The Sunday Haul

It is time and occasion to make a couple of confessions here. The first is regarding an unfulfilled ambition I harbored for quite a long time. While in college I realized that given my temperament I am more suited to be a journalist and so dreamed of a life in the publishing world. But unfortunately I ended up in the government world after a brief stint in the advertising world. Though I’ve given up on that dream I nevertheless like to read about journalism and journalists. So, without a second thought, I picked up Theodore Dreiser’s ‘A Book About Myself; Newspaper Days’ first thing on reaching Abids. I had not bought it last week when I first saw it because I thought it was too highly priced. I was disappointed with myself about that decision. However, on Sunday I got the book for only fifty bucks. Dreiser, as I’ve discovered lately, has written travel books (‘A Traveller at Forty,’ ‘Dreiser Looks at Russia, ‘A Hoosier Holiday’) and other non fiction titles like ‘Notes on Life’, ‘Tragic America’ that I want to look out for.

My second confession is a bit embarrassing- in my thirty odd years of reading life I haven’t read anything by Anita Desai, apart from the odd essay or short piece. I keep coming across a few of her titles especially ‘A Village by the Sea’ quite often at Abids. Somehow I keep telling myself that I’d start reading Anita Desai some other time. But that time never came until last Sunday when I found a new title of hers. I found ‘Diamond Dust’ a collection of nine short stories- Royalty, Winterscape, Diamond Dust, a Tragedy; Underground, The Man Who Saw Himself Drown, The Artists Life, Five Hours to Simla or Faisla, Tepoztlan Tomorrow, and The Rooftop Dwellers. I got the book for thirty rupees and was quite a bargain though the pages have started yellowing.

The next find was my first Condé Nast Traveller of 2011 which happened to be the last issue of 2010 i.e., the December 2010 issue. The issue, at first glance, appeared to be a good enough issue but it wasn’t so. Inside, a complete section (on India), almost thirty odd pages of it, were not only repeated but inserted upside down in place of nearly thirty odd pages. There was an article on New Zealand that was missing along with others. It was a freak issue but I don’t mind since the magazine has a couple of nice articles especially the ones on Reunion Islands, Lech in Austria, and Uruguay. Of course, the photographs alone are worth more than the twenty rupees I paid for it.