The Sunday Haul (on 06-08-2023)

 Last Sunday was a sort of special visit to Abids. Someone who follows me on Twitter messaged me that she would be visiting Abids and asked me to show her around. I was a bit nervous but the lady turned out to be an avid reader like her mother who accompanied her. She bought ten books and I gave her six copies of some of my favorite titles including ‘All About H Hatterr’ by GV Desani, ‘Summer of 42’ by Herman Raucher, a collection of stories by Mavis Gallant, a Dave Barry title. It is for this reason that I buy multiple copies of titles I loved to read. Anyway it all went off well and I was pleased about it all. 

I too picked up four titles on my own. The first title I picked up was a beautiful almost new copy of ‘The News: A User’s Manual’ by Alain de Botton. Over the past weeks and months  I have found Alain de Botton’s ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’, ‘Essays in Love’, ‘The Art of Travel’, ‘The Consolations of Philosophy’ after reading which I was convinced that de Botton was a wonderful thinker and writer.  

 

Somehow I like reading accounts by individuals who lead interesting lives doing something not many people do or can do. One such title I found last Sunday was ‘The Shepherd’s Life; A Tale of the Lake District’ by James Rebanks that I picked up also because it was a Penguin title. I did not mind paying a hundred and fifty rupees for it. 

Of course any title related to travel does not escape my eye and so when I spotted a nice copy of ‘Without a Guide’ edited by Katherine Govier I picked it up knowing it would be a good title. I wasn’t wrong as the book is a collection of travel pieces by seventeen celebrated women writers like Annie Proulx, Alice Walker, Bapsi Sidhwa, Ann Beattie, Margaret Atwood and also Robyn Davidson whose ‘The Ribbon and the Ragged Square’ I had bought at Bengaluru, and from which book an excerpt is included in ‘Without a Guide’. 

 

I never seem to write good English so I am always trying to improve my writing by learning the basics of writing, grammar, style and so on. Sometime last month or the month before it I had found a nice copy of ‘The King’s English’ by H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler that I plan to read along with Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’ that I had got cheap earlier this year.