The Sunday Haul

Usually I do not miss buying any copy of any of Dave Barry’s titles but I had almost half a dozen copies of ‘Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits’ and so did not buy the copy I kept seeing at a seller at Abids every Sunday. I had asked for the price and after hearing the price I decided to let someone else buy it. However, no one seemed very interested in picking it up and more than a couple of occasions I had been tempted to buy it. But I didn’t, until last Sunday. In a pile of books selling for only twenty rupees I saw the cover first. It had become detached from the rest of the book. I couldn’t bear to see it in such a condition so I picked up the book. After I got home I fixed up the cover and felt glad that I had bought it. There’ll always be someone who might enjoy the sort of humor that Dave Barry writes.

That was the only book I picked up on Sunday but earlier in the week I had bought another book. Last Friday on an unexpected visit to the MR Bookstore near the flyover at Punjagutta I found ‘The Penguin Book of American Short Stories’ edited by James Cochrane. I picked it up instantly since the price was only thirty rupees. The book has famous names and has the following stories: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, Bartleby by Herman Melville, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain, The Outcasts of Poker Flat by Francis Bret Harte, One of the Missing by Ambrose Bierce, The Real Thing by Henry James, An Unfinished Story by O. Henry, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky by Stephen Crane, Neighbor Rosicky by Will Cather, To Build a Fire by Jack London, Death in the Woods by Sherwood Anderson, Who Dealt by Ring Lardner, Flowering Judas by Katherine Anne Porter, The Rich Boy by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Delta Autumn by William Faulkner, The Battler by Ernest Hemingway, The Jewbird by Bernard Malamud, Children on Their Birthdays by Truman Capote and Wife-Wooing by John Updike.