The Weekend Haul (on 11-09-2021)

Last weekend was pretty long with three holidays. Friday was a holiday because of Ganesh festival, second Saturday which is a holiday for us and of course, Sunday. Friday passed somehow but I felt restless on Saturday and so decided to check out Unique bookstore in Khairatabad. I always find something interesting in Unique on every visit and my visit there on Saturday was no different because I found two nice titles.

Since finding the first copy of ‘On Writing’ by Stephen King sometime in 2004 or so I have managed to find and also buy more than a dozen copies of this wonderful book. Even after giving away many copies of this book I have at least four copies of ‘On Writing’ gracing my shelves. I can never resist buying this book and so when on Saturday I found a beautiful, hardcover copy of ‘On Writing’ by Stephen King that appeared to be almost brand new I snatched it.

Of late I seemed to be finding books about India, and travel in India by foreigners and Indians. Only recently I had found a lovely copy of “If it is Monday it must be Madurai’ by Srinath Perur and before that I had found a copy of ‘Mofussil Junction’ by Ian Jack. On Saturday the second book I bought was a copy of the August-September 1997 issue of ‘London Magazine; India 1997 with Affection’ that looked interesting. It had a mix of articles, poems, photographs, art, book reviews mostly by Indians but the topic or theme was India because 1997 was the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence. I was glad I found it though I would have been gladder if I had also bought other titles I had seen but couldn’t buy. But I plan to visit the store soon and pick up the other books I saw especially the copy of the collection of essays by Amitav Ghosh.

 Of course, the next day being Sunday I went to Abids too. However though I saw a couple of books that appeared very interesting I did not feel like buying them. I saw a nice copy of ‘Italian Neighbours’ by Tim Parks that I had earlier missed buying but gave it a miss this time too. I may have to wait until the Sunday after next Sunday to buy it because the next Sunday it is Ganesh immersion and there will be a lot of traffic restrictions. Also, the cops won’t allow the sellers to set up shop on the pavements.