Bookstore Crawling

Last week I found the time to visit four bookstores but ended up buying just one book though my wallet was fairly bursting with money. It is a fairly common thing with me, coming across books that I have to buy no matter what but cannot because there’s not enough moolah, and not finding even a single book when I have enough of it. The day I got my pay I set off to Jubilee Hills to pick up Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Collected Stories’ that I had seen last week. I was relieved the book was still in the same place I had last seen it. (Thank you, folks.)

‘Collected Stories’ has twenty six of Marquez’s best short stories culled from three collections. Some of the stories include ‘Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother’, ‘Big Mama’s Funeral’, ‘Eyes of a Blue Dog’ and so on. While I waited for my coffee and Hari I read one story from the book, ‘Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers’ and was immediately lost in that mysterious world that Marquez weaves with his magical prose. I plan to savor the book by reading only one story a week.

Next I dropped in at Walden the same evening. I had planned to check out a new book reviewed in Outlook. It was Amit Verma’s ‘My Friend Sancho’ that I looked for and found. I did not buy it immediately though and planned to wait for some more time before picking it up though Outlook’s review said it was a hilarious book. City magazines are usually found in the cities about which they write but I found ‘First City’ in the magazine rack at Walden. ‘First City’, as the name suggests, is about our first city, New Delhi. It has a few pages on books and writers but the May issue was a ‘Writers’ Special’ so I took it. It had short pieces by famous writers on their favorite writers. There was Pico Iyer on Graham Greene, Lloyd Jones on Ryszard Kapuscinski, Gita Hariharan on Orhan Pamuk, Anjum Hasan on Vladimir Nabokov and several other writers I haven’t heard about talking about others writers who are unknown to me. I had another surprise in store in FC. There was a review of the book I had checked out (My Friend Sancho) and this review said was a little different (little charm, uninvolved plot, apparent artifice and so on) which puts one in a dilemma about buying the book.

I had been to a second hand book store, Unique Books, at Nampally where I saw Haruki Murakami’s ' A Wild Sheep Chase' but I did not buy it because it was not in a good condition. Maybe I will take a second look later and pick it up. There was a good copy of David DAvidar’s ‘House of Blue Mangoes’, Kiran Desai’s 'The Inheritance of Loss', Penguin Collection of Short Stories- 2 but I did not buy any of them. The fourth store that I visited was the second hand book store beside the flyover opposite ‘Lifestyle’ where the two copies of Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys I had seen in my previous visit still remain unsold. I also saw Elmore Leonard’s ‘Rum Punch’ and Paul Theroux’s ‘My Secret History’ but I was not interested in buying these or any other books.