The Delhi Haul

Two months after my earlier trip to New Delhi in February I was off to Delhi again on another trip my second of the year. This too was a six day trip so I made plans to check out the places where I usually drop in to check out the books.

The first visit on the second day in the evening was to Connaught Place. At Anil Book Corner somewhere in H Block of Connaught Place I checked out the titles arranged in tall stacks. On my last visit I had not found worth buying at this place but now on this visit there were a couple of titles that looked interesting. I spotted a nice copy of ‘The Dew Breaker’ by Edwidge Danticat whose ‘Brother, I’m Dying’ I had found at the Sunday book market at Darya Gunj on a previous visit to Delhi last June. It was a haunting tale about Haiti that was difficult to forget so I bought ‘The Dew Breaker’ without a second thought.

I found my first Nora Ephron title Crazy Salad’ in 2017, and ‘I Feel Bad About My Neck’ in January, 2018. I’ve read both and enjoyed Nora Ephron’s humour which is why when I saw ‘I Remember Nothing’ by Nora Ephron I picked it up though I had to shell out a substantial amount. These are the essays in ‘I Remember Nothing’ : I Remember Nothing; Who Are You?; Journalism: A Love Story; The Legend; My Aruba; My Life as an Heiress; Going to the Movies; Twenty-three Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again; I Just Want to Say: The Egg-White Omelette; I Just Want to Say: Teflon; I Just Want to Say: No, I Do Not Want Another Bottle of Pellegrino; I Just Want to Say: The World Is Not Flat; I Just Want to Say: Chicken Soup; Pentimento; My Life as a Meat Loaf; Addicted to L-U-V; The Six Stages of E-Mail; Flops; Christmas Dinner; The D Word; The O Word; What I Won’t Miss; and What I Will Miss.

On another day I decided to go to Pahargunj. I took an auto from Telangana Bhavan on Asoka Road to Jackson Books, Paharganj. There were books wrapped in plastic that the person in the store said were new books. I wasn’t interested in new books and there wasn’t anything interesting in the pitiably small pile of ‘old books’ in the front so I decided to look at the new books once again to see if there was anything I missed in my first casual glance. On a detailed, slower round of looking at the titles I found ‘The Grass is Singing’ by Doris Lessing for two hundred and fifty rupees.