The Sunday Haul

One reason why I was desperate to visit Chennai was to get a couple of my fountain pens fitted with Sheaffer nibs at Gem & Co in Chennai. When the opportunity came up sometime in last year for a trip to Chennai I was excited and all raring to go. But due to some reason I was unable to go which increased my longing to go to Chennai at the next available opportunity. When I read about the Lit for Life fest at Chennai in the second week of this month I began planning in great detail which I never usually do- listing out things to do, people to meet, things to buy and so on. I had also booked the tickets and also applied for leave. It was just a matter of waiting for the day when I would board the train. Then disaster stuck, literally. The day before I was to leave, a severe hailstorm struck many parts of the state bringing heavy rains that killed eighteen people besides causing a lot of damage. Naturally, however much I desperately wanted to get Sheaffer nibs fitted on my fountain pens and also attend the Lit for Life festival at Chennai, I had to put aside such wishes for a while and stay back to do what little I could do to take stock of the situation. Maybe I will go next year.



Anyway, thanks to the untimely natural calamity, not only did I not go to Chennai; I had to go to the office on Sunday. Going to the office on a Sunday isn’t exactly unusual to me considering the nature of the work which our Department does so I went without a murmur. The only saving grace was that I got to go to Abids in the morning which is something I rarely miss. At Abids the first find was Susan Isaacs’ ‘Shining Through’ that I got for thirty rupees. I have a copy of this book and have already read this extremely funny book which I want to give to one of my friends. It was a good copy that I found so whoever gets it from me will not have reason to gripe.



The second find was a crime fiction title by a new author I haven’t read about before. Of late I am stumbling upon some very good books by new authors almost by accident. I found books by Sarah Dunant, Hary Dolan and Jake Arnott in this manner and on Sunday I spotted a new name on a book- Andrew Vachss. In a pile of crime fiction titles I found ‘Dead and Gone’ by Andrew Vachss and picked it up on a hunch that it looked like something that might be a good read. I got the book for fifty rupees and later when I browsed on the net I was pleasantly surprised that Vachss was a bestselling crime writer so naturally I am very interested in reading about his charecter- Burke.