It was a partly sunny, partly cloudy in Hyderabad last Sunday when I set out for Abids. As usual I stopped at Chikkadpally before proceeding to Abids. The first find of Sunday was a nice copy of ‘Islam’ by Karen Armstrong. I had first found her ‘The Spiral Staircase’, her memoir of her life as a nun while very young and leaving the convent sort of disillusioned. I also have read her ‘Twelve Ways to a Compassionate Life’ sometime back. I got ‘Islam’ for a hundred rupees. Afterwards I got into a bus to Koti and thence to Abids.
I was lucky to spot a nice small sized book with ‘Cultural Action for Freedom’ by Paulo Friere with an attractive cover that drew my eye to it. I had earlier found and also read ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ by Paulo Friere, and so this new title I wanted to read also. The seller asked for just thirty rupees for it that I was glad to pay.
Somehow I feel my English isn’t so good and that I have to improve it by whatever means. So I buy books on grammar, usage, style and so on whenever I spot such titles. Last Sunday I came across a nice copy of ‘English Blues’ published by New Indian Express that I seem to have bought long time back and since I wasn’t sure about it I picked it up for thirty rupees.
I had been seeing this copy of ‘The Moon by Whale Light’ by Diane Ackerman with a seller since the past few Sundays and did not feel like buying it though I love to read writing on nature. When I read in the inside page that Diane Ackerman was a staff writer at The New Yorker and had also written a few best-selling books about nature I bought it.
A long back I had read about Krupabai Sattianadhan, a Brahmin woman whose parents were among the first to be converted to Christianity sometime in the 1850s or so. I wanted to read about her but couldn’t find much anywhere. Last Sunday I spotted a copy of ‘Kamala: The Story of a Hindu Child-Wife’ by Krupabai Satthianadhan and bought it.
More than a decade ago I picked up a copy of ‘Monkey Grip’ by Helen Garner after having seen it with the same seller for many weeks. I hadn’t heard of the title or Helen Garner so I hesitated though it was a Penguin book. But after I bought it and read it soon after ‘Monkey Grip’ became one of my favorite novels. Last Sunday I spotted another copy with the same cover and bought it right away.
Arms loaded with six books and on the way home when I stopped at a seller and saw a copy of‘The Rinehart Reader’ by Jeff Rackham & Beverly J. Slaughter. This was a thick volume, one of those books that colleges in the United States recommend to their students to improve their reading and writing skills. I had bought a few such book in the past because they contain many good stories and essays by well-known writers, to illustrate the fundamentals of writing short stories and essays. In one such book I found a short story that I had been looking for everywhere.
Then right next to it was a copy of ‘The World and Africa’ by W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, a writer whose books I keep reading about on social media where people post the covers of his books. I had to buy it because it was my first du Bois title and also that it was about Africa, a place I never tire of reading about. These two titles cost me three hundred rupees!