Imagine breathlessly writing on the blog about waiting eagerly for an event and then forgetting about it altogether. This is what happened to me this month. A week back or so I had posted about getting excited about the sale of Best Books that would begin on 10th September. I remembered it until the ninth of September and afterwards forgot all about it. I wasn’t busy or anything but maybe the noise of all the drums of the Ganesh procession (I live near a temple) must have affected my brain somehow and made me forget. It wasn’t until I read Jai’s blog that I realized that the sale was on.
So without wasting much time I rushed to the sale almost three days after it had started wondering if there’d be any books left for me to pick from. The Best Book sale attracts a lot of book lovers because of the eclectic collection of titles though of late the collection has become old and jaded. This time however, almost all the books were almost new but expensive. I hoped I’d find some really good titles and did not think much about the budget though it was the middle of the month when the wallet goes all skinny. In the past at such sales I have been unable to come out with a couple of books in my hands. On this visit to the sale I picked up two really good titles.
The first book I saw was Pico Iyer’s ‘Sun After Dark’ which picked it up right away. I am a major fan of everything that Pico Iyer has written so far. I have with me ‘Falling Off the Map,’ ‘Video Night in Kathmandu,’ ‘Tropical Classical,’ ‘Global Soul,’ and I was on the look out for his other titles. So when I found ‘Sun After Dark’ I was glad no one had picked it up. ‘Sun After Dark’ is like all Pico Iyer books, a book about travel and has
Feeling very glad after finding ‘Sun after Dark’ I looked around hoping I wouldn’t find another good book because what I had to pay for it would empty my wallet. I saw plenty of books I already have copies of like Joan Didion’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking.’ I pulled out the book underneath and almost jumped up in joy. Before me was a book that I had been looking sine a long time. At last I found Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ that I decided to buy though it would make an enormous dent in my wallet. I got the book for and did not feel any regret. However, I decided not be anywhere near YMCA, Secunderabad where the sale is, for the next couple of weeks or at least until end of September when the sale too ends.
Back home with the books I opened them and read the first few pages. There was a poem on the first page of STB. The poem was TS Eliot’s and I discovered how two titles got their names. ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ is a line in the same poem and in another line there is the phrase ‘Widening Gyre’ which is the title of Robert B Parker’s early novel. By the way there was only one Spenser title at the sale but I did not buy it expecting to come across a cheaper version of the same title somewhere at Abids very soon.
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