The Sunday Haul

Normally I hesitate to pick up any book by an author whose name I haven’t heard before anywhere. But if the book’s title has a word that comes close to magical like ‘writing’,’ or ‘Tuscany’ I buy it with eyes closed. The other thing was that the cover was quite good and it was a Penguin imprint. So it was it with eyes closed that I bought Allan Parker’s ‘Seasons in Tuscany’ for only twenty rupees last Sunday at Abids. It was the only book I bought and the other find was a magazine- the absolutely latest (Oct 09) issue of ‘National Geographic Traveler’ that I got for just ten rupees.

What they say about not judging a book by its cover seems to have a lot of truth in it. Allan Parker’s ‘Seasons in Tuscany’ did not appear as good as I thought when I bought it looking at its cover. Maybe I had expected the sort of writing Frances Mayes managed in ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ which evoked Tuscany like nothing before. SIT was too run of the mill with a lot of things happening too quickly. In the first two pages the author falls in love with a woman quite too easily. Then there are paragraphs and paragraphs of dry description about the place. With insipid prose and an insconsistent style the first thirty pages were a disappointment but I hope the rest of the book will somehow make it up.

It was surprising not to find any mention of Tuscany in the 25th Anniversary Edition issue of ‘National Geographic Traveler’ that featured the World’s Greatest Destinations in ‘50 Places of a Lifetime.’ Of course, there was Florence and another place, Salina in Italy but I was surprised Tuscany did not find a place along with Provence, which too was missing. Two places in India find a place in the list. All destinations in this issue are written by famous writers of the country. Shashi Tharoor wrote about Delhi and Amitabh Kant did the honours for Fatehpur Sikri. I don’t know why no one writes about the beautiful Andamans. There are some places in the Andamans which make you think of spending the rest of the life there doing nothing but watching the sunrise. Maybe someday I will write about it.