It was one of the best hauls of the year that I landed last Sunday at Abids with a couple of titles I have not heard of and also authors I haven’t read about anywhere. Once again I was amazed at the kind of gems one finds at the second hand book market at Abids. I felt that I am extremely fortunate to live in Hyderabad where every Sunday I can visit to Abids and pick up gems to fill my bookshelves.
The first title I spotted at Abids was a copy of ‘With Two Presidents’ by Major CL Datta, an aide-de-Camp to Dr. Rajendra Prasad and Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan who were the first two Presidents of India. I usually avoid reading such accounts since it is nothing more than ‘I saw’ and ‘I went’ and such stuff which is usually boring. But after I flipped through the pages and read a few paragraphs at random I thought it sounded interesting and so picked up the book.
I love to read African literature. Ever since I read ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe I have developed this great desire to read everything written by African writers and also everything written about Africa. Though I have managed to find many such titles and read a few essays about African literature and writers I have never heard of Es’kia Mphahlele. Maybe because I haven’t read enough to know about him. Anyway last Sunday I spotted a book with a splendid cover which turned out to be a beautiful copy of ‘Down Second Avenue’ by Es’kia Mphahlele. It was a Penguin title and I knew I would buy it no matter what the prize was when I saw on the cover that inside was a Foreword by Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, another writer I live very much. I got this book for a hundred and twenty rupees.
I had been seeing this copy of ‘Purity’ by Jonathan Franzen at Abids since a couple of months but did not feel like buying it because of its length. The book runs into 563 pages and I wondered if I would get the time to read such a lengthy book since many books of that length that I had picked up earlier are still sitting unread on my bookshelf. However last Sunday I decided to buy it after I found that the seller was ready to sell it to me for just fifty rupees.
A couple of day back I finished reading ‘The Big Bookshelf’ by Sunil Sethi, the last title in a handful of books on books and reading by Indian writers that I had managed to collect. ‘The Groaning Shelf’ by Pradeep Sebastian, ‘Would You Like Some Bread with that Book’ by Veena Venugopal, ‘The Girl Who Ate Books’ by Nilanjana Roy, ‘Bombay, London, New York’ by Amitava Kumar, and Navtej Sarna’s ‘Second Thoughts’ and ‘Bookless in Baghdad’ by Shashi Tharoor were the titles. Just when I thought that I had read them all and did not expect there would be any more such titles I got a pleasant shock when I spotted another title at Abids last Sunday. I saw a copy of ‘50 Writers 50 Books-The Best of Indian Fiction’ edited by Pradeep Sebastian and Chandra Siddan nestled in an untidy pile of books laid out on the pavement. I was surprised to find it since I had not heard of this wonderful title before. It was a treasure, I thought, since there were fifty individual essays about fifty titles that the essayists thought were outstanding.
My collection of travel titles by Indian writers is slowly growing with new titles getting added quite frequently. A couple of Sundays ago I had found two titles and last Sunday I found another title that has become a bestseller. I had been thinking of buying a new copy of ‘Truck De India’ by Rajat Ubhaykar but last Sunday I came across two copies, brand new looking, with a seller. I bought one of the better copies.
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