The Sunday Haul, News of a Sale, and About Book Titles

The Haul

The last time I saw Dave Eggers’ ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ it was at a book sale more than a couple of years ago. It was a sale of second hand books but the price was of this book was somewhere near three hundred rupees and so naturally I did not pick it u p. I knew little about Dave Eggers then though an extract of Michiko Kakutani’s review full of praise for it made me almost buy it but for the price. I did not come across the book again until last Sunday. I saw ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ in a heap of books selling for Rs 20. I bought it right away. The book runs into more than 450 pages and looks very interesting with other superlative praise filling up a couple of pages in the front.
I also saw a book by Jonathan Franzen but I am not able to recollect the title now. But I am saving it for next Sunday if I am in the mood and shape to buy more books after a book sale that is coming up on Saturday. The eagerly awaited sale of second hand books by the ‘Best Books’ people begins on Saturday, that is, the 15th of September. The venue is YMCA, Secunderabad and I have no idea how long it will last but it is going to be around longer than expected.

News of A Sale

The ‘Best Books’ guy I got this news from also gave me another piece of wonderful news. It seems BB is planning to make the sale a permanent one. In other words they are opening their latest branch at YMCA tomorrow. It also means I have a second hand book store closer home. So whenever I feel the itch to browse through some good second hand titles I do not have to run all the way to Abids or Khairatabad or Begumpet.

Of Book Titles and their Origins

The last line in WB Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’ ‘…Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’ was obviously the inspiration behind the title of Joan Didion’s collection of essays ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem.’ I know it because the poem comes after the ‘Acknowledgments’ page in the book. Last week I made a serendipitious discovery about the origin of another title. A couple of months back I had read somewhere about Tim Parks’ memoir titled ‘Teach Us to Sit Still’ that I planned to read if ever I came across it. Incidentally, I saw the book at Landmark, Somajiguda last week but I did not buy the book right away. I do not find it easy to spend hundreds of rupees buying a new book in a bookstore when I can find the same book cheap at Abids if I am patient. Anyway, the thing is that at that time I did not think much about the origin of the title. I could have learnt about it if I had opened the book and read the first chapter. I am currently reading Saul Bellow’s collection of non-fiction titled ‘It All Adds Up’ and going through it a chapter a day. The other day I read a piece which was actually a lecture Bellow gave at Oxford University in 1990. The piece was titled ‘The Distracted Public’ in which Saul Bellow quoted two lines from a poem by TS Eliot that go like this: Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still. It gave me a minor thrill knowing where Tim Parks got the title of his memoir. The side effect of this discovery is that now I want to read everything that TS Eliot wrote.