The Sunday Haul and the 250th Post

It is exactly a year since I began this blog this day last year, and I am excited that I have managed to complete one year with 250 posts on my blog. (This post is the 250th post.) A sort of celebratory post will follow sometime next week! Meanwhile read on about my haul of books this Sunday.

This Sunday I had a strong reason not to visit Abids for my weekly book hunt but there was a far stronger reason that made me go. I had been feeling under the weather with mild fever and so I thought of staying at home wrapped in a warm blanket instead of going out in the cloudy weather. But the deafening noise from the loudspeakers in the temple, a stone’s throw away from my home gave me second thoughts. There’s something to be said about living near a temple but that is for a future post but for now I will just say that a local festival was on in our locality. All major festivals in Hyderabad are celebrated in Hyderabad accompanied by a lot of noise and this ‘Bonalu’ festival was no exception. Unable to bear the repetitive songs and the sound of the drums on the loudspeakers I fled home after breakfast towards Abids.

In a way it was a good decision coming to Abids because I found three good books. The first find was ‘Rules of Thumb 2’ by Tom Parker which is a collection of hundreds of pieces of interesting trivia about a lot of commonplace things. But, there’s more about the book at the end of the post. The next book I found was one by Annie Proulx, the author of ‘Shipping News’, copies of which I see every where at Abids. But on Sunday I found her ‘That Old Ace in the Hole’, a four-hundred plus pages book which I guess is a good find. But I don’t know when I am going to find the time to read it.

After finding these two books I left Abids, and on the way home I stopped at Chikkadpally where two or three sellers display their stocks. There was one near the Bharat Petroleum filling station. I was almost turning back after finding nothing of interest when a stack of books piled against a pillar caught my eye. The last book in the two feet high pile was Elmore Leonard’s ‘Unknown Man No 89’ that I pulled out eagerly and bought. I was surprised to see it was a Penguin imprint It was a pleasant surprise and doubly so since I got the book for only fifteen rupees.

In ‘Rules of Thumb 2’ which has a total of 930 Rules on various things. I found the following rules while flipping through it at random. These are all about books, by the way, the ones I am mentioning here. There are a few about writing but those I will write about some other time. Here are a few out of the twenty two Rules of Thumb about books in this book:

326. REMEMBERING A BOOK: For every worthwhile book you read there will be one statement or story you’ll remember for a decade or longer.

364. COMPARING BOOKS TO MOVIES: Comparing a movie to a book is easy when one inspired the other. The one created first will be better.

446.QUICKLY CHECKING A BOOK: A good way to get the ‘feel’ of a book is to read the table of contents, then read the index, if it has one, and finally read the first and last paragraphs of each chapter.

703. SELLING BOOKS: Ten percent of bookstore customers buy 90 percent of the books. Ten percent never buy anything.

Here’s one I found very interesting:
488. REMEMBERING WHAT YOU LEARNED: You will remember only ten percent of what you think you learned in college. (I don’t remember anything!!)