The Book Fair Haul-2

 

My next visit to the Hyderabad Book Fair was on Saturday, two days before the fair concludes.  I had missed checking out some second-hand book stalls so I carefully went through what they had on the shelves and managed to find four good titles.

I’ve read almost all books by Bishwanath Ghosh but hadn’t read his ‘Aimless in Banaras: Wanderings in India’s Holiest City’ that I spotted in a pile of Rs.100 books. All Bishwanath Ghosh’s books are travel books so was ‘Aimless in Banaras’ that I plan to read right away because I like the way he writes about his trips. 

A long time back I had found a copy of ‘Bird by Bird’ by Anne Lamott, a book about writing for aspiring writers. I had found a couple of copies mostly at Abids and when I saw another copy at a stall at the book fair I did not want to leave it behind. 

I thought I knew about all the titles of Marquez and so was sort of shocked to find a new title I hadn’t heard before. I spotted a copy of ‘Clandestine in Chile’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in a small pile and it was the cover that drew me to it. It had Marquez’s picture, the face only, on the cover and someone had drawn spectacles and moustache on it with a ball point. Nevertheless, I bought this title about a film director’s clandestine visit to Chile. I felt pleased finding it.

This was the first title I picked up on this day and hesitated before buying it. On an earlier visit I had picked up a similar title about someone’s struggle with cancer, Lisa Ray’s ‘Close to the Bone’ her memoir of her cancer. ‘Not the Last Goodbye’ by Dr. David Servan-Schreiber is also a memoir about cancer but the writer is a doctor and that is what makes it poignant. 

 

My next visit was on the last day of the Hyderabad Book Fair i.e., on 29-12-2025. I had decided to look for two or three titles I had missed buying one of which was ‘Black Skins White Masks’ by Franz Fanon and the other was ‘Trieste’ by Jan Morris. Unfortunately, both titles were not to be seen and the stall keepers were not able to tell me if they had been sold or not. However, I was about to find four good titles. 

One title I found was a copy of ‘Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight’ by Alexandra Fuller, a memoir of living in South Africa that had a beautiful cover. The name of Alexandra Fuller sounded familiar and it was only after I got home that I realized that I have her second book- ‘Scribbling the Cat’ that I had found sometime this year I guess. 

One of my interests is to read books by the great literary critics like Cyril Connolly, Edmund Wilson, Frank Kermode, and others like them. I had read about F.R. Leavis somewhere and when I saw the same name on the spine of a book in a lot of books at a stall, I took it out. It was a copy of ‘The Great Tradition’ by F.R. Leavis that I thought I would get cheap. But the seller asked for an astronomical sum for it and after some hard bargaining I got it for six hundred rupees which is still a lot of money but I thought it would be worth it. 

I buy almost every travel title I come across and so when I saw a copy of ‘Three Moons in Vietnam’ by Maria Coffey in a lot selling for fifty rupees only I was surprised because it was by ‘abacus’. They only publish very good travel accounts and I thought I was lucky to find it at such a ridiculously low price. 

I had been seeing a lot of copies of books by Ashok Chopra but hadn’t even bothered to check what they were all about which was sort of silly of me. When I saw a hardcover copy of ‘A Scrapbook of Memories’ by Ashok Chopra in another stall I decided to see what it was all about and was totally surprised to find that Ashok Chopra had been a publisher and it was a memoir. I got it for two hundred and fifty rupees.