The Sunday Haul (on 23-02-2020)

Those who read, I realized, have few friends and those friends are mostly people who also read. There was someone in the office who loved to read and her birthday was coming up so I wanted to give her a book. I had told her about Alice Munro and also about William Trevor. While I had an extra copy of an Alice Munro title I did not have extra copies of any of the half a dozen William Trevor titles I have on my bookshelf. So I decided to go in search of a book to give her. It was a holiday due to a local festival and I decided to drop in at MR Books at Begumpet. I couldn’t find anything worth giving to her but I found something for myself. I found a beautiful copy of ‘Bookworm’ by Lucy Mangan. I had written down this title in my notebook after I read about it on someone’s blog. I felt very pleased finding this title that happened to be about books.

That was on Friday and on Sunday I was at Abids where I found two more titles. However, these were copies of books I already have. I found a nice copy of ‘Prashad: Cooking with Indian Masters’ by Inder Singh Kalra that I got for a hundred rupees. I bought it because the copy I had with me wasn’t in such a good condition.

The next find was a copy of ‘The Story of Lucy Gault’ by William Trevor. It would make a nice gift for the colleague in office so I bought it. I got it for eighty rupees which was very less for a book in such a beautiful condition that it appeared almost new.

The Sunday Haul (on 16-02-2020)

The previous Sunday I had been to Abids only for a brief while, long enough to share a cup of tea and have a brief talk with Jai who dropped in. I left without a glance at the books since I had to return home to see off my mother leaving for Delhi. So last Sunday it felt like I had not been to Abids after ages even though it was only a week. The weather on Sunday looked like it was already summer. It was uncomfortably warm in the open sun and I had the sense to bring along a cap. Once I began to look at the books I forgot all about the weather and focused on the titles on display. I managed to find three books in all, two at Abids and the third at Chikkadpally.

I have quite a few copies of short story collections by many writers- Alice Munro, Alistair Macleod, William Trevor, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, Raymond Carverand also several anthologies. Only the previous month and also at the Hyderabad Book Fair recently I picked up more than a couple of short story collections. There are some writers like AE Coppard, Sean O’ Faolain whose short stories I haven’t had the fortune of finding anywhere, and when I saw their stories in a copy of ‘The Oxford Book of Short Stories Selected by VS Pritchett’ I took it. There are altogether forty one stories in this book.

I have exactly four years before I retire. I am getting drawn towards articles dealing with retirement and in many of such articles I read the common thread is that one has to prepare for it. I’ve realized that I haven’t prepared for it and that I have only four years to do it. There isn’t much that I have saved and I don’t even own a flat or any kind of dwelling. Since I have only four years to prepare for retirement I want to learn as much as I can about retirement and what to do about it. The thought of retiring is slightly scary but at the same time it promises to be liberating. In the hope that I might find something useful I picked up a nice copy of ‘Retired but Not Tired’ by BK Trehan and Indu Trehan.

There are books that have irresistible cover pages and some have illustrations inside that are too beautiful to ignore and if any book has any of these I buy it even if the subject is something I am not very interested in. Last Sunday at Chikkadpally a seller had a set of four volumes, two with colourful jackets and two without. The two volumes with jackets were a copy of ‘The Ramayana’ Text by Lakshmi Lal Illustrated by Badri Narayan, and another –Worship of Shiva and both said on the cover that the illustrations inside were by Badri Narayan. Now I know enough of art that Badri Narayan was a famous name and decided to take a look at one of the books. The illustrations inside were so beautiful that I wanted to buy both the volumes. In the end I decided to buy the copy of ‘The Ramayana’ Text by Lakshmi Lal Illustrated by Badri Narayan that had the cover more or less intact. I got it for hundred rupees only.

The Super Haul at Bengaluru

For the past several months I’ve been dreaming of traveling to Bengaluru and look in at the nearly half a dozen secondhand bookstores on Church Street, including the venerable Blossoms. I nearly went there in the first week of January when an opportunity came up to participate in a workshop but I had to drop the idea as I was busy with a course I was handling. However, last week I got the chance finally. My son was joining at his first job in a company in Bengaluru and on the pretext of accompanying him I too went. I spent a whole day trawling the bookstores and ended up buying nine wonderful titles.

I had a couple of hours free on Sunday evening so I went the new Blossoms on Church Street. All through the days leading up to the trip to Bengaluru I had been waiting for the moment I would step into this store. So when I entered I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of books available. It would take me a day to check out all the books so I tried to do a rapid scan as fast as I could. Sometime back, I forget where, I had read about Adam Diment, a name I heard for the first time. As is my habit I noted it down and also remembered it. So the first book I spotted at Blossoms was an old copy of ‘The Bang Bang Birds’ by Adam Diment. I felt ecstatic because I saw that the price was only seventy rupees. When I had checked online for books by Adam Diment after I heard about him, I was shocked to find the only book available was for something like 1800 rupees. So that explains the ecstasy.

I was even more ecstatic when I spotted a nice copy of ‘Imperium’ by Ryszard Kapuscinski next. I grabbed it, needless to say. This was one title I was looking around for since a long time. One get to find such great books at Blossoms that I have decided to make at least one trip every year to Bengaluru and buy all the books I want.

Finding the next book was enough justification to break my resolution of not buying more than two books as I felt there were simply too many books lying at home. I gave myself many excuses chief of which was that my birthday was just a couple of days away and I need to buy gifts for myself and there’s nothing better than a book to gift myself. So with that excuse I added the copy of ‘Patrick White Speaks’ by Patrick White, to my haul.

The next day, free of all chores, I decided to spend the whole day looking into the other bookstores on Church Street. I started off the day’s search with Select Book Shop. There I found a nice copy of ‘Time Bites’ by Doris Lessing. Since I couldn’t find anything else interesting I went upstairs where I met the venerable KK Murthy who told me to look around. So when I looked around I found a newish copy of ‘The Art of Travel’ by Alain de Botton. But it didn’t come cheap at 550 rupees.

After Select it was the turn of Bookworm. The person said they had a copy of ‘The War Doctor’ by David Nott that I read about somewhere. I took a break for lunch when they told me they would search for it. When I returned I was disappointed to learn that they did not have it. But I found another interesting title-‘An Anthology of Indo-English Poetry’ edited by Gauri Deshpande. There was no year of publication anywhere in the book so I am guessing it must have been published sometime in the early seventies.

There were poems by poets I knew and some I did not know about. The poets featured in it: Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, R.Parthasarathy, K.N. Daruwala, K.D. Katrak, Gauri Deshpande, Rakshat Puri, Gieve Patel, Adil Jussawala, Mamta Kalia, Saleem Peeradina, Jayanta Mahapatra, Pritish Nandy, and Pria Karunakar.

It was almost half past five and my train was at eight in the evening. I did not have much time and decided to look in Bookhive that I had not been on my earlier visit sometime in 2013. In Bookhive I ended up finding three wonderful titles. The first find was a nice copy of ‘Friend of My Youth’ by Alice Munro. It had the sort of plastic jacket that libraries put on the books and when I looked inside I was not surprised to read that it was a discarded copy from Leicester City Libraries.

These are the stories in ‘Friend of My Youth’- Friend of My Youth, Five Points, Meneseteun, Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass; Oranges and Apples; Pictures of the Ice; Goodness and Mercy; Oh, What Avails; Differently; and Wigtime.

I came to know about Jane Harper recently after I read about her ‘The Lost Man’ and ‘The Dry’ somewhere, naturally, online. I had noted down the titles and had no hopes of finding them in the near future. In Bookhive which was my next stop, I spotted a copy of ‘The Dry’ and was impressed by the blurbs and it also helped that the writer was an Australian so in it went into my haul.

The last find was the icing on the cake, a real treasure. I spotted a beautiful copy of ‘The Soccer War’ by Ryszard Kapuscinski. This was another title that I had been looking for. So with nine books in the haul and many more I wished I could buy I bade good bye to beautiful Bengaluru.