The Chennai Haul

In the ten years that I’ve been attending the Hyderabad Literary Festival here at Hyderabad it remained the only lit fest I’ve attended. I’ve never been to any other lit fest in the country though I wanted to go to the Jaipur Lit Fest. I never got the chance to go to Jaipur all these years but last week I attended the Lit for Life 2019 literature festival of The Hindu at Chennai. Apart from attending the many sessions and listening to some of the wonderful writers talk about their books and other issues, I also managed to attend the Chennai 42nd Book Fair and also dropped in at a second hand book store and returned from Chennai with a haul of ten books.

The Haul at the Chennai Book Fair

An online friend whom I’ve never met and wanted to meet at Chennai informed me that the Chennai Book Fair was on. It was wonderful news for I had a lot of time on hand on the day I reached Chennai. The venue of the Book Fair, YMCA Grounds at Nandanam, was not too far from where I was staying and after lunch I started for the book fair. I had read that that there were more than 700 stalls of which, I discovered, there were fewer than a dozen stalls stocking books in English. In the handful of stalls selling second-hand books I managed to find three titles.

The first title I found was a copy of ‘Master Georgie’ by Beryl Bainbridge that I got for a hundred and fifty rupees. The next find was a beautiful copy of ‘The Dain Curse’ by Dashiell Hammett that I bought along with a copy of ‘Tar Baby’ by Toni Morrison for two hundred and fifty rupees. It was more than what I would normally pay for second hand books at Abids in Hyderabad but since it was a book fair I did not think twice.

The LFL Haul

At the LFL, I had decided beforehand, that I would buy the latest titles of Amitabha Bagchi (Half the Night is Gone) and Anuradha Roy (All the Lives We Never Lived) and get them signed by the authors. I had read ‘Above Average’ by Bagchi only recently and was quite impressed enough to think of buying his latest title that is getting rave reviews everywhere. Though I have almost all of Anuradha Roy’s titles I haven’t read any till date, though I know they are all outstanding works. I managed to buy these two books and also get them signed. What I had not planned was buying a copy of ‘Virtual Realities’ by Neelam Saran Gour that I bought after hearing her talk.I also got it signed by Neelam Saran Gour who, later next day , was awarded the Hindu Prize for fiction.

On the second day of LFL I had sat in a session in which Abdullah Khan was on the panel and I was impressed by the candour in his replies to the moderator’s questions. After the session I bought his ‘Patna Blues’ but forgot to get it signed. The next day I sought him out and he signed on the book and chatted with me for a while over coffee. The only thing I regret is not getting my copy of ‘Ghachar Ghochar’ that I carried from Hyderabad to Chennai, by Vivek Shanbhag. I had thought he’d be around for some time but apparently he had left soon after his session on the first day itself.
Amitabha Bagchi doesn’t appear anything like the person shown in the photograph on the book. He had a ponytail and a long beard and many people couldn’t recognise him until he was introduced by the moderator.

Another Chennai Haul

I had long been thinking of visiting Chennai’s Moore Market, where I was told, were booksellers who stocked used books. At last I was there last week but since it was festival time the market was closed. But I wasn’t prepared to give up. I had read about Govindaraju’s ‘Rare Books’ in RA Puram which was where I was headed soon after finding that I wouldn’t find a single title in Moore Market. ‘Rare Books’ turned out to be some kind of a garage store with thousands of books stacked haphazardly. There were books, magazines, tattered tomes, and loose papers scattered around. From this mess I managed to extricate three titles. The first find was a hardcover copy of ‘The Gutenberg Elegies’ by Sven Birkerts that was in my ‘must-buy’ list. I had read about this title somewhere and so remembered it.

Two more titles that I bought here were copies of titles that I already possess. One was a nice copy of ‘Writing Down the Bones’ by Natalie Goldberg and the other a copy of ‘The Instant Enemy’ by Ross Macdonald that I also read again in the plane back to Hyderabad. I got these three books for four hundred rupees. I had seen a book by Jai Nimbkar and a hardcover book of Rainer Maria Rilke that I now regret not buying.

The visit to Chennai yielded ten titles and with these my total haul in the first fortnight of the first month of the new year comes to eleven.