The Sunday Haul (on 03-01-2016)

A week after the Hyderabad Book Fair ended and twenty four books later I thought of stopping going to Abids for a couple of weeks. But some habits are difficult to avoid even temporarily. So I made that familiar trip to Abids that I make every Sunday but with a resolve not to buy anything until I had read at least half a dozen of the two dozen books that I had picked up at the Book Fair.

However strong the resolve not to buy any more books might be it easily dissolves when I come across books by authors like Ross Macdonald. Ever since I came to learn about Ross Macdonald and his Lew Archer series of novels and also read a few titles like ‘The Instant Enemy,’ ‘The Ivory Grin,’ and ‘The Wycherly Woman’ I was hooked to his writing style. The previous Sunday I had seen four Ross Macdonald titles- The Galton Case, The Chill, The Moving Target, and The Underground Man. I had the first three titles with me except ‘The Underground Man’ that I wasn’t exactly looking for.

Sometime back I had purchased second hand copies of eight Ross Macdonald titles online. This lot of eight titles included three titles I saw at Abids. My desire to buy all the four titles was dampened by the seller who quoted an abnormally high price after he saw the gleam in my eye when I spotted the books. Fresh after shelling out nearly three thousand books for the two dozen titles that I had bought at the Book Fair only the week before I was not in a mood to spend on more books. So I had walked away reluctantly after an unsuccessful bout of bargaining with the seller who was in no mood to budge from the price he had quoted.

But last Sunday I decided it wasn’t such a high price after all and ended up buying all the four Ross Macdonald titles- The Galton Case, The Chill, The Moving Target, and The Underground Man that I kept and gave the rest of the first three titles to one of my younger brothers. I bought the four titles for forty rupees each which was considerably less than the seventy five rupees I spent on each of the titles I had bought online from Afzal of Matunga.

Another book that I found at Abids last Sunday was ‘Arab Gold’ by MT Vasudevan Nair and NP Mohamed. This is the second or third MT Vasudevan Nair title that I had found and I was glad to pick it up. It did not take me very long to decide to buy this book that had a picture of two golden coconut trees on the cover which was totally black.

So I began 2016 with another medium sized haul of five titles. I was glad that I found another Ross Macdonald title to add to my collection that it growing gradually. I don’t know how many books I will end up buying during the year but I not want to break the last year’s record of nearly 230 books bought.