A Double Haul

A Weighty Haul
The New Year began with a wee bit of luck in store for me. Eight months after the posting in a district I was shifted to Hyderabad. I will post about this stroke of luck and my new place of posting sometime later. More than anything one reason why I wanted to be in Hyderabad was to be able to drop in at the second hand bookstores and also to be able to attend literary events such as book launches and readings whenever I wanted. Within a fortnight of being transferred I got the opportunity to drop in at a second hand bookstore and haul in a tidy collection of books. I also got to attend the Hyderabad Literary Festival where again I found two more titles in book stalls there.

On the Republic Day (26th Jan) after attending the flag hoisting event at my new workplace in the morning I stopped at a second hand bookstore on the way back home. Nowadays second hand bookstores in Hyderabad have started selling books by weight. I wanted to check out if I could find something of worth in the MR Bookstore in Begumpet so I landed there early in the afternoon on Republic Day. I had the whole day before me so I decided to spend at least a couple of hours in the store looking at each and every title to see if I’d be able to find something good.

Only the week before I had finished reading ‘CAL’ by Bernard MacLaverty that I had found some time back at Abids. It turned out to be extremely good and enjoyed reading the interesting love story of Cal, the protagonist. After finishing reading it I gave it to Hari to read. At the MR store I found another Bernard MacLaverty title- ‘Grace Notes’ that I got for fifty rupees. I was thrilled to find it and afterwards I went into the section where the books were to be sold by weight. It was downstairs where there seemed to be thousands of titles on the shelves. I got down to looking at the titles hoping to find enough books to make up a kilo which was the minimum one had to buy. The books were priced at Rs 120 per kilo. I got lucky and found four good titles.

The first title was another Bernard MacLaverty title- ‘Lamb’- that was also made into a movie like the other title I had read-CAL. So I was mighty thrilled and breathless I searched carefully. I found a hardcover copy of ‘The Man Within My Head’ by Pico Iyer. The jacket had a piece missing on the front but otherwise it was in good condition so I picked it up though I already have another copy of this same title. The next find was ‘Bomber’s Law’ by George V.Higgins, a writer whose books I don’t want to miss reading. I had been hunting for ‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle’ but haven’t found it so far but any book by George V. Higgins is worth picking up. Only recently I had found his ‘Wonderful Years, Wonderful Years’ at Abids last December. The last find was ‘A Home in the Sky’ by Vaasanthi.

These four titles added up to a little more than a kilo that cost me just a hundred and thirty rupees. It means I got these books for a little over thirty rupees each. It surely is a ‘heavy haul.’

The HLF Haul
A day after I bought the books by weight at MR Bookstore the Hyderabad Literary Festival began. However I wasn’t able to attend on the first day but I took a day off on Saturday and landed at the Hyderabad Public School. As usual, there was the stall by Oxford Publishers and one stall by Best Books.

At the Oxford stall I picked up ‘Roots’ by Malayatoor Ramakrishnan for seventy rupees. At the Best Books stall I picked up a title I had missed buying at the Annual Hyderabad Book Fair last month. It was ‘People of the City’ by Cyprian Ekwensi. I got this book too for seventy five rupees. I had read somewhere that this book was published much before Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart.’ With these two books the number of books I had bought in the first month of the New Year stands at twenty already.