Friday Double Post: Post- 1: The Sunday and Other Haul

The recent five book haul at Bengaluru notwithstanding my book buying spree continues. It was a holiday last Friday due to a festival and with nothing much to do at home I dropped in at the Best Books store at YMCA in Secunderabad. There I found another title of Dashiell Hammett –‘Red Harvest’ that I read is another classic. I am glad I found it so easily and also for so cheap- Rs 150. Another title I found right after I picked up ‘The Red Harvest’ was Anne Lamott’s ‘Bird by Bird’ that I had heard so much about. It is invariably included in the list of writing books recommended for people who want to become writers . Anyway, that wasn’t the only haul of last week. There were more books on Sunday at Abids.

The first book I spotted and picked up at Abids was ‘The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan’ that was a hardbound copy. It had a faded cover page that was slightly torn in places. But the inside pages were intact and that was what mattered. It was a good find because this one volume seem to have almost all the poems of A.K. Ramanujan. The volume has four books, three of which were already published. Book 1- ‘The Striders’ (41 poems), Book 2- ‘Relations’ (33 poems), Book 3- ‘Second Sight’ (36 poems) and an unpublished book, Book 4- ‘The Black Hen’ ( 60 poems) which I read has been published in this collection for the first time. I got it for only thirty rupees which I guess is very reasonable considering the collection has in all nearly 170 poems that one cannot find anywhere at one place.

The second book was Chinua Achebe’s ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ that I had read about in the articles about Achebe following his death recently. I do not know when I will get the time to read it but I bought it nevertheless for fifty rupees. I haven’t seen any of his books except ‘Things Fall Apart’ at Abids so far.


PS: The photographs here look far better than the ones I put up usually because they have been shot by my ace photographer friend- Uma Shanker. Thanks, Uma.