The Sunday Haul (on 13-10-2019)

Though the Dasara festival was over the shops were open since Diwali was another two weeks away, and people with lots of money and nothing to do would want to shop. Also there was the marriage season so the regular shops were open last Sunday too. However, apart from a couple of second hand book sellers who had moved to other corners most of them were at their usual places.

I found a title by an author I had read about sometime back- Hanya Yanagihara. I thought I wouldn’t be able to find anything by her and so completely forgot about it. Last Sunday when I saw a copy of ‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara at Abids I got a pleasant shock. The second hand book market that comes up at Abids every Sunday is truly a treasure house. The book was more than 700 pages long and I wondered if would be able to read it. But I didn’t hesitate for more than a minute before buying it. The other shock was that I paid only a hundred rupees for it.

Even before the joy of finding ‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara had bubbled over I saw another wonderful book. I wasn’t even aware of ‘Figures in a Landscape’ by Paul Theroux so when I saw it with another seller at Abids I felt a thrill of excitement. It was a brand new copy and no wonder the seller asked for a bomb for it. I wasn’t willing to pay so much and so walked away after the seller refused my own offer. However, I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I went around looking at other titles until I finally turned around and picked up the copy of ‘Figures in a Landscape’ by Paul Theroux. Not buying it would have been quite a dumb decision because I read that it contains essays that Theroux has written during the period 2001-2016. There are thirty essays in this title, on subjects ranging from Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Paul Bowles, Somerset Maugham, including one that immediately caught my eye- My Life as a Reader.

I read this essay right away and looked for authors and titles that I might have also read. There was Edmund Wilson’s ‘Memoirs of Hecate County’, B. Traven (whose ‘The Bridge in the Jungle’ I had found a couple of years ago), Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s ‘The Worst Journey in the World’, and also several titles and authors I haven’t read and that I now want to look for at Abids and elsewhere. It is finding books like these that make me want to come to Abids again and again.