The Sunday (on 25-07-2021) and an Online Haul

    One of the few genre of books I am fond of reading is spy fiction, and also crime fiction especially if they are well written and the authors are famous names like le Carre, Len Deighton, Ross MacDonald and such writers. I recently finished reading ‘A Swell Looking Babe’ by Jim Thompson and was looking out for more such titles when I saw a copy of ‘Old Flames’ by John Lawton, a name I had not heard previously. What attracted me to it was first that it was a Penguin title and secondly the blurbs comparing John Lawton to le Carre, a writer I like very much.

The Online Haul

    A couple of years ago I had come across a copy of ‘Detours’ by Salil Tripathi at a seller in Chikkadpally. It was a hardcover book and the seller asked for what I thought was a very high price. I wasn’t willing to pay that much and so undecided I left hoping I would be able to buy it the next Sunday. But next Sunday much to my disappointment I couldn’t find it. The seller told me someone had bought it last Sunday itself that made me terribly annoyed with myself for not having the sense to buy a good book when I saw it. However, on one the WA groups of an online seller of secondhand books I happened to spot this title and I quickly claimed it before anyone could. Luckily for me no one wanted it so I got it. ‘Detours’ are a collection of Salil Tripathi’s essays about his travels all over the world. It was exactly the sort of book I was looking for, a travel book by an Indian author. I have already started reading it and finished the first two essays. In the essay about his time in Indonesia I read about Promodeya Ananta Toer whose one title of a trilogy I had found some time back. Another place was Toer was mentioned was in Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens’ memoir.

 

    I had come across the name Vikram Paralkar somewhere very recently but did not know it was the name of a writer. When I saw a copy of ‘Wounds of the Dead’ by Vikram Paralkar in the same WA group I decided I would claim it. Once again no one seemed to want it so I got this title too. After I received the book this Monday I flipped through the book and found that the author was a medical doctor. This too was a hardcover book a little over 200 pages long that I can finish in a couple of days but when I would find the time to read it I do not know.