The Sunday Haul

Of late, on-fiction is what I am filling up on quite regularly. Travelogues, autobiographies especially of writers, memoirs, accounts of people who have had adventures, mishaps, harrowing experiences and other trials and tribulations now form a major part of my daily reading. Since this makes for fascinating reading I am always on the lookout for such books. Last Sunday my first find was Brian Keenan’s ‘Evil Cradling’ that I picked up from a pile of books selling for thirty rupees. The book has received high praise and after I read a couple of paragraphs I am convinced it is a damn good book. Surprisingly after I picked up this book I came across two more copies of the same book at different places at Abids.

I never let go of any of Dave Barry’s books wherever I come across them though mostly I find his books in second hand bookstores or at Abids. I haven’t yet seen any titles by Dave Barry in regular book stores in Hyderabad. I wonder why. My second find at Abids last Sunday was ‘Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need’ that was my nth copy. It was an almost brand new hardcover copy that I was lucky to get for only thirty rupees. ‘Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need’ is another hilarious book by one of my favorite writers. Here’s a sampler from the book: ‘Of course, traveling is much easier today than it used to be. A hundred years ago, it could take you the better part of a year to get from New York to California: whereas today because of equipment problems at O’Hare , you can’t get there at all.’ ‘We travel because no matter how comfortable we are at home, there’s a part of us that wants- that needs- to see new vistas, take new tours, obtain new traveler’s checks, buy new souvenirs, order new entrees, introduce new bacteria into our intestinal tracts, learn new words for ‘transfusion’ and have all the other travel adventures that make us want to French-kiss our doormats when we finally get home.’ Once I started reading I couldn’t stop because it is so terribly funny and leaves one is splits. I love Dave Barry and I am glad I have almost every book he’s written except a couple of them that I am sure I will find one day or the other.

Afterwards I found two comics that my kid loves to read. The haul had grown to four books and also made me poorer by a hundred rupees. Nevertheless we continued looking for more books. Shrikant who was with us struck gold finding Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay of ‘Pulp Fiction’ quite cheap. I could have exchanged the day’s haul for that one book. At one of the last places where we stop to look before turning back I found a treasure. The seller had on the pavement three Tin Tin titles- ‘Explorers on the Moon’, ‘Prisoners of the Sun’, and ‘Destination Moon’- that I snapped up pretty fast. They were brand new copies without a single blemish in the form of damaged covers and spoilt pages. In regular bookstores each Tin Tin title would have cost me nothing less than Rs 500. But I paid only Rs 200 for the three boks which, though a great bargain, dwindled my finances to precarious levels.

This was madness and I felt guilty splurging hundreds of rupees every week on books. But on Monday or so I read an article on the net which made me feel better and actually made me feel that I had done the right thing buying the books. Here’s an excerpt from the article by Anthony Daniels in ‘The New Criterion’ I buy more books than I read, though always with the intention of reading them; For the moment, however, I derive a certain comfort from looking over, and being surrounded by, my laden shelves. They are my refuge from a world that I have found difficult to negotiate; if it had not been for the necessity of earning my living in a more practical way, I could easily, and perhaps happily, have turned into a complete bookworm, or one of those creatures like the silverfish and the small, fragile, scaly moths that spend their entire lives among obscure and seldom disturbed volumes. I would have not read to live, but lived to read.

On Tue morning I read in the newspapers that the Hyderabad Book Fair would begin from the 14th of the next month and would last until the end of the month, which is, coincidentally the end of the year. So far this year I have bought a total of … books. At the book fair I am certain I will find at least half a dozen books that I will have to buy if I do not want to die of regret. The only thing on my mind is how to set aside at least a thousand rupees though I will be happy if I have double that amount. One never knows what one finds at such book fairs. Last year at the same book fair I picked up quite a few good titles including ‘The Old Patagonian Express’ by Paul Theroux and ‘Playback’ by Raymond Chandler.