The Sunday Haul (on 15-7-2018)

Though the weather forecast said it would rain heavily on Sunday it didn’t! But the sky was overcast and looked like it would rain any moment but mercifully while we were out at Abids not a drop fell from the sky. It wasn’t rain that I was worried if the copy of ‘A Whole Life’ by Robert Seethaller that I had seen the previous Sunday and not bought was there or not. But before I could reach that seller I spotted another interesting title with another seller right in the lane where I park my two-wheeler. It was a copy of ‘Out on the Rim’ by Ross Thomas that I saw in a pile of ‘Rs 20 only’ books. I would have picked up anything by Ross Thomas and this copy had a blurb by Elmore Leonard on the back cover saying: ‘ A stunning array of characters working a plot that twists and slithers, never stops.’ I read the first chapter later after I got home and now I am trying to make time to read this book as soon as I can.

'Out on the Rim' was the first title I picked up at Abids last Sunday before finding ‘A Whole Life’ by Robert Seethaller that I managed to buy at the price I wanted to pay- hundred rupees. I felt glad that no one had picked it up in the meanwhile and I got to bought it. As it says on the cover it had been long listed for the Man Booker and surprisingly it was less than a hundred and fifty pages long.

The next find was ‘Mildred Pierce’ by James M. Cain. I already have a copy of this title that I had bought a couple of years ago. But this was a very good copy almost new and coming cheap at thirty rupees only. In fact this was one of the three books I picked up from a heap selling for thirty rupees only.

The second book was ‘The Mirror Maker’ by Primo Levi. It is a collection of Stories and Essays translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal. The stories in it are: The Interview; They Were Made to Be Together; The Great Mutation; The Two Flags; Five Intimate Interviews; The Mirror Maker; Through the Walls; The Ant’s Wedding; Force Majeure; A Mystery in the Lager; Time Checkmated; The Tommy-gun Under the Bed
The Essays in it are: A Valley; The Commander of Auschwitz; The Moon and Man; Sic!; Our Dreams; The Struggle for Life; Spears Become Shields; Translating Kafka; Rhyming on the Counterattack; Dear Horace; Bacteria Roulette; Among the Peaks of Manhattan; The Wine of the Borgias; Reproducing Miracles; The Man Who Flies; About Gossip; Jack London’s Buck; Adam’s Clay; The Spider’s Secret; The Dispute among German Historians; Defiance in the Ghetto; Hatching the Cobra.