The Sunday Haul- Two Books

In the June 2009 issue of ‘First City’ with “Writer’s Special” on the cover, Sashi Deshpande had written about her favorite writer- Jane Austen. In it she had mentioned a book, Fay Weldon’s ‘Letters to Alice’ that was about Austen’s life. By a strange coincidence last Sunday at Abids, it was the first book I found and bought for twenty bucks. But this wasn’t the first copy since I remember I had picked up one copy earlier, maybe a couple of years ago. Needless to say, I haven’t read it but this time I flipped through it and came across the following passage by Weldon:

‘Writing is an odd activity-other people have occupations, jobs; the writer’s life is work, and the work is the life, and there can be no holidays from it…There can be no time off, nor real diversions, because wherever you go you take yourself…Fear the work of a writer who says, it is my characters who lead me, they take off! They well may, but who will want to follow? It is the writer’s mind the reader wants: a controlled fantasy, very, very, rarely, the meanderings of an idle author.’

Weldon writes about Jane Austen’s life and her writing so well that I want to read all of Jane Austen’s books (that I have somehow not managed to read so far) as well as those of Fay Weldon too.

The second book I found at Abids was ‘Poetry in the Making’ by Ted Hughes, which is actually an anthology based on a radio series. It is basically aimed as an introduction to children to the point of poetry and the practice of writing. There are a couple of pieces on writing novels that got me interested in the book in the first place. I got it for twenty rupees though the book seems to have been bought twenty seven years back, in 1982 exactly, by a Superintendent in the Customs and Central Excise Department whose stamp graces the front cover as well as the inside pages.

Another interesting thing was that the Sunday Magazine supplements of ‘The Hindu’ seems to have devoted one full page to books and stuff like that titled ‘Written Word’ which I hope will now be a regular feature. It does take away some of the disappointment of the reduced number of pages in ‘Literary Review’ monthly supplement.