The Sunday Haul- The first one of the New Year (03-01-2020)

Sometime back, maybe last month, I made a couple of new bibliophile friends online. They sent messages to me after I bagged a few books in a WhatsApp auction. I sent a book to one of them and in return he sent me a book that I did not expect. I got it on the last day of 2020. It was a copy of ‘The Lost Heart of Asia’ by Colin Thubron, a travel title. I was a bit overwhelmed, as is usual for me whenever I get books as gifts. It was a beautiful copy, almost new. 2020 ended nicely that way, with a book as a gift.

On Sunday at Abids, it was the usual mild winter morning with a bright and sunny day. There was a title I had been noticing with a seller since the past couple of weeks. I felt drawn to it but somehow I did not pick it up though for all appearances it looked like a good tale. The attractive cover and that it was a crime fiction title should have made me buy it right away but since the past two or three weeks I had been walking away from it. But last Sunday however I couldn’t hold back and picked up the copy of ‘Death in Willow Pattern’ by WJ Burley.

In the same pile was another title- ‘12 from the Sixties’ edited by Richard Kostelanetz. It is a collection of twelve short stories by some great writers that can be found on the cover- Tillie Olsen I had wanted to find since long but couldn’t so far. I haven’t heard of Irvin Faust, Kenneth Koch, and also HW Blattner. It looked very interesting so I picked it up. Both these books I got for twenty five rupees each.

I never miss titles, especially crime fiction titles by Penguin. When I saw a copy of ‘Providence’ by Geoffrey Wolff a little away from where I had picked up the first two titles of the day, I picked it up to take a closer look. The cover was a bit damaged but when I saw the blurb, the first one in a long list, by Ross Thomas saying it was a very good and witty novel  I realized I had made a good choice and bought it for just thirty rupees.

Sometime back I had at last found a copy of ‘From here to Eternity’ by James Jones. I had been looking for it ever since I found it mentioned in a very good writing book that I was reading. It took me a long time to find it, something like a decade. I was ecstatic when I found it but I haven’t yet started reading it. One reason is that it is too long something like 820 pages. I wondered how anyone found the time to write such lengthy books and also how anyone would read such tomes though I bought it with the intention of reading it. But I really had no idea that James Jones had written another lengthy novel running into more than 700 pages until I actually came across it last Sunday. What was astonishing was that I found this massive tome in a pile of books going for just twenty rupees! I found a nice copy of ‘Go to the Widow Maker’ by James Jones.

The next find was at the seller on the corner of the RTC X Roads where I have found many interesting titles earlier. ‘Tara Lane’ by Shama Futehally was one title I had been hearing for so long that I wondered why I wasn’t able to find it anywhere. But finally last Sunday I saw a copy and grabbed it. It turned out to be a hardcover copy with the jacket intact but torn. I was excited finding such an old edition. I got it for thirty rupees only.