The Sunday Haul- Lucky, Lucky, Lucky.

From Monday to Saturday this week I will be posting daily.

Unlike lightning, luck does have a way of striking one at the same place more than twice, if not again and again. The other Sunday, I had found Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ at Chikkadpally. I was delighted to learn that I was extremely lucky to have found the book. This Sunday I found another Raymond Chandler title- ‘The High Window’ that I got for twenty five bucks. I hope this is also a lucky find. I have not yet started reading all the stories in the earlier title except the first one. ‘The High Window’ is Chandler’s third book and one that added to his growing fame. Since Chikkadpally comes before Abids I had a feeling that it was going to be a lucky day at Abids if finding Raymond Chandler was any indication.

The first find at Abids this Sunday turned out to be by a writer I had read about only recently. Sometime back I had read about Jonathan Franzen in an issue of Time and also in the issue of Vanity Fair that I found last week. I did not expect to find any of his books in secondhand bookstores stores much less at Abids. I had read that ‘The Corrections’ had sold three million copies one of which I discovered in a heap selling for twenty rupees at Abids. I could not believe my eyes when I saw the name on the cover of the paperback book. This was one writer and one book I had read about only weeks ago and one I had actually looked forward to reading someday. The day has come! ‘The Corrections’ runs to nearly six hundred pages. This is one book that is going to take me days to finish reading but whatever I am terribly glad I found this book.

I have lost count of the number of books on writing that I have read till date and I have also not count the number of times and examples of Ernest Hemingway’s writing that I read in those books. So far I have read only a few stories by Hemingway but not any of his novels. I am more interested in reading his non-fiction but his non-fiction books are few and also difficult to find. ‘Green Hills of Africa’ is one book I read about very recently and it was by a lucky coincidence that I found the book at Abids on Sunday. It was my third lucky find but it came at a steep price. The seller wasn’t budging from the fifty rupees that he quoted for it. I paid because I did not want to break my lucky spell.