The Sunday Haul

It was the last Sunday of April, the fourth month of the New Year and exactly the time for the mercury to keep rising higher and higher. The temperature was perhaps close to forty as was evident when we went around checking out the books on sale at Abids. The temperatures will eventually come down but the number of books that I buy every Sunday keeps rising. The score of the books that I have bought so far has reached the fifties. As on date I have bought a total of 59 books not counting the three titles I picked up on Sunday.

I had found a battered copy of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ by James M. Cain long time back and also read it soon after. I had decided to read everything James M. Cain had written but couldn’t find any of his titles. On Sunday I found ‘Mildred Pierce’ and got it for twenty rupees. It was a nice copy and I hope to read it sometime soon.

The second find of the day was ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ by Anita Loos that I got for the ridiculous price of only ten rupees. I had not heard of this book but have come across the phrase. I learnt that this book was out of print which makes it something of a rarity. The book is very short, about a hundred and twenty pages and would take just a couple of hours to finish.

The third title that I found was one that I had not picked up when I saw it at the Hyderabad Book Fair in December last. I did not buy it because the price was too steep for me, somewhere around three hundred rupees. But on Sunday I got Paul Theroux’s ‘The Tao of Travel’ for just a hundred rupees. The copy I found was as good as new and I was pleased to have bought it. My friends told me that the book hade been around since the past two weeks yet I had failed to spot it. I must have these eagle eyes of mine checked once.