The Sunday Haul- Irving Wallace and Bill Bryson

Sooner or later I know I am going to find all the books on my list. But the search isn’t going to end since the list continues to grow even as I tick off titles in it. The more titles I find from the list, the more it gets added to. Last Sunday I found another book that’s been on the list for quite a long time. I don’t exactly remember when I added Irving Wallace’s ‘The Sunday Gentleman’ to the list but now the title’s been added to my shelf of books on writing.

Books by Arthur Hailey, Harold Robbins, Irving Wallace and others formed the popular reading in the eighties. I guess most of those who read English fiction in those days would have read their books sometime or the other. I was no exception. However the books written by them could be read only once and then discarded. Of all the books by Irving Wallace I was fascinated by one book and that was ‘The Prize’ which was a novel woven around the Nobel Prize. It wasn’t until recently that I found his ‘The Writing of One Novel’ which was all about how he came to write ‘The Prize.’ ‘The Writing of One Novel’ is one book of Irving Wallace that I read again and again at least once a year. It is a fascinating book every aspiring novelist perhaps should read at least once.

Before he started to write books full time, Irving Wallace was a magazine writer researching and writing articles for prestigious magazines like Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review, Esquire etc. Somewhere I had read about his non-fiction book called ‘The Sunday Gentleman’ in which he had written about his magazine writing life. I wanted to get hold of it and was on the look out for it since ages. At last I found it though it wasn’t a very good copy I got because the cover wasn’t good and part of the pages were wet. I picked it up nevertheless and I am glad I did it. I have read the first article in it which is all about his magazine writing career. Needless to say it is very engrossing as are the other pieces in it. I have read the one about the ‘Orient Express’ and another piece about a writer (Gilbert Patten) who created an unforgettable character called ‘Frank Merriwell.’ The amount of research he does is truly astonishing. There’s a piece in the book on the Rolls- Royce titled ‘Millionaire’s Chariot’ which I am looking forward to read soon.

For a long time I couldn’t decide who was funnier- Dave Barry or Bill Bryson? But now it is decided Dave Barry is my favorite, and Bill Bryson comes a close second. I will write about the reasons in a later post but for the time being let me put it on record that Bill Bryson is equally funny. In fact I read Bill Bryson before I stumbled on books of Dave Barry. Anyway, I have almost all of Bryson’s books except the recent ones-‘Mother Tongue,’ ‘Thunder Bolt Kid’ and ‘Shakespeare.’ It was the last title I found at Abids on Sunday. It was a brand new book which I got for only eighty rupees. It was a lucky find at a time when not many sellers are to be seen at Abids because of the Diwali shopping season.