More Free Books

I was pleased with the response to my previous book giveaway, and value the shelf-space that it has freed up. I’m encouraged then, to go through the exercise again with a second batch of volumes. I had vaguely planned to make some kind of sneak preview offer to those who just missed out on the last giveaway, but, alas, laziness has prevailed, and… well, it’s just the same deal this time as before.

To claim one of the books listed below, leave a comment including an e-mail address that states which book you want. Then send me an e-mail which includes a mailing address. I’ll pay the postage, and will dispatch the item within a week. As before, I’ll be restricting the offer to one book per mailing address.

1. The Birds, by Tarjei Vesaas, published by Peter Owen, translated from the Norwegian by Torljørn Støvend and Michael Barnes. ‘A tale of delicate beauty and deceptive simplicity by one of the greatest Scandinavian writers of the twentieth century’, says the publisher. I’d previously read (and loved) The Ice-Palace, by the same author, but I found this book, although obviously well-written, much harder to get into. Paperback; ISBN: 0720611431; 234pp.

2. Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar. My copy is of the US edition, published by Pantheon. Gregory Rabassa did the translating from the Spanish. Had I encountered this boldly experimental novel ten years earlier, I may well have persevered with it to the end, but, as it turned out, I began to lose all interest in its bohemian characters’ misadventures and opinions about half way through. Then again, I was reading it sequentially: perhaps that’s where I went wrong… ISBN: 0394752848; 576pp; paperback.

3. For Years Now, by W.G. Sebald. This is a slim volume of poetry written in English by the renowned German-born author. The book is illustrated by the artist Tess Jaray. It’s published by Short Books. The poems are mostly very short, like little chopped-up aphorisms, making for a light snack of a book, where one might have hoped for a more satisfying meal, so to speak. Paperback; 75pp; ISBN: 1904095097.

4. Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, specifically the 1999 Oxford World’s Classics edition, in the translation by Charles Jarvis, with an introduction by Milan Kundera. Some favourite authors of mine love this book, so I was disappointed to find that Cervantes was not for me: give me Pierre Menard’s partial re-creation of the Quixote any day! Hardback; ISBN: 0192100327; 1128pp.

5. Dr. Simon Forman, A Most Notorious Physician, by Judith Cook, published by Chatto & Windus. This is a moderately interesting biography of a successful medic (or, to give an alternative view ‘nothing but a quack and a charlatan, an astrologer who purported to practise medicine, a fellow of bad repute’) who lived in Elizabethan London and who was notable for having kept a diary for many years, albeit of an altogether sketchier and slighter kind that Pepys’s say, or Evelyn’s. He wrote, for example, of visiting the theatre to see the original production of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. ISBN: 0701168994; Hardback; 240pp.

6. Dossier, a Collection of Short Stories, by Stepan Chapman, published by the Creative Arts Book Co. This collection of exceedingly weird tales, set in all manner of far-flung locales, advertises an author with a singularly powerful imagination. The publisher writes ‘the author flips recklessly from culture to culture in his attempt to compile a dossier on the human animal’: an ambitious undertaking which is only sporadically successful. Also, I sensed (or, perhaps, I imagined) in several of the tales a disconcertingly cold undercurrent of isolation and alienation. Paperback; 176pp; ISBN: 0887392806.

7. Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose(8): a Memoir of Love, Exile and Crosswords, by Sandy Balfour, published by Atlantic Books. This is a charming autobiographical account by a South-African-born, but London-resident documentary film-maker, in which he relates anecdotes from his many travails and travels, structured around his growing fascination with the phenomenon of the English cryptic crossword. Hardback; ISBN: 1843540363; 288pp.

8. The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman, published by Mandarin (now out-of-print). This is a good selection of Aickman’s marvellous ‘strange stories’, featuring what is perhaps my favourite of his tales, Ravissante. Also included is The Cicerones, recently realised as a short film by the League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson. I’m only parting with this book at all as I’ve since invested in the 2-volume Collected Strange Stories set published a few years ago. Paperback; 302pp; ISBN: 0749301732.

9. Embers by Sándor Márai, Published by Viking, and translated from a German edition by Carol Brown Janeway. This is a 1942 novel that has only recently been rescued from obscurity. The book has been widely praised, and even likened to Thomas Mann and García Marquez: on reading it though, I couldn’t see why it had recieved such acclaim, at the same time wondering if its being a translation-of-a-translation may have dulled its edge somewhat. Hardback; ISBN: 0670910996; 224pp

10. Mindware: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, by Andy Clark, published by the Oxford University Press. This is a succinct introduction to a fascinating subject, which I bought after reading an earlier book of Clark’s, only to be somewhat disappointed to find the latter book seemed in large measure a restatement of the former. 226 pages; ISBN: 0195138562; paperback.