas? Did you buy loads of people books for presents? I know I did on both counts. I think they're the ideal Xmas present in lots of ways - they're relatively cheap, and almost everyone has a little kink or interest you can key into a publication. Shopping for them gives gives me a chacne to wander around the Charing X Road aimlessly buying stuff for myself also. So I thought it might be worth having a thread for the nerdy list making that accompanies biblophilia. Having said that I'd appreciate it if people could make a bit of a descriptive effort rather than just posting a list of titles - what it is, how or why you ended up with it, expressions of horror or delight etc - use your imagination.

I got:

Richard Woolheim's Germs, requested after reading a review of it in The Guardian. Wollheim was a philiospher who had a lifelong commitment to psychoanalysis, as well as a couple of astonsihing phobias so this memoir of childnood is quite an interesting psychic excavation. It looks fascinating - being compared to Proust and WG Sebald.

Hugh B Urban's The Economics of Ecstacy - spotted in Unsworth's by a friend, discounted from £45 to £11, and request passed on to present purchaser. An investigation of the interstices of colonialsm and tantra in Bengal, using the concept of the marketplace to interweave economic status and concerns to the religous movements studied in the text. It might seem a heavyweight choice for Xmas but not if your prefered reading is academic Indology.

I also got a history of the aphabet, a conpedium of lore around the letters, which looks facinating, but I can't remember the bloody title! One for mucho dippping.

Also got a pile of paperback cookbooks off my mum including Rick Stein and Jane Grigson's English Food. The later means my consumption of butter and cream will go up not down in 2005.

And received from, and gave to,my girlfriend, a copy of China Melville's Perido Street Station. Great minds think alike. Decided to catch up at last. My copy is going back to the shop as it's uninscribed.

And yourself?

15:44 / 26.12.04

Gave: P.D James the Murder Room, Lemony Snicket: A Series of unfortunate Event no. 11, Northern Lights many more children's books.
Got: Enduring Love by Ian McEwan, Small Island by Andrea Levy.

16:03 / 26.12.04

...now, that last line at the end of the first paragraph. What does it say?

16:18 / 26.12.04

Heh heh sorry,
Already mentioned something here
But on the whole extremely pleased with what I got as its normally bargain basement crap.

I could relate to you the festive tail of how the door alarm went off during my Christmas shopping in Waterstone's.... and I just have because there wasn't much to add passed that. I did have to wander to and fro through the sensor a few times to check if it was me which
attracted loads of horrible attention (luckily still had my receipts, still the shame etc)
And eventhough I just grabbed whatever I could in a frenzied 1 day to Christmas way people seemed genuinely happy with what they got and I was even thanked in a completely non sarcastic way for really personalising and thinking about what I got.
I must buy Northern Lights for myself, as I flicked through it briefly and it seemed to be a good read.

The Prince of All Lies

16:44 / 26.12.04

I got Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle..I already started reading it, couldn't contain myself...

Haus of Mystery

20:53 / 26.12.04

A fucking brilliant book!

I gave my Mum a copy of Nigel Slater's Toast, his childhood memoir filtered through his memories of food, as I read it myself and thought she'd like it. She does cos she's already read it. Curses! That was my only own goal though - gave my brother's girlfriend The Cast Iron Shore by Linda Grant, as I read it at uni and thouroughly enjoyed it. She's a lecturer in Art History, and I wanted to give her some fiction that wasn't too verbose or convoluted, and Grant's book is a marvel of economic prose, traversing a woman's whole life, and two continents in crisp, effective prose.

I recieved:
Charlie Booker's collected Screen Burn columns from the Guardian, as he's my favourite bilious misanthrope in the Whole World. I snorted turkey out of my nose laughing.

Kingdom of Fear by the good Doctor, HST, as I always get abook by him. It's a tradition. More bile, from a vbery on form Mr tHompson. It's good to be reminded of the sane Americans, and he calls Bush a 'whore beast'.

The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe, a sequel to The Rotter's Club an excellent evocation of 70's life, awkward teenagers, the social climate, and the way tragedy disrupts lives. Hope the sequel is as good.

I only asked for the Thompson book, and was delighted with the others (especially 'Screen Burn' - I can't describe how much I love Charlie Brooker. His next collaboration is 'Nathan Barley' with Chris Morris - working title 'Cunt'). It really is great to recieve
surprises that show people a)know you and b) that they care about you.

Oh yeah! My girlfriend bought me an old copy of 'Hammer House of Horror' magazine because it has a large George Romero interview on the set of 'Dawn of the Dead'. That's love, that is.

00:36 / 27.12.04

I got the Dark Materials trilogy and two Routledge books on Alchemy by Jung.

10:19 / 27.12.04

I got 2 Stephen Jay Gould books that I had asked for:

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle - Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time.
Bully for Brontosaurus - Reflections in Natural History.

SJG died a couple of years ago and so it has become increasingly difficult to get his earlier books. These two were ordered in from the US. I'd read everything he had written up until the mid-80's, when I was a student. Sadly I tossed them all when I moved country 10 years ago [and yet strangely I'd decided to keep 'Field Guide to Mangroves'...].

I also gave 2 books, which I've read and loved:

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk.
The Mind's I - Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul - by Hofstadter and Dennett. It's a collection of essays by people like Nagel, Borges and Dawkins with commentaries of varying lengths by Hofstadter or Dennett. It's quite dated now having been written in 1981, however it is still a fascinating read.

20:08 / 27.12.04

Andy Warhol 365 takes - beautiful stuff..

23:52 / 27.12.04

gave: paul auster's bk of illusions, milan kundera's unbearable lightness of being, russell banks' sweet hereafter -- all 1st editions, which accounts for the odd list.

got: I GOTS NATHAN.

I have scared people off from buying me books. I'd say I'm unhappy about it but then I can still remember some of the choice items I have received in the past. No, Oprah's book club. No.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

07:42 / 28.12.04

I gave my sister Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal, The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester for my Mum and for my Dad Peter Ackroyd's Dickens

I received Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Goodbye Again: The Definitive Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, a collection of Pete and Dud sketches, and a couple of books by Christopher Tolkien about his father's writing of the Lord of the Rings.

I'm reading the Pratchett first, I know he's sneered at by Barbeloids in general but MR has references to physical and sexual abuse amid the usual correct 'war is hell' messages, so is surprisingly dark. After that I'll probably move on to the Jonathan Strange as it seems to have got favourable reviews from most places.

14:39 / 28.12.04

I gave my mum The London Jungle Book by Bhajju Shyam, which I bought on a drunken whim when I went into Foyles to get a guidebook on Reykjavik. It's written and illustrated by an artist from a very rural area in India who has some fascinating responses to London. I also got her an illustrated guide to marsh plants and flowers which came from 1946 -- London and wildflowers are two of the subjects on which she can be excessively geeky so she loved them.

For my birthday, Stoatie gave me Straight from the Fridge, Dad: A Dictionary of Hipster Slang by Max Decharne, which I have been meaning to get for ages. It's very entertaining.

I bought myself Brooklyn Dreams by JM DeMatteis and Glenn Barr to read during the quiet moments on Xmas Day. I went to the comic shop with two friends and asked them to recommend something like Bone by Jeff Smith -- something bulky that will take a long time to read. Everything that my two friends and the guy in the comic shop came up with were things I already had or had already read, so they were getting pretty desperate. Actually, Brooklyn Dreams wasn't really the kind of escapist drama that I was after. Despite its bulk, it took me very little time to read and I found it horribly self-indulgent in places... Oh well. (I've been rereading the first ten volumes of Inu-Yasha by Rumiko Takahashi for escapism, instead...)

14:41 / 28.12.04

Oh, and Illmatic, isn't that book on the alphabet just called Alphabet? It looked pretty fun.

18:32 / 28.12.04

I got:
The Disinformation Book of Lists
Mental_Floss Presents: Condensed Knowledge

I gave:
several copies of John Stewart's America: The Book, to various people

Regrettable Juvenilia

19:23 / 28.12.04

I'm just going to mention one book I was given: Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, which I've been dying to read for a while... 90 pages in and it is absolutely bloody spectacular, crammed full of details that make you want to rush off to a history reference book to see who and what he's made up himself, and what really happened - of course that would be nothing without a spot-on sense of humour, an ability to make rather academic discussions exciting and accessible, and most of all, the ability to just write (I can't really phrase that any other way).

It's making a good run at being my favourite book to have been started in 2004, and considering this was the year I discovered China Mieville, that's pretty impressive. And I haven't even got to the fisting yet.

(I'd never have expected Stephenson had this in him when I threw Snow Crash down in disgust after even fewer pages...)

21:02 / 28.12.04

I got "Introducing Stephen Hawking" by McEvoy and Zarate and "A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science" by Losse.

Regrettable Juvenilia

21:17 / 28.12.04

Great! No need to do what Illmatic asked and tell us anything about them!

Our Lady Has Left the Building

13:33 / 30.12.04

Bit tricky to talk about them as I haven't read them yet. I know that on Barbelith knowing of which you speak isn't necessarily a pre-requisite for actually saying something...

Regrettable Juvenilia

15:25 / 30.12.04

Tsk. I wasn't talking to you, you made a bit of an effort...

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:56 / 31.12.04

I know, but I was talking about people in general on this thread. Still, I'm sure in time people will bring this up on the '2005: What are You Reading?' thread...

10:01 / 31.12.04

Okay then. Got a bumper crop of books this year.

Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King ~ Lloyd Bradley.
Been wanting to read thissun for ages, ever since I put down England's Dreaming - Jon Savage's gloriously grimy history of the Sex Pistols. It's basically a musical and cultural history of Jamaican music (and it's off-shoots) starting with the birth of the original sound-systems and heading right on up to the present day.
I expect to be trawling Soul Seek for obscure Mento tunes any day now.

The Algebraist ~ Iain M. Banks.
Well, I can't say too much about this 'cause, well, I haven't read it, and I don't know anyone that has, and I haven't read any reviews (deliberately). I do know it's not a Culture novel, however, and I know I like Iain M. Banks, and my life has been seriously lacking some space opera for some time now.

The Time Out Film Guide 2004 ~ various contributors.
If you claim to like cinema - which I do - then you really shouldn't even consider buying ANY OTHER FILM GUIDE.
Seriously, I don't want to talk about this one, just go and buy it.

Gods and Monsters ~ Peter Biskind.
Another book about movies, this time from the guy who brought us the hugely entertaining history of American cinema in the 70s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.
'Squite a change from what I've come to expect of the man, but only because I'm an ignorant fuck who had no idea about his wider career as a film journalist.
Far from being yet more tales from the trenches, its a collection of film essays with distinctly political slants. Those familiar with Biskind's other books (I've just finished Down and Dirty Pictures, a history of American independent cinema in the 90s) will almost certainly find the contents comforting as they reveal the serious and intelligent journalist behind the scandal and sketchy politics of his other works.

10:04 / 31.12.04

A musical history of music?

I am a retard.

14:47 / 31.12.04

I got me a book which can't remember the title of, but it is basically a conversation between the writer of the English Patient and the editor, about the craft of film editing - Haven't looked at it properly yet, but is the kind of thing I like so should be good.

I got a copy of America, the Jon Stewart book - really very funny. I don't know his stuff too well being a brit and not the biggest fan of watching television, but the book is very very good.

I got a collection of Lester Bangs articles (again can't remember the title) which I've skimmed through, and looks great. Never read any of his stuff before, and only really know of him through Almost Famous, so looking forward to that one.

I gave, Watching the English - flicked through it myself, looks okay, a kind of guide book/anthropological study of the habits and characters of Englishness.

And I gave a couple of photography books to the old man - which I'm sure he'll enjoy for five or so minutes.

hanabius yamamura

17:20 / 31.12.04

... Angry White Pyjamas by someone i can't quite remember ... given to me by my mother in an incredibly insightful moment (bearing in mind last year she gave me Carl Fogerty's - the world champion bike racer dude - autobiography based, apparently, upon the fact that I've never owned a bike, watched or expressed any conceivable interest in bike racing) ... this year she triumphed and I'm weeing myself with glee at the prospect of reading it ... the women deserves a medal

h.k. x

hanabius yamamura

17:22 / 31.12.04

... just read the above post to the wife who said 'last year? did she? I'll read it!' ... and the circle of life continues

15:03 / 02.01.05

I put a few books from the non-fiction thread on my xmas list and managed to bag Rubicon; The Triumph & Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland.

I'm two-thirds of the way through and loving it. It's very interesting to read about the strengths and weaknesses of the republic and how it eventually turned into an empire. And the soap opera element keeps the pages ticking over. God those Roman politicians were corrupt. The only omission so far is that of a little Gaulish village that still holds out against the invaders ...

unheimlich manoeuvre

15:10 / 03.01.05

gave
Iron Council by China Mieville. fucking expensive hardback, he liked PSS so...
Veniss Underground by Jeff Vandermeer. author of City of Saints and Madmen, which was a full-immersion Weird fiction classic. Veniss Underground is more of the same weirdness, far future Earth genetic engineering.
Bad Thoughts, A Guide to Clear Thinking by Jamie Whyte. Bit of a weak intro to Analyical Philosophy but my friend's an accountant and I'm sure he'll enjoy it.
The Woman Manual by Haynes. A guide to the female anatomy but in the format of a Haynes car manual. His wife is pregnant, he needs to know why.
A glossy illustrated hardback collected tales of Hans Christian Andersen for a very pregnant girlfriend.
Gave the Plot Against America by Roth and the Corporation by Joel Bakan to the same high-flying corporate *****. I love her, despite her lifestyle. (I think.)
hmmmm... there were others...

received

The Berlin Novels by Christopher Isherwood
and some book tokens. Working for Hammicks for eight years seems to daunt the book giving of my friends.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:35 / 03.01.05

GAVE... the new Philip Pullman to lilly- not read it myself yet but I'm assuming it's his usual wonderful read.

Garry Mulholland- This Is Uncool to Tango Mango- a friend gave me this for Chrissy last year, and it's ace. It's a list of Mulholland's favourite 500 singles, each with a write-up. It's the kind of thing they invented tables to put next to your toilet for.

A Nice Cup Of Tea And A Sit-Down - gave this to my mum, but will likley buy myself a copy in the near future. It's from the website, and is filled with essential questins like whether Jaffa Cakes are actually a cake or a biscuit.

GOT- Lost For Words- John Humphrys from my mum. It's ace. Like a less pedantic, but infinitely grumpier Lynne Truss.

and the real killer, which I haven't started yet but may well do tonight, having finished all my other reading for the mo'- Pirates, Ghosts and Coastal Lore: The Best of Judge Whedbee from Tango Mango and lilly. Short stories of pirates and nautical ghosts from North Carolina. On the basis of a quick skim it looks absolutely fantastic.

Whisky Priestess

19:57 / 03.01.05

Gave: Every Ruddy Word (Alan Partridge) - much appreciated.

Got: none except Perdita (I reckon this woman may be a possible ancestor of mine - same surname and there's a Gainsborough portrait of her that looks startlingly like me) yet, but my Amazon wishlist is filling fast.

09:57 / 04.01.05

Got a huge and very heavy Vegetarian cookbook from my sister, which I had to leave at home along with some other presents because Ryanair's limit is now 15kg.

Love letters by Dylan Thomas - From my dad and in German unfortunately. I'm not too keen on translations. Not in the mood for love letters either - too bitter and cynical for that sort of thing.

Narziss und Goldmund by Hermann Hesse - Also from my dad. Hermann Hesse reminds me of school but I haven't read a German book for years so I'm looking forward to this one.

Acid Row by Minette Walters - Er... cheers, mum.

10:47 / 04.01.05

Thinking about it, most of the books I gave this year were picture books, which is unusual -mostly, everyone gets a books from me. I also got fewer than usual this year, as I had to carry everything back home with me so the fam tended to stick to CDs and similar skinny media.

I got The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch, which I asked for basically on a bit of a whim -I've never read one of her books I didn't enjoy, and liked the sound of the title. It's also going to be one of the two of her novels I read this year; whilst the limit to two may make me sound like a crazy person I always think that if I read more I will realize they all have, essentially, the same plot. So I don't do that.

Also:

Rabbit Run by John Updike, because I've not read any of his books and thought I should probably start somewhere near the start;

Eco's The Name Of The Rose, for similar reasons to the above;

Some Wodehouse to keep me happy in the coming winter months;

The Confusion by Neal Stephenson, so now I have access to the whole trilogy I can start reading Quicksilver;

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt, which I started this morning -not read much of it, so the plot's just building up, but I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops. Excellent writing as well -a lot of vivid descriptions of places, which I like.

I also got Cake Icing And Decorating, which is not really a book to talk about on this forum but which does mean I can make pretty much any cake I want, and decorate it with marzipan pigs. Brilliant.

14:54 / 04.01.05

didn't get the books i asked for this year. they were a bit overpriced, it's true, but i would have thought some folk could have doubled-up. anyway, perhaps smelling literature-less disappointment for me, she ran to one of the hippy shops in town and bought me 'ghost of chance' by mister ws burroughs. it's a late work, set in captain mission's madagascar, so perhaps extracted from an earlier draft of the Cities... trilogy. it's very short and came as a nice edition with shots of some of his paintings, great christmas reading. there's a quote that by the late eighties burroughs 'the old writer, had come painfully to the end of what could be done with words' or something like that. this story is perhaps his effort to do something concrete and simple with his words by writing a didactic novella, something with a message and real-time, real-world political reflection.

got two copies of 'men who stare at goats' between us, so one of them's lying unread waiting to go back to borders. half-tempted to swap it for ...

what? tell me.

15:26 / 06.01.05

I gave:

A couple of the books mentioned by Illmatic

Flesh, Fish, and Good Red Herring by Alice Thomas Ellis, to my mother. She liked Alice Thomas Ellis's 'Home Life' columns from The Spectator, and she likes popular history books, and food, so I thought this would be a winner, and she seemed very pleased and read it in two days; but when I had a look at it myself, I found that the author had insisted on attempting to retain the old long 's' from C17 and C18 typography, which looks daft in a modern font and makes it harder to read - annoying.

A Word in Your Shell-like, by Nigel Rees, to my father - a compendium of everyday phrases and their origins, looked as if it would be up his alley, and last time I saw it it was in the upstairs loo, a very good sign.

I got:

Perdido Street Station, which I have finished already and is excellent.

A British Museum book on C17 English prints, from my sister, which is wicked - lots of lovely pictures of Charles II, Duke of Monmouth, Jesuits, etc. Marvellous.

Cookery book - Jane Grigson's English Food, which is full of recipes for stodgy puddings and stews, etc., but which I will probably use more than I think I will. I really like Jane Grigson, and her recipes always work and are mostly not too complex.

I also got a book token, which I was meant to spend on a hefty academic tome, but which I have naughtily used to buy:
The Scar (which shows you how much I liked Perdido Street Station, I suppose)
Her Name was Lola by Russell Hoban, because I love Russell Hoban
the new Haruki Murakami, on Ghadis's enthusiastic recommendation, and because they are flogging it for a tenner in Waterstone's, Gower Street

It's just a shame I don't really have any time for reading at the moment...

stephen_seagull

18:31 / 09.01.05

I got H. G. Well's The Island of Dr. Moreau from my uncle-of-sorts (kinda adopted, kinda lingering around waiting to get fed, have a bed to sleep in, and somebody to do his laundry).

I also got a book called Popcorn by Ben Elton from my brother. If its being written by Ben Elton isn't bad enough, then the fact that it was picked up free from whatever bookstore it was picked up from twists the metaphorical spear on which I am impaled.

Basically then, I got sweet FA (in book-terms). In fact, I've already disowned the Elton book. The Wells I'm keeping. Firstly, because I watched the Val Kilmer/Marlon Brando movie and had... fun, I think. It was crap. But fun. Secondly, because I wouldn't mind reading it. And thirdly, because I have to. And that's all I have to say about that.