Free Books at Christmas

What better time than at Christmas, I thought, for the fourth of my free book giveaways. Alas, overfed lethargy has prevailed hereabouts, so this post is three days later than I had at first planned. Below then, is the latest selection of ten books that I’m letting go. To claim one of them, leave a comment on this entry that includes your e-mail address, and that states which of the books you’d like. Then, send me an e-mail which includes a mailing address. Based on a general first-come, first-served principle, with a restriction per offer of one-book-per-recipient, I will allocate who gets what, and will dispatch the books before the year’s end, if at all possible. As before, I’ll pay all postage costs. Happy reading! Happy New Year!

1. Atomised, aka The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (the French title was Les Particules Élémentaires). This is the UK edition in hardcover. It was published by Heinemann, 320pp; ISBN: 0434007935.

2. Ada, by Vladimir Nabokov. This is my latest, and perhaps my last attempt at giving Nabokov’s works a chance. I don’t know what it is about his writing, but I have a strong and instinctive aversion to it. I have tried reading four or five of his books at various times, and have yet to clear a few dozen pages of any of them. This copy is of the first UK edition, and is in hardcover with a dustjacket in passably good condition. It was published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 589pp; SBN: 297179357.

3. Johanna Sinisalo’s Not Before Sundown, a novel translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas - previously discussed here, it’s the story of one man and his troll… The book is a paperback, and was published by Peter Owen, 220 pp; ISBN: 0720611717.

4. Passions, and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated from the Yiddish by several hands. I picked up this volume at a local antikvariat, forgetting that I had already read these stories in a collected edition a few years before. This is the first UK edition, in hardcover complete with dustjacket. It was published by Jonathan Cape in 1976, 312pp; ISBN: 0224012495.

5. Gods, Mongerels and Demons: 101 Brief but Essential Lives by Angus Calder. This compilation of thumbnail biographies of sundry eccentrics both real-life and fictional, ‘from Billy the Kid and Billie Holiday, to the more obscure personages such as Saint Wilgefortis and Iannis Xenakis’, caught my eye in a Malmö bookstore a few months back. When I came to read the book, however, it struck me as a fine idea, uninspiringly executed. It is a hardcover, published by Bloomsbury, 384 pp; ISBN: 0747560501.

6. Haruki Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun. This is one of Murakami’s slighter novels, but still well worth reading. It was translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. This copy is a paperback, from a UK edition published by The Harvill Press in 2000, 188pp; ISBN: 1860467172.

7. Ehrengard by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). Several of Dinesen’s stories have stuck vividly in my mind since I first read them, but not this one, which I read relatively recently, but which I can barely recall at all. I daresay it was still a pleasant enough read, though. This is a Penguin paperback, 128pp; ISBN: 0140180745.

8. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is one of my favourite books, ever. While I was living in Italy, I picked up a copy of an Italian paperback edition of Le Città Invisibili, in the hope that my Italian would one day be good enough that I could read the original, however haltingly. Seven years on, that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen… This book is a reprint of a 1993 Mondadori edition, 164pp; ISBN: 8804411112.

9. I wrote a little about Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver here. Since then, I’ve given up on the book: it occurred to me that I’d much rather read some good histories of the period and the personalities in question, rather than wade through Stephenson’s fictionalisation of them. This is the UK hardcover edition, published by Heinemann, 926 pp; ISBN: 0434008176.

10. Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Laurence Weschler’s absorbing account of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and of its founder, the eponymous Mr Wilson. This is a paperback published by Vintage, 168pp; ISBN: 0679764895.