The Sunday Haul (on 11-06-2017)

The coming of the rains and the Ramzan season changed things at the Sunday book market at Abids. For one it has become much cooler and for the first time I did not wear the cap while out at Abids. Then the usual stores were open for Ramzan shopping and so the second hand booksellers moved out of their usual spots before store fronts to other spots in Abids. Luckily, it did not rain and I wanted to take advantage of it and look keenly for titles I wanted to buy.

But last Sunday I wasn’t as lucky as I was the past few Sundays and couldn’t find a single title worth buying. However, at Chikkadpally on the way home I found a good copy of ‘The Best American Essays- 2011’ edited by Edwidge Danticat. The copy I found was almost brand new and I felt lucky to have spotted it. I got it for just sixty rupees which was a steal considering there are twenty four essays by some of the best writers in America and that were published in various publications in the year.

In the list of twenty four writers I could recognize only four names- Christopher Hitchens, Pico Iyer, Chang-Rae Lee, and Zadie Smith. The rest were names I was not familiar with. However, I am looking forward to reading all the essays in it soon. Since Sunday I’ve managed to finish reading three essays and strangely, all of them were about death. Katy Butler’s ‘What Broke My Father’s Heart’ was a candid essay about her father’s last days that had me thinking about where medicine was taking us.