Friday, July 18, 2025

The Sunday Haul (on 13-07-2025)

 A recent personal development put me in low moods last week and I wasn’t in the mood to go to Abids last Sunday. However, I went hoping I would find something that would give me hope and also cheer me up. Sadly, I found nothing of that sort but found a copy of ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ by Frantz Fanon with a striking cover. Sometime back I had found two copies of the same title and with this I now have three copies of the same title. 

I had seen the Bloomsbury 2021 Catalogue but did not pick it up since some of the pages seemed to be damaged by moisture. Back home I felt I should have taken it since I do not have any catalogue by any publisher. Maybe next Sunday I will buy it if it is still around at the same place I saw it last Sunday. 

Friday, July 11, 2025

The Sunday Haul (on 06-07-2025)

 

The previous Sunday I had been late to Abids and so did not have the time to take a leisurely look at the books on the pavements at Abids. Last Sunday, however, I was there before noon but most of the sellers had not set up shop due to Muharram. Out of the few who were present I found three titles that seemed interesting to me. 

The first book I picked up was a nice copy of ‘Indira Gandhi’ by Pupul Jayakar that I had been seeing with a seller since the last couple of weeks. I got it for hundred rupees.


All the titles on the Palestine issue were different ones and last Sunday I found a different title by someone who claimed to be a neutral person, neither a Jew nor a Palestinian. I found a nice copy of ‘Why Blame Israel?’ by Neill Lochery that I got for two hundred rupees. This is another title on the Middle East that I plan to read together with the other titles I have sometime in the coming months.


There were a few additions to the stock of books with a seller in a lane that looked old hardcover titles with the jackets missing. In that pile I spotted a copy with this title on the spine ‘Autobiography- Neville Cardus’. I am not very interested in cricket but know enough that Neville Cardus was a cricket writer and quite famous. So I bought it for a hundred rupees. 


On the way back home I stopped to look at the pile of books that are almost new that a seller keeps on a kind of low bench. I spotted a copy of ‘Blood & Sand’ by Frank Gardner, another memoir by a journalist who had covered the Middle East among other places. I got it for only fifty rupees. 



Somehow it did not seem enough and I felt restless as I hadn’t been to Chikkadpally to look at the titles the couple of sellers there put up for sale. So, in the afternoon I went and picked up a collection of literary essays by a Telugu writer. It was a slim, paperback copy of ‘Sahitya Darshini’ by Kolakaluri Enoch. I got it for thirty rupees only. 

Friday, July 04, 2025

The Sunday Haul (on 29-06-2025)

I had left home early to be at a meeting of fountain pen lovers that takes place every month. I was added to their WhatsApp group by someone I know and days later I read the message about the monthly meeting. The meeting was at 10.30 am in Nexcity near the Sattva Knowledge city. I was surprised at that wonderful place where we could sit and discuss. I was the first to arrive and later joined by a motley groups of people carrying bags filled with exotic and beautiful fountain pens. They showed around their fountain pens and also the bottles of ink they had, scribbling on special notebooks to test the nibs and the color of the inks. I had not taken my collection except one fountain pen so I just looked at the fountain pens they had. But since it was getting late for my Abids hours I left after an hour.

I reached Abids quite late, sometime after one in the afternoon. I found only one book which was a nice copy of ‘Everything is Broken: Life Inside Burma’ by Emma Larkin. Emma Larkin is a writer who made several trips to Burma and this book is an account of what she saw there in the aftermath of a cyclone that hit the country in 2008.