FOUR POST FRIDAY: The Bengaluru Haul (2/4)

This is the second post of this day. Read the others too.

I was in Bengaluru for three days last week. On the third day of my stay, which I kept deliberately free in order to go to the bookstores on MG Road, the first thing I did after breakfast was to head to MG Road. I had been to Bengaluru twice already this year, once in May and again last month and had on both occasions picked up some really good books. I hoped to find some more wonderful books at Blossoms, Bookworm, Select and another store that I hoped to look in all day since my train left hours later late in the evening.

At Blossoms that was my first stop I picked up ‘Teach Us to Sit Still’ by Tim Parks that I had read about somewhere earlier and was on my list. Somehow I found another title on my list- ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ by Alan Fournier that I read was a classic. It was a good find. Another find was Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Vagrant Mood’ that surprisingly I had not read about before. I also found a hard cover copy of Elizabeth George’s ‘Write Away’ that I picked up. All these books did not come cheap but nevertheless I bought them.

The next stop was the Select Bookstore in another side lane on Brigade Road. The person recognised me since I was there only the previous month and had asked for Arun Joshi’s titles. He told me that he had a book on Arun Joshi and took out S.Radha Krishnan’s ‘Fiction of Arun Joshi’ which is a collection of academic articles by various academics on Arun Joshi’s novels. It was an interesting book and I got it for only thirty rupees.

In the main Bookworm store I couldn’t find Graham Greene’s ‘Getting to Know the General’ that I had missed buying on my earlier trip. There was nothing interesting to buy and the only book I picked up was ‘Dave Barry is Not Making This Up’ by Dave Barry. I bought the book since the guy offered me coffee and I did not want to leave without having made a single purchase.

In another bookstore (half of it was a clothes store) the name of which I do not remember now, I found a hard cover copy of ‘X Men’ that my kid loves to read. I bought this book too though it was a bit heavy to carry around for too long. It was almost half past four by the time I left for the railway station carrying my precious cargo of books. I was elated that I had found some good books that wouldn’t have found at Abids so easily. With this haul the total number of books that I have bought so far this year comes to around a hundred and thirty books. Time to stop the cascade of books flooding the house I guess.