The Sunday Haul (on 19-04-2015)

The Sunday before last Sunday though I was in Bengaluru I wished I were in Hyderabad since I would be missing my Sunday visit to Abids. Even if I was in Hyderabad I would not have been able to go to Abids since, I learnt later, the heavens poured from the sky all Sunday in Hyderabad. I was glad I had picked up the five books at Bookworm and Blossoms the previous evening.

However last Sunday I could go to Abids. It has become such a habit that I do not feel the same if I haven’t been to Abids. The last time I was in Abids I noticed that there was fresh stock and I could find some good titles including William Saroyan’s ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’ that I got dirt cheap. This Sunday I found another collection of short stories by Saroyan. I found ‘Little Children’ that I got for thirty rupees. This collection has seventeen stories: Laughing Sam; The Sunday Zeppelin; Corduroy Pants; The Coldest Winter Since 1854; O Higher Accountancy, O Traffic Management; The Only Guy in Town; The First Day of School; The Man Who Got Fat; Around the World with General Grant; The Messenger; Many Miles Per Hour; The World’s Champion Elevator Operator; The Mexicans
This is the fourth William Saroyan title I have with me. A long ago I had found ‘Here Comes There Goes, You Know Who’ and sometime recently I found ‘My Name is Aram’ that I haven’t got around to reading. However I read one story (Laughing Sam) in the collection I found on Sunday. I plan to read the rest of the stories one a day.

I have about four or five books related to Hollywood. I have Pauline Kael’s ‘I Lost It All at the Movies,’ Syd Field’s ‘Going to the Movies,’ Manny Farber’s ‘Negative Space,’ and Barry Norman’s ‘And Why Not’ The next find was another Hollywood book that I found in a heap of almost brand new books selling for fifty rupees. I picked up Larry McMurtry’s ‘Film Flam’ which is a collection of essays on Hollywood. I noticed that many of the twenty one essays in it were related to screenwriting that somehow I like to read about.

I found in another heap of books selling for twenty rupees I found Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ that I bought. Srikant took it saying he wanted to read it first so I let him.