In a coincidence last Sunday happened to be the last day of 2023 and also the last Sunday of the year. Somehow this year I haven’t kept count of the number of books I’ve bought at Abids as well as online but the figure could be somewhere around 200 which is quite high. As I set out for Abids last Sunday I wondered how many titles I would find that I really want to buy. I ended up buying three good titles.
The first find
was ‘The Road to San Giovanni’ by Italo Calvino that I remember having bought
earlier. But since the copy I saw last Sunday appeared to be reasonably good I
bought it. It has five autobiographical essays that I am raring to read as soon
as I finish the books I am reading currently.
The next find
was a book I felt everyone in the country should read. It was a copy of ‘What
the Nation Really Needs to Know: The JNU Nationalism Lectures’ that has twenty
four essays in English and a few in Hindi by various JNU faculty about
nationalism and other issues.
It was the last find that got me pretty excited after I picked it up and read the blurbs on the cover. When I first spotted the book the title intrigued me and I had that feeling that it could be a good book. I told myself even before I actually picked it up that I should buy it. However I did not pick it up right away but came back and read the blurbs. On the cover the blurb by Frances Wilson of Sunday Times said ‘You have in your hands a masterpiece’
It was a copy of
‘The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance’ by Edmund de Waal that had me
quite excited as I flipped through the pages and read the blurbs on the back
cover. Apart from praise by others it was the praise by Diana Athill - ‘A
complex and beautiful book’ that convinced me that my hunch that it was a good
book was correct.
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