The Double Haul of Four Books

The Mid Week Find

Though I find many good books during my Sunday hunts on the pavements of Abids, the place I find the really good books are the second hand bookstores of Hyderabad. If every Sunday I hunt at Abids at least once a week I make it a point to drop in at least one of the more than half a dozen secondhand bookstores of Hyderabad whenever I get the time. Last Thursday the Legislative Council where I was assigned on duty adjourned quite early. It left with some time so I decided to pay a visit to Best Books at Lakdikapul which was the nearest second hand bookstore. While checking out the books in the first floor of the store I spotted a book I knew I had to buy right away.

The book was Haruki Murakami’s ‘The Elephant Vanishes’, a collection of his short stories. A hundred and twenty five rupees is a lot of money to pay for a secondhand book but a Murakami title is worth perhaps more so I bought it almost grateful for coming across it. There are seventeen short stories in TVE beginning with The Windup Bird and Tuesday’s Women, The Second Bakery Attack, The Kangaroo Communiqué, On Seeing the 100 % Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, Sleep, The Fall of the Roman Empire; The 1881 Indian Uprising; Hitler’s Invasion of Poland; and the Realm of Raging Winds, Lederhosen, Barn Burning, The Little Green Monster, Family Affiair, A Window, TV People, A Slow Boat to China, The Dancing Dwarf, the Last Lawn of the Afternoon, The Silence, and finally, The Elephant Vanishes, in the end. Till now I had read only one collection of Murakami’s stories titled ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’ and nothing else by this acclaimed author though I have ‘Kafka on the Shore,’ ‘The Wind Up Bird Chronicle,’ ‘Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World’ that I am saving to read some other time.. My last Murakami find was ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’ sometime in August last year. ‘

The Haul on Sunday

On Sunday the first book I found at Abids was one that I thought I had lost as I couldn’t find it after first spotting it two Sundays ago and failing to buy it. But Tobias Wolff’s memoir ‘This Boy’s Life’ was still with the same seller. I was relieved it wasn’t picked up by anyone. At only ten rupees the 288-pages book was a real steal. ‘This Boy’s Life’ is another addition to a long list of autobiographies/memoirs by writers I am gathering in my collection that I plan to list out in a separate post sometime in the future.

Though I have only heard of Tobias Wolff but never got to read any of his books I guess his memoir is a good place to get an idea about his writing and what shaped it. According to the reviews on the net TBL is described as a searing and honest account of his growing up years in the company of his single mother. I’m glad I bought this book but I am really looking forward to finding his other books- especially ‘In Pharaoh’s Army’ which is an account of the time he spent reporting the war in Vietnam.

I also saw Sarita Mandanna’s ‘Tiger Hills’ that I also had assumed was bought by a big second hand book seller but it wasn’t. However, the sheer size of the book and its condition made me decide not to buy it and I walked away. Which was a good thing I did because the next find was Milan Kundera’s ‘Life is Elsewhere’ that I wouldn’t have bought had I picked up ‘Tiger Hills’ because I wouldn’t have had the fifty rupees to pay for it. Milan Kundera is another writer I haven’t yet started reading though now I have two of his books the first one being ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ that I bought a couple of months back.

The third find of the day presented me with a tough choice. Stephen Fry’s ‘Paper Weight’ was one of my lucky finds a long time back, maybe a decade or more ago. It was one of the funniest collection of humor pieces I had ever read till then. I greatly enjoyed the book that I had then bought for only fifteen rupees. So when I found ‘Stephen Fry in America’ I couldn’t leave without buying it. The book was a sort of travelogue and had pictures in it which was a bit unusual. The book was brand new but some of the pages were slightly stained but that did not prevent the seller from asking two hundred rupees for it. I bargained successfully and got it for half that amount. Later I wondered if I had overpaid for the book but it is very unlikely that I would find the book so it justified the hundred rupees I spent on it.

Bill Bryson’s ‘Walk in the Woods’ was still on the pavements even after two months of spotting it first. I had thought I’d buy it this Sunday but with the midweek’s find and the three book haul on Sunday left me with no option but to leave it until next Sunday