The Sunday Haul (on 19-02-2023)

 Last Sunday at last I found a book by a columnist I read occasionally. I was thrilled to find a well-read copy of ‘The Accidental Theorist’ by Paul Krugman and got it pretty cheap at fifty rupees only. I am eager to start reading the essays in this title. 

Another title that I got for only twenty rupees was a copy of ‘Barren Island’ by John D. MacDonald. This is not a Travis McGee title. 

The Sunday Haul (on 12-02-2023)

 Last Sunday it was the usual Sunday in Hyderabad and in my life, though the temperature seems to be going up. Summer is approaching and safe to say it is round the corner. Though it wasn’t very hot I was glad I took along my cap and wore it all through the couple of hours I was out in the open at Abids. 

 I saw a hardcover copy of a title that I thought I had read about earlier but it wasn’t so. It was a nice copy of ‘The Unmapped Mind’ by Christian Donlan that the seller wouldn’t give at a price I wanted. The price he quoted was way too beyond my capacity so I walked away though he lowered the price a bit. For some reason no title that I saw on the pavements seemed to interest me until I realized it was that hardcover title that I had seen that I wanted to buy. So I gave in and decided to pay the seller what he wanted and picked up the book. 

 

There’s a book I ought to have read a long time back but I never got around to reading it because either I didn’t find a good copy or I couldn’t find the time to read it with the attention that such titles require. Anyway, last Sunday on the way back home from Chikkadpally I stopped at one of the couple of sellers there I spotted a nice copy of ‘Discovery of India’ by Jawaharlal Nehru that I grabbed. I got this book for only two hundred rupees. 

The Sunday Haul (0n 05-02-2023)

The trip to Abids last Sunday yielded a pretty good haul including a title I thought I missed buying earlier. Three of the titles were ones that I hadn’t read about anywhere. 

The moment I spotted this book I realized there was something special about it. When I picked up ‘A Dark Night’s Passing’ by Naoya Shiga drawn to it by its cover and opened the pages I knew I my first instinct that it was something special was confirmed when I read the blurbs. 

 

Though I had seen many copies of ‘Last Orders’ by Graham Swift on several occasions at Abids somehow I wasn’t very interested in buying the title. Last Sunday at Abids I saw a nice copy of ‘Learning to Swim and Other Stories’ by Graham Swift I knew I had to buy it if only for the reason that it was in a heap of books selling for twenty rupees only. 

About a couple of months ago I spotted a copy of ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’ by Alain de Botton at Abids that I foolishly did not pick up. I had bought more than five books that Sunday and didn’t feel like buying another book with the seller who was a cantankerous fellow who quoted outrageous prices. But the next Sunday when I looked it wasn’t there making me feel like kicking myself for not having bought it the first time I saw it. Until last Sunday I looked for it every Sunday and then when I saw it last Sunday I felt very excited and grabbed it. 

    There are some books I feel irresistibly drawn towards though I or anybody else has heard about the author or the title. Sometime back I had found a book by a civil servant of yesteryears who had served in the court of a modern maharajah just before Independence in 1947. I had bought it intrigued by what I read in the few pages I randomly opened. Sometime afterwards I found another small and slim volume by an Indian diplomat in the early sixties or seventies that was once again a personal account of the times he had spent in various countries during his postings. Last Sunday at Abids I found another similar title that was also slim and small.  It was a copy of ‘Pawn in the Seventh House’ by R.G. Rajwade a civil servant in the house of Scindias who transformed into a diplomat after Independence. This slim volume published by Sangam Books, a division of Orient Longman and now no longer in existence is about the author’s time abroad in the service of the country. I was drawn to the font that was common to the books published in the sixties.

The Sunday Haul at the Hyderabad Literary Festival (on 29-01-2023)

 Since the past few years I haven’t been too interested in the Hyderabad Lit Fest (not that it matters to anyone) and this year too I felt the same kind of disappointment. I could go only on the last day of the HLF 2023, on Sunday, and I felt out of place amidst the crowd but I couldn’t place why I felt the way I felt. Anyway, I sat in a couple of sessions watched the people in the sessions intently listening to the authors. Of course, there was the book counter and I managed to buy two books almost emptying my wallet on just these two titles. 

 

I don’t know why I haven’t read much of what Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has written on literature in English in India. I have a copy of his ‘An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English’ and had also read it a long time back but I haven’t found anything else by him other than a collection of his poetry ‘The Transfiguring Places’ that I found a not long after I found ‘An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English’. I picked up a copy of ‘Partial Recall’ by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra- Essays on Literature and Literary History’ that is just what I wanted to read. There are eleven essays in it and if the Introduction is anything to go by (there’s some scathing criticism of the reviewers and critics) then it promises to be one good read. 

I read the title essay that was about his childhood in Bhilai, and also studying in Allahabad where he along with his friends brought out a magazine. It is a delightful essay written in a conversational tone about his attempts to write poetry, about his friend Amit who later dies of cancer. After reading this essay I want to read the other ones too right away instead of putting off reading the book to a later time. 

The next book I picked up was a copy of ‘Writing the City’ edited by Stuti Khanna that had an attractive cover though I did not pick it up for the cover but for what was inside: essays by some writers about the cities they live or lived in. It is a collection of essays by fourteen writers that include Chandrahas Choudhury (on Bombay and Delhi), Sumana Roy (on Siliguri), Manju Kapur, Amitabha Bagchi, and also Ankush Saikia among others. The essays are in first person and most of the writers write about their writing and this is something I like to read. However, this slim volume of over a hundred and ten pages put me back by more than eight hundred rupees.