The Sunday Haul

In the past few months my collection of books of short stories grew at a rapid pace. A couple of months ago I had found Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Human Element and Other Stories’ at a sale and later I found Daniyal Mueenuddin’s ‘In Other Rooms, Other Wonders’ at Chikkadpally sometime in September. It was followed by Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Kingdom’s End and Other Stories’ that I found at Abids in October. Then at the Book Fair in December I found Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Doctor Brodie’s Report’ and got it quite cheap, by the way.

The previous Sunday I had found John Updike’s ‘Problems and Other Stories’ at Chikkadpally and the same day I got ‘Collected Stories’ by Saul Bellow as a present. I have a shelf-full of short story collections like Marquez’s ‘Collected Stories,’ Ernest Hemingway’s ‘First Forty Nine Stories’ MT Vasudevan Nair’s ‘Catching an Elephant and Other Stories,’ Annie Proulx’s ‘Close Range,’ Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Black Margins,’ Alice Munro’s ‘The Moons of Jupiter’ and also ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’, Peter Taylor’s ‘The Old Forest and Other Stories,’ Haruki Murakami’s ‘’ David Leavitt’s ‘A Place I’ve Never Been,’ Penelope Lively’s ‘Beyond the Blue Mountains’ and ‘Pack of Cards,’ and many other titles that I cannot recollect right away.

Last Sunday I found another collection of short stories by an Australian writer. I haven’t read many books by Australian writers except ‘Oscar and Lucinda’ by Peter Carey a along time back and Helen Garner’s ‘Monkey Grip’ recently. The book I found last Sunday was Jessica Andersen’s ‘Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories’ that I found in a heap of books selling for thirty rupees only at Abids. One of the reasons I picked up the book was that it was a Penguin imprint. ‘Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories’ has eight stories ‘Under the House’, ‘The Appearance of Things,’ ‘Against the Wall, The Way to Budgerra Heights, The Aviator in ‘Stories from the Warm Zone’ and The Milk, The Late Sunlight and Outdoor Friends in ‘Sydney Stories.’

The second book in Sunday’s Haul was ‘Love, Chocolates & Medicine’ by Dr. Ravi Sekhar Krishna who gave it to me personally when we met on Saturday afternoon at Minerva. Dr. Ravi, a young doctor pursuing his post-graduation in General Surgery told me how he came to write his first book which was published by Zorba Publishers. He has already finished writing his second novel and is working on the third novel. Hardly half my age, the young writer has written almost three novels in a very short time and here I am still struggling with my first novel since the past eight years and clueless about how to finish it. Some guys have all the luck.

Yesterday, that is, Thursday I read a marvelous review of ‘A House by the Shore’ by Alison Johnson by Aparna Karthikeyan in her column ‘The Armchair Traveller’ in The Hindu Metro Plus. After reading the review I added the title to my ‘To Buy’ list that includes several other books. In fact I cut the review and have kept it in a folder. I hope one of these days she writes about Moritz Thomsen’s ‘The Saddest Pleasure’ that I have with me lying unread for some reason.