THE SUNDAY HAUL

With the two books I bought on Sunday the tally of books I bought so far this year has grown to 82. If I buy two books a week for the remaining 13 weeks I’ll be touching more than hundred books. Though it is a considerably smaller haul than some of the haul in the previous years, I do not want to cross the 85 mark. I plan to cut down on my book purchases in the coming weeks in order to increase the tally of books that I’ve read so far. As on date I’ve read only forty books this year and this figure might touch sixty by the end of the year if I really speed up my reading. Though I do not know if I can stick to this goal, that’s the plan for now- to buy fewer books but read more of them.

Non-fiction titles number more than fiction titles this year. In non-fiction, travel books account for most of the titles. In 2911 I’ve found some very good travel books by well known writers especially Pico Iyer. Though I haven’t done any kind of travel so far this year, I’ve picked up fourteen travel titles till date. Last Sunday I added another title to this bunch.

At Abids I found Saul Bellow’s ‘To Jerusalem and Back; A Personal Account’ on the pavement. I got the slim, 182-page book for only twenty rupees. Maybe I should plan my reading so that I read all books on travel at one go though it sounds like a bad idea. Anyway, since it is a short book I am thinking of reading it sometime next week since it won’t take more than a couple of days to finish it.

Just before I left I came to know from the Best Books guy that their sale at YMCA was still on and that Monday was the last day. The sale was supposed to end on the last day of September and it was a pleasant surprise to know I can check it out one last time. I did not plan to buy anything but there was a title that I had wanted to check out since I had been eyeing it since long. In the evening I went to the sale at YMCA at Secunderabad and saw all the titles I couldn’t buy. There was Kunal Basu’s ‘Racists,’ Joan Didion’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ that I have two copies of with me and other books. When I checked for James Patterson’s books I saw that ‘Along Came the Spider’ was still in the stack. I decided to buy it though it was for Rs 95, and so ‘Along Came the Spider’ became the second haul of the day.