A Midweek Haul

If I am not at Abids on Sunday it could be because of three reasons. Either I am sick, or I am out of town or it is raining heavily. So, last Sunday I couldn’t go to Abids for my weekly fix of books because I was recovering from a bout of fever and too weak to go outdoors. But I was in a better shape by Monday and even went to work. If I don’t go to Abids on Sunday to look at the books the entire week I am in a grumpy mood. The only cure for it is to drop in at a second hand bookstore and smell the books. On Tuesday I dropped in again at the MR Books store opposite Lifestyle just to feel normal again.

Sometime back I had picked up a book at Akshara bookstore in Jubilee Hills that I entirely forgot to write about here. I will write about it in another post but briefly it was a compilation of the 100 best crime novels. It featured so titles that I already have and many I don’t even know. One of the titles was a title I seemed to have come across at Abids but hadn’t thought much about it. At MR Books on Tuesday I came across this book which was ‘Savages’ by Don Winslow. I saw on the back cover that it was made into a movie directed by Oliver Stone, and starred Benicio Del Toro and Salma Hayek among others. It was a good copy so I picked it up and I was glad I found it.

A long time ago I came across a list of half a dozen title that not many know about but are supposed to be very good. One of the titles happened to be Dodie Smith’s ‘I Capture the Castle’ that I had found at the Hyderabad Book Fair a couple of years ago. It wasn’t a very good copy but I bought it since I thought I’d not be able to find the title again anywhere. I was so wrong since I came across a beautiful copy at MR Bookstore a little later but I did not buy it because the price was too high and moreover I already owned a copy. But when I saw the same copy again on Tuesday in the ‘Rs 120 per kilo’ section I decided to pick it up. I knew from experience that just two books won’t weigh a kilo so I went looking for two more books to make up for a kilo which was the minimum quantity one had to buy.

Luckily I found another good title by an author I had read only recently- Alan Paton. I had read his autobiography, ‘Towards the Mountain,’ first before reading ‘Cry, the Beloved Country’ and had regretted not reading him earlier. At MR on Tuesday I came across a beautiful copy of ‘Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful’ that I instantly picked up without thinking twice. It is the first title in a projected trilogy.

The next find was by an author I had been looking for since a long time. Recently I found Lorrie Moore’s ‘Birds of America’ and also ‘Self Help’ both collections of short stories that I was waiting to read since I had read high praise about Lorrie Moore’s writing somewhere. This time I found a copy of ‘A Gate at the Stairs’ by Lorrie Moore which is a novel. I haven’t read anything other than short stories by Lorrie Moore so I was excited to find her novel.

I got all four books that made up a little less than a kilo and they cost me just a hundred and ten rupees which means I got each book for something around thirty rupees.