Milestone 750th Post: The Sunday Haul

Milestone Post: This is the 750th Post and the first post of the 7th year of this blog.

The first time I saw Moritz Thomsen’s ‘The Saddest Pleasure’ was sometime in January, 2009.I did not buy it right away. The seller had asked for a high price and besides I had not heard of either the book or the author before. I was curious because the book had a foreword by Paul Theroux. After I got home I regretted not buying it. I was crestfallen since I did not find the book again. But four Sundays later, fortunately for me the book reappeared and I picked it up right away. Here’s the blog I wrote about it in February, 2009. http://vinodekbote.blogspot.in/2009/02/sunday-haul.html Sadly I haven’t read it so far but now I want to read it because someone recently nominated it as the greatest book on earth.

Of the two item haul last Sunday, one item was the March 2013 issue of Conde Nast Traveller. Later in the evening while flipping through the issue I came upon something in the ‘Books’ page that made me feel very good. Author Sarah Wheeler wrote about ‘The Saddest Pleasure’ and said it was the greatest book on earth. I felt really pleased with myself that I had the presence of mind to pick it up when I saw it. I was glad I owned a copy of the book and somehow thought of myself as a lucky person. Last Sunday I took out the book from my bookshelf and read the foreword by Paul Theroux which made me yearn to find the other two books by Thomsen.

The other haul of Sunday was a book I found not at Abids but at Chikkadpally. I found Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ on the pavement and picked it up. It was a Penguin edition and in quite good condition and surprisingly the seller gave it to me for only forty rupees. It was a steal at that price. I saw a copy of ‘A Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that Srikant wanted me to buy for him after I told him about seeing it at Chikkadpally. I picked it up for rupees fifty on my way home.

On Monday I happened to be near Sangeet in Secunderabad. There’s a bookseller putting up a few books on makeshift wooden shelves where I found some interesting books in the past. I saw a really good Penguin edition of Marquez’s ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ that I could not resist buying. I got it for only sixty rupees and thought it was a steal. But on Tuesday I was in for another surprise.

On Tuesday on my way back from Jubilee Hills where I had gone to a training institute on work I dropped in at the MR Books stall beside the Punjagutta flyover. There I saw yet another Marquez book. It was ‘Three Novellas’ containing ‘Leaf Storm,’ ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ and ‘No One Writes to the Colonel.’ The book was in an excellent condition and the surprise was that I got the book for only fifty rupees as it said on the price sticker. This is the third Marquez title that I found in a span of three days last week making it a Marquez bonanza for me.