The Sunday Haul (on 05-09-2021)

It had been raining almost all day since the past ten days over here and Sunday morning was no different except that it was all cloudy as if it would rain any moment. However it did not rain when I set out for Abids. The previous Sunday while picking up some books at Chikkadpally I had seen two other titles I couldn’t take. So before going to Abids I thought I would see if they were still there with the seller and take them if they were available. To my luck I saw them and took these two titles for just a hundred rupees for both.

The first title was a copy of ‘A View of My Own’ by Elizabeth Hardwick. A collection of essays in literature and society as it says on the cover, there are essays on a few writers known and little known, like Christiana Stead, Mary McCarthy, and the lives of some poets, writers. I hope to dip into it now and then over a long period.

The second title was a hardcover copy of ‘Light Blue, Dark Blue: An Anthology of Oxford & Cambridge Writing’ Edited by John Fuller, Julian Mitchell & William Donaldson, Robin McLaren. This book features writings of people who have been at these two universities in the sixties, and some of the writers I could recognise were Dom Moraes with three articles, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and many that I do not know. Another Asian sounding name was that of Waris Habibullah, who , I read at the back of the book,  was born in Lucknow, lived in Bombay,  and had also written three stories.

Occasionally I read books in the languages I know. I have read a couple of books in Hindi and a few in Telugu but that was a while ago. Last Sunday I saw a beautiful and almost new hardcover copy of ‘Krishnaveni’ by Ranganayakamma that I picked right away. In the Foreword the author writes about why she got this latest edition published. Ranganayakamma wrote ‘Krishnaveni’ in 1959 when she was nineteen years old and it was first published as a serial in a weekly magazine in the years 1960-61. But after more than eight editions there were no reprints and the book had become difficult to find.  There were several errors in the book that she wanted to change and she tried to obtain all the editions to know more about where she had made corrections and in which edition. Hence this latest edition published in 2010 has a lot of footnotes about the errors and the corrections in scenes. Now this only made me want to look for older editions of this title. I hope I will be able to find at least one edition before I begin reading this popular book.