The Sunday Haul

There are many writers like Somerset Maugham, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck whose books I haven’t yet read. Though I have the time I am hesitating to read their novels. There are many reasons for this hesitation- I feel that they may not be as good as made out, or I wonder if I have the patience to wade through those tomes or I feel I am not yet experienced enough to understand them. I have collected many books by these writers but I am keeping them aside on the shelf to be read at some time in the future. At Chikkadpally again last Sunday I found a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer whose works are totally not unknown to me since I keep coming across two of his books-‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Tender is the Night,’ often in books on writing.

‘Tender is the Night’ is the book I had found and this is one book I read about quite a lot in writing books. It appears that Scott Fitzgerald brought out one edition of the book and finding it not quite up to his taste changed the opening and brought out another edition. It must have been an unusual thing for a writer to do something like that. Though it has been well received Fitzgerald is said to have been not very happy with it. I wish I could find the original edition with the unchanged opening.

I had not expected to come across the dish ‘Tzatziki’ that I had read about in an issue of Conde Nast Traveler that I found sometime back. But while reading a short story The Dance in Audrey Thomas’ collection of short stories titled ‘Goodbye Harold, Good Luck’ I came across the dish again. Having come across the dish twice already in print I hope the next time it comes to me in an actual dish.

One book I am eagerly looking forward to is Pradeep Sebastian’s ‘The Groaning Shelf and Other Instances of Book Love’ that was mentioned in Chandrahas Choudhury’s blog- The Middle Stage. I have been quite regularly reading Pradeep Sebastian’s columns in ‘The Hindu’ since a long time. He is one bibliophile who really writes in an engrossing way about books. I wonder if it is a collection of all his columns or something new altogether but either way it will be something worth buying if you love books.

I have no idea when ‘The Groaning Shelf…’ is going to come out but if I wait until next Sunday I can read ‘The Literary Review’ in ‘The Hindu’ because it happens to be first Sunday of the month. This is one Sunday of the month I await eagerly.

For sometime now I have been mulling over the utility of attending Literary Festivals. I have read somewhere that there are two Lit Fests being held in Kerala sometime in October and November. The Kollam Litfest is scheduled from October 1-3 followed by the Hay on Wye Festival from 13-15 November at Tiruvananthapuram. I am making plans to attend the HoW in November and if all goes well I might land up in Tiruvananthapuram armed with the latest draft of my first novel.