It’s been almost two weeks since the monsoon season has begun but the rains have yet to fall. Since there has been a drought here for the past two years I really wish it would rain heavily and regularly but not on Sunday, please. For some reason I do not like it when it rains. The cloudy weather and the wetness that the rains come with brings on a gloom in my life that lifts only when the sun comes out. Since it hasn’t yet started to rain I am normal and yet to be engulfed by the rain-induced gloom that brings back painful memories. Last Sunday it was quite sunny when I started for Abids to hunt for books on the pavements there.
Even before I was halfway through to Abids I stopped at a seller in RTC Crossroads on a hunch. I was glad I followed my bunch to stop there because I spotted a good book in a pile stacked up against the wall. I found ‘Everyone Can Write’ by Peter Elbow. It was quite a hefty paperback of nearly 500 pages containing several lengthy academic essays on the process on writing. Academic or whatever when it comes to anything about writing I’m willing to empty my pockets. I got this book for a hundred and fifty rupees which was quite cheap considering the immaculate condition of the book and what it is about.
Later at Abids it was a happy reunion of all my friends I made through this blog where I write about books mostly. I met Umashankar, Srikant, and also Jai and we dug through a large pile of books where we had gathered. Our search yielded quite a few good titles as Shrikant and Uma found two different copies of ‘Kitchen Confidential’ by Anthony Bourdain. I found a nice copy of ‘Diary of a Madman and Other Stories’ by Gogol. Since I had not come across any such collection of stories by Gogol I picked it up from the pile of books selling for thirty rupees.
The last find was a title by Ross Macdonald that I spotted with another seller in a heap of books selling three for a hundred rupees. The title I found was ‘MEET ME AT THE MORGUE’ and I was excited at finding another Ross Macdonald title to add to my collection of his books. But I was disappointed when I saw that it was not a Lew Archer novel. I bought it nevertheless because Ross MacDonald is the kind of writer you wouldn’t want to miss reading.
With these three books the total number of books I found so far this year stands at eighty eight.
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