Incoming Books: 21 July

Yes, another serious book-shopping trip. I do have two good excuses: I'm on vacation, so it's easy to do it now, and I was being good during my World Fantasy reading frenzy and trying not to buy anything then. So now I have to make up for it:

• A User's Guide to the Millennium by J.G. Ballard
  I found a nice first edition hardcover to replace my battered bound galley, so this goes directly onto the real book shelves.
• Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
  One of the famous surrealist/sexual/oh-so-French/modernist novels, and which I was happy to see is actually quite short, so I might get to it soon.
• We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light by John Baxter
  I saw a good review/appreciation/something-or-other of this book somewhere recently, and I read and enjoyed his book A Pound of Paper.
• Sweet Women Lie by Loren D. Estleman
  One of the middle "Amos Walker" mysteries that I'm missing. Just two more, I think, and I'll be able to put them in order and read a bunch of them. (I don't like to read series mysteries out of order if I can help it.)
• Killing Yourself To Live by Chuck Klosterman
  I've picked this book up the last three times I've been in a bookstore, so I finally bought it. Klosterman is supposedly the great rock 'n' roll writer of our time, and this is a book about his roadtrip to the scenes of a whole bunch of famous rock-star deaths.
• Memoirs of a Mangy Lover by Groucho Marx
  I read and enjoyed Groucho and Me a few years back, so when I saw this for seven bucks (in a like-new trade paperback), I had to pick it up.
• Enough's Enough by Calvin Trillin
  A hardcover replacement for my actually quite nice trade paperback; I'm upgrading all of my Trillin books to hardcover as I can. The title essay of this book is one of my favorites of his work (even more now that I have kids of my own) -- let me give you just two sentences as a teaser:
  

  A lot of people don't think a phrase like "Tone of voice" can be a rule; most rules would include a verb, for instance. People who don't think "Tone of voice" can be a rule are people who don't have children.

• The Coming of Bill; Very Good, Jeeves! and Do Butlers Burgle Banks? by P.G. Wodehouse
  Three of the most recent batch of four Wodehouse hardcovers in the sublime Overlook hardcover editions. (The fourth is The Little Nugget, and it didn't come in with the rest of my special order -- but I expect it soon.) The reader who does not appreciate the humor of Wodehouse is a very dangerous character indeed, and should be watched closely (or perhaps avoided strenuously -- one or the other). I wish Overlook continued luck with this program -- Wodehouse wrote about a hundred volumes (depending on how you count things) and they've now reprinted forty-two of them, so they are well underway, but still have a lot to get through.

Tomorrow I need to start a book for SFBC, and I'll spend at least part of next week catching up on my Hugo reading, but then I hope I can dive into one of these books. (Or maybe one of the several hundred others that have accumulated, unread, all around me.)