The Sunday Haul- Lucky Finds

Of late I am being reassured, quite often, about the luck I have with books. It is a comforting thought to know that I’ll be never be unlucky in finding good titles. Last week I had occasion to experience it when I found two good books that I wasn’t even looking for. I found a new title by Marquez and a travel anthology I least expected to find, of all places, at Abids. It made me realize that there is something called extreme good luck. I guess it strikes only once a year or so.

When I found Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor’ at a second hand bookstore on Friday I thought I was lucky once again. Though I had to pay a hundred bucks for it I felt the book was more than worth it. TSSS had a foreword by Marquez about how he came to write the account of a sailor who roughed it out at sea for a couple of weeks before being finally rescued. It is a slim book written from the point of view of the sailor in the first person. I haven’t yet started it but I hope to read it sometime in the last week of the year. I plan to end the year reading a book by a master. Or if that isn’t possible, maybe I will begin the New Year in that manner.

Without the original cover, to me, no book appears complete. One doesn’t feel like buying it much less read it. However, my first copy of Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ that I found at Abids a couple of years ago had no cover except a white paper with the title scrawled on it. Last Sunday I found another book with the same sort of cover but the title scrawled on it was ‘Wanderlust’ by Don George. Unlike King’s book this book did not have even the back cover. I had no idea who the publishers were. But I got a clue when I leafed through the front pages. It was by Salon.com. The book has a foreword by that master of travel writing- Pico Iyer, and forty one travel essays by some famous names like Isabel Allende, Po Bronson, Peter Mayle, Tim Cahill, Don George (who edited the collection) and Jan Morris, whose books I never seem to find anywhere. ‘Wanderlust’ is a whopper of a book with three hundred fifty pages. It also came at a whopping price - all of sixty rupees.

Normally I do not find any publications related to books and the publishing industry at Abids. A couple of months ago I had found some similar magazine whose name I cannot recall now. But this Sunday I found the ‘Bookseller’ of the first week of November 2009, which is very, very recent. I know whose magazine it is because the sticker with the address of the subscriber was intact but I am not going to reveal it here. It has the name of a top honcho of a famous publishing house. Anyway, the magazine had a lot of stuff including the interesting information regarding the next books by Rushdie and Adiga.

I read in ‘Bookseller’ that Salman Rushdie has written a sequel to ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories,’ titled ‘Luka and the Fire of Life’ that will be published by Jonathan Cape in October 2010. Then there was the news about Arvind Adiga’s new novel called ‘Last Man in the Tower’ which is set in Bombay. There was no information about the likely publication date. Stieg Larsson turned up again and apparently, he is an author not to be missed because his books- ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,’ ‘The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest’ and ‘The Girl Who Played with Fire’ are on the top of the best-sellers list. I was surprised to note that ‘Guinness Book of World Records’ is an all time best seller occupying the No. 1 slot for a long time.

The magazine was packed with short reviews of new forthcoming titles and the only book that interested me was Ruth Padel’s ‘Where the Serpent Lives’ published by Little Brown. It caught my interest because the book is a love story in London and rural India. I want to read how rural India is depicted in the book if I can manage to lay my hands on the book. Interestingly, half the magazine was devoted to Graphic Novels and Manga. I’ve never read a graphic novel but I was intrigued enough to read that some Stephen King titles were being adopted into graphic novel format.

Will my luck hold next week too? I couldn’t get the issue of Conde Nast Traveler magazine that I had seen two weeks ago. I might get it next week if the seller keeps his word to get it next Sunday. I know I won’t get it for anything less than a hundred bucks so I am saving up for it.

No pictures of the covers of books I’ve picked up because my good ole camera decided to call it a day and clicked its last sometime last month. RIP.