The Sunday Haul (on 25-10-2015)

Another Sunday. Another visit to Abids. Another haul of a few books. It all sounds predictable and monotonous but believe me I am never more excited than when I am starting for Abids on Sunday morning. Before stepping out I wonder what I will find at Abids and how many books I will buy there. Last Sunday once again I found three titles one of which was a title I already have four or five copies of. Another title was a travelogue and the other one was a poetry collection.

It was a lovely morning last Sunday with a post-festival feeling coupled with the hangover of a week-long holiday spell that we in the Government here enjoyed. The first book I saw was ‘The Healing Land’ by Rupert Isaacson that I picked up. On the cover was the picture of the lead character in the popular movie- The Gods Must Be Crazy. It looked like an interesting title and moreover it was a travel title that I do not miss reading. I got the book for forty rupees.

It is not unusual to find books for ten rupees at Abids. Until a couple of years one could get good titles for five rupees. But it is not usual to find a brand new title, that too one by a popular writer, for just ten rupees. When I heard the seller say ‘Ten rupees’ after I asked him how much the copy of ‘Neglected Poems’ by Gulzar I picked up was I was shocked. It was a brand new copy in pristine condition and in fact it looked like a copy that looked like it had come straight from the shelf in a book store. I saw that the original price was Rs 250 but I was getting it for only ten rupees. Needlessly to say, I bought it.

The next find was an interesting find. Sometime back I learnt about the little known writer Arun Joshi who has written some interesting novels. I am a big fan of Arun Joshi and I endeavor to tell as many people as possible about his books and if they appear interested I give them copies of books by Arun Joshi. So far I have bought about half a dozen or more copies of ‘The Apprentice’ and also ‘The Foreigner’ that I saw at Abids and other places. Last Sunday I spotted another copy of ‘The Apprentice’ that I snapped up the moment I saw it.

The Sunday Haul (on 18-10-2015)

I seem to be getting luckier by the week. Since the past few Sundays I’ve been finding at least one wonderful title on my Sunday hunts for books on the pavements of Abids. Last Sunday it was Akira Kurosawa’s autobiography, the Sunday before that it was ‘The Rachel Papers’ by Martin Amis and three other titles, and earlier than that at the Best Books sale last month I found many more good titles. It is as if it’s guaranteed that I’d find at least one good title every time I visit Abids. It may sound a bit farfetched but it is true. Last Sunday I found not one but two wonderful titles all in the space of sixty seconds.

A long time ago, nearly thirty years back, someone gave me a copy of ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson that I misplaced somewhere and never saw it again. It must be somewhere in a forgotten carton in a corner of the house but I never got around to looking for it. This was one title I was looking for desperately ever since but though I found three copies of ‘All About H.Hatterr’ by G.V. Desani I couldn’t find a single copy of ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson. But last Sunday in an unbelievable stroke of luck I came across a nice copy of this title along with another title that I bought in a flash. I got this book for just fifty rupees. I happen to be an Agricultural Entomologist and I know how important ‘Silent Spring’ is in these times when just about everything is being poisoned by the indiscriminate use of pesticides that we do not need.

The other title I found at the same time was ‘Groucho & Me’ which is the autobiography of Groucho Marx. Sometime back I had found another Groucho Marx title that I do not remember very clearly but it was not in such a good condition. However, this copy was in excellent shape and I got it for just fifty rupees which is peanuts for such a good title. I am impatient to begin reading it as soon as I finish the ones I am reading right now.

These weren’t the only book I found at Abids last Sunday. I found another title I had been searching for. I came across a decent copy of ‘The Power and the Glory’ by Graham Greene. I found it in a stack of books being sold for thirty rupees each. No sooner had I spotted it than I grabbed it because it was a nice Penguin edition that I did not want to miss it at any cost. This was a wonderful find and it put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. I am already wondering what I will find next Sunday at Abids.

The Sunday Haul (on 11-10-2015)

Though the festival season of Dasara and Diwali is less than a fortnight away the shops at Abids were closed on Sunday allowing the pavement book sellers to put up their shelves. I was glad that most of the booksellers were at their usual places. In the couple of hours I spent browsing alone I found four good titles. Every Sunday I am finding at least two good titles to take home. I have bought so many books till date this year that I have stopped counting.

I do not watch movies but I like to buy books related to movies such as autobiographies of actors, collection of movie reviews, scriptwriting books, and so on. It may sound unbelievable but I have not watched any movie by Akira Kurosawa. It is a matter of great embarrassment to be confessing this fact. I don’t understand why I haven’t tried to watch Akira Kurosawa’s movies but it fills me with regret now. I have made up my mind to get hold of his movies. When I saw a beautiful copy of ‘Something Like an Autobiography’ by Akira Kurosawa I grabbed it. I did not hesitate even when the seller told me it would cost me two hundred rupees. I was willing to pay any price for it so I paid up and took it.

The next title I found at Abids was an interesting one by an interesting person. I had read about Chris Kyle, the movie on him, and also about how he was murdered. I did not watch the movie ‘American Sniper’ when it ran here sometime recently but when I saw the book ‘American Sniper’ based on which the movie was made I took it. I was interested in knowing about Chris Kyle and I hope to learn something about this fascinating personality. I bought this almost brand new copy for just fifty rupees. It looks like an easy read and I am planning to finish it one of these days.

Last Sunday I found a nice copy of Woody Allen’s ‘Getting Even’ that I got for thirty rupees. This Sunday I found his ‘Side Effects’ that I got for thirty rupees again. It was a nice copy and I am glad I found it. I also found a copy of ‘The 5th Penguin Book of Sunday Times Crosswords’ that I got for fifty rupees. One of my younger brothers is a major crossword buff and was in the Top 10 in Indian Crossword League, an annual competition for crossword solvers. I too am interested in solving crosswords but am not such an addict as my brother is. Though I may not be able to match him I bought this book for the same reason I cannot let go of any book on books, reading, writing, and also pens.

The Sunday Haul (on 4-10-2015)

Last Sunday I was at Abids to search for titles worth picking up from the thousands of books laid out on the pavements which is like heaven for book lovers like me. Maybe because I was alone I managed to find five good titles. Of these five titles three were copies of books I already have. Somehow I find it very difficult to avoid buying more copies of books that I have in my collection. One reason is that they are hard to find and hence whenever I come across extra copies I buy them up. About one tenth of my book collection is made of multiple copies of the same titles.

Of late I am finding collections of short stores and also verse especially of our (Indian) writers of an earlier generation. I had found an anthology of verse sometime back and this Sunday again I found another anthology edited by Vilas Sarang. It has poems by some familiar names like Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, A.K. Ramanujam, Arun Kolatkar, Keki N. Daruwalla, Dom Moraes, Dilip Chitre, Eunice de Souza, Adil Jussawala, Gieve Patel, etc. I am absolutely delighted that I found this little gem.

About two or three Sundays back I had seen a copy of ‘All is Burning’ by Sri Lankan writer Jean Arasanayagam on a shelf with a seller on the pavement. It was a bound copy but it was not in a good condition so I did not feel like buying it though I was aware I may not be able to find it again. I saw it again the next Sunday at the same place but I did not buy it. Last Sunday however I gave in and bought it for just fifty rupees. It has nineteen stories: The Journey, I am an Innocent Man, Elysium, Time the Destroyer, The Mutants, Man Without a Mask, From Distant Ophir, The Golden Apples of the Hesperides, All is Burning, The Sand Serpents, The Innocents of the World, Prayers to Kali, Fragments from a Journey, A Fistful of Wind, Bali, A Husband Like Shiva, ‘I Will Life Up Mine Eyes,’ Two Women and an Apple, Fear: Meditation in a Camp.

I’ve managed to pick up all the copies of ‘Mandingo’ by Kyle Onstott that I’ve come across after reading it somewhere. So far I have found two copies, both with the same cover and when I saw a different edition with a different cover last Sunday at Abids I bought it. It was in a heap of books being sold for twenty rupees and I was glad I got my third copy of ‘Mandingo’ that cheap.

Another find was a second copy of Martin Amis’ ‘The Rachel Papers’ that I once again got for cheap at just twenty rupees. It was in a good condition and I was quite glad I found it. I had bought my first copy of this title quite a long time back, maybe five or six years ago. I must have written about finding it on this blog.

Another title I got at the same price of twenty rupees was ‘Without Feathers’ by Woody Allen. This was a good copy and my third or fourth copy. I wouldn’t leave behind anything by Woody Allen that I find anywhere.

A Midweek Haul

Last Sunday I did not go to Abids due to the Ganesh procession and the consequent traffic restrictions. A couple of years ago the immersion fell on a Sunday and somehow I went to Abids but was disappointed that no bookseller had turned up. I had to return empty handed. Since I experience a kind of withdrawal symptoms if I do not get my weekly fix of books at the Abids Sunday book bazaar I took adequate precautions. During the week I dropped in at two bookstores and ended up buying two good books that were coincidentally about short stories.

Sometime on Wednesday or Thursday I went to the Best Book Centre branch at Abids. There were a lot of books I wanted to buy but in the end I bought just one book. I found ‘English and the Indian Short Story’ edited by Mohan Ramanan and P.Sailaja. Inside it is written that the book is the result of a National Seminar on’English and the Indian Short Story’ held in August 1994 at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. Though this is an academic book on the short story, needless to say, I bought it to find out what it has to say on the short story in India. Another reason that I bought this book was the first article in it by Ashokamitran titled ‘My Writing, My Times’ that I read standing in the store. He happens to be one of my favorite writers and I don’t miss anything by him that I find.

Again on Saturday I dropped in at was the Unique bookstore at Lakdikapul. I found a treasure of short stories in the form of a hefty volume titled ‘The Art of the Tale- An International Anthology of Short Stories’ edited by Daniel Halpern. This wonderful volume contains eighty two short stories by some well-known writers and also by writers I haven’t heard about before. There were some writers like Mavis Gallant I had been looking for and at last I managed to find one short story by her in this volume. This is the list of the eighty two stories and the writers in this book that I got for two hundred and fifty rupees.

Chinua Achebe -The Sacrificial Egg
Ilse Aichinger -The Bound Man
Vasily Aksenov - Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality
Margaret Atwood- Hair Jewellery
Ingeborg Bachmann- Everything
James Baldwin- Going to Meet the Man
Russell Banks- The Child Screams and Looks Back at You
Donald Barthelme- Cortes and Montezuma
Ann Beattie- Jacklighting
Samuel Beckett- First Love
Heinrich Boll- Action Will Be Taken
Wolfgang Borchert- Do Stay, Giraffe
Jorge Luis Borges- The Aleph
Tadeusz Borowski- This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Abdeslam Boulaich- Cowardice
Paul Bowles- A Distant Episode
T. Coraghessan Boyle- Greasy Lake
Harold Brodkey- Ceil
Dino Buzatti, -Seven Floors
Italo Calvino- The Adventure of a Traveler
Albert Camus- The Adulterous Woman
Truman Capote- Children on their Birthdays
Raymond Carver- Fat
John Cheever- The Country Husband
Robert Coover- Quenby, and Ola, Swede and Carl
Julio Cortazar- Bestiary
Guy Davenport- The Haile Selassie Funeral Train
Isak Dinesen- The Cloak
E.L. Doctorow- The Hunter
Stanley Elkin- I Look Out for Ed Wolfe
Richard Wolfe- Communist
Carlos Fuentes- The Doll Queen
Mavis Gallant- The Chosen Husband
William Gass- Order of Insects
Natalia Ginzburg- The Mother
Nadine Gordimer- The Life of the Imagination
Graham Greene- Two Gentle People
Wolfgang Hildesheimer- Why I Transformed Myself into a Nightingale
Yasunari Kawabata- One Arm
Milan Kundera- Let the Old People Make Room for the Dead
Tommaso Landolfi- Gogol’s Wife
Doris Lessing- The Habit of Loving
Mario Vargas Llosa- The Challenge
Naguib Mahfouz- The Conjurer Made Off with the Dish
Bernard Malamud- The Last Mohican
Gabriel Garcia Marquez- Eyes of a Blue Dog
William Maxwell- The Pilgrimage
Ian McEwan- First Love, Last Rites
Leonard Michaels- The Deal
Yukio Mishima- Patriotism
Alberto Moravia- Jewellery
Mohammed Mrabet- Doctor Safi
Vlamimir Nabokov- Spring in Fialta
R.K. Narayan- Naga
Joyce Carol Oates- The Tryst
Edna O’Brien- Sister Imelda
Flannery O’Connor- The Artificial Nigger
Frank O’Connor- A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme
Amos Oz- Nomad and Viper
Cynthia Ozick- The Suitcase
Grace Paley- The Contest
Cesare Pavese- Suicides
V.S. Pritchett- The Saint
James Purdy- Eventide
Alain Robbe-Grillet- The Replacement
Merce Rodoreda- Rain
Leon Rooke- In the Garden
Juan Rulfo- Talpa
Nathalie Sarraute-XXII
Isaac Bashevis Singer- Henne Fire
Susan Sontag- Unguided Tour
Jean Stafford- Children Are Bored on Sunday
Peter Taylor- A Friend and Protector
Michel Tournier- Death and the Maiden
William Trevor- Beyond the Pale
John Updike- Separating
Luisa Valenzula- I’m Your Horse in the Night
Euodora Welty- No Place for You, My Love
Patrick White- Five-Twenty
Tobias Wolff- Hunters in the Snow
Richard Wright- Big Black Good Man
Richard Yates- The Best of Everything

The Sunday Haul (on 20-09-2015)

Unlike the previous Sunday when I had the pleasant company of Jai and his family last Sunday I was absolutely alone. Though my friends could not make it Abids Jai dropped in with his small family. Before bursting on the scene to look for books on the pavements we sat in the Taj Mahal and had coffee. Jai gave me a Deccan pen in exchange for the copy of Stephen Fry’s ‘Paperweight’ that I gave him. Later, while looking for the books, and after watching the earnest and eager face of Mamun, Jai’s sweet little daughter, while she picked up her own books I was convinced another book lover was in the making. I hope Jai brings her to Abids regularly so she can find more books to read.

Since I was alone last Sunday I enjoyed every moment of it keenly looking for titles to pick up without being distracted. In a heap of books selling for thirty rupees I saw a nice copy of ‘London Fields’ by Martin Amis that I had seen earlier at the same place. I had not felt like picking up then but last Sunday I realized it would be a dumb idea to leave it behind. This was the first find.

I am currently half way through ‘Poor but Spirited in Karimnagar’ by Sumita Dawra, an IAS officer, that is about her experiences as the Collector of Karimnagar. At Abids when I chanced upon another such book by an IAS officer I thought it would be a good idea to pick it up and read it to see what the retired bureaucrat had to say. So I picked up ‘Walking with Giants’ by G. Ramachandran. I got it for forty rupees.

I haven’t read any title by Terry Pratchett who was in the news recently after his death. I am not really into sci-fi or fantasy but when I saw a nice copy of ‘Carpe Jugulum’ by Terry Pratchett I bought it. It would be my first Terry Pratchett title and I hope it would be an interesting read.

Later at Chikkadpally I found another delightful collection of short stories published by Sahitya Akademi. I found ‘Contemporary Short Stories’ Series-1 that had a total of fifteen short stories translated into English from various regional languages. This collection had the following stories:
BHADARI (Assamese) by Laxminath Bezboroa
THE PRICE OF FLOWERS (Bengali) by Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay
A MOMENT OF ETERNITY (English) by Bhabani Bhattacharya
THE LETTER (Gujarati) by ‘Dhumketu’
THE CHILD (Hindi) by Premchand
THE CURDS-SELLER (Kannada) by Masti Venkata Iyengar
THE BRIDE’S PYJAMAS (Kashmiri) by Akhtar Mohi-ud-din
THE TALKING PLOUGH (Malayalam) by Ponkunnam Varkey
MANU (Marathi) by Roop Kattnak
ONLY A DOG (Oriya) by Kalindi Charan Panigrahi
MIRACLE (Punjabi) by Kartar Singh Duggal
BROTHER ABDUL RAHMAN (Sindhi) by Amarlal Hingorani
THE NOSE JEWEL (Tamil) by C. Rajagopalachari
ON THE BOAT (Telugu) by P.Padmaraju
TINNY’S GRANNY (Urdu) by Ismat Chugtai

The Sunday Haul

Last month thought it did not actually rain much, there was a steady downpour of books in my life. This month it is raining cats and dogs outside almost every day and the downpour of books in my life hasn’t stopped either. In the sale of second hand books by Best Books at YMCA that was from 1-12 September I managed to buy a total of fifteen books in the four visits I made. At the same time, on Sundays I continued to go to Abids and pick up books as usual.

Last Sunday, at last, I found one of the missing titles in Len Deighton’s ‘Game, Set, Match’ trilogy. I found ‘Mexico Set’ in a pile of books selling for only thirty rupees. It was only recently that I had found ‘Berlin Game’ and the third in the trilogy, ‘London Match’ and ‘Mexico Set’ that I found completed the trilogy. Now that I have the trilogy I am planning to begin reading the first title and hope to find the missing titles in the remaining two trilogies of ‘Hook, Line, and Sinker’ and ‘Faith, Hope, and Charity.’

Another interesting find was ‘The Bookseller of Kabul’ by Asne Seirstad, a journalist. It was a non-fiction title about the time the author spent in Kabul living in the house of Sultan Khan, the book seller. I bought it because I love to read everything about books, booksellers, and also because I was getting it for only thirty rupees.
I was at the launch of Raghu Karnad’s ‘Farthest Field’ at the Taj Krishna earlier this week. I had read so many gushing reviews of this book that I not only attended the launch I also ended up buying the book and getting it signed by the author.

The Sale Haul- 2

On normal days I find it difficult to keep myself from visiting at least one of the more than half a dozen second hand bookstores in Hyderabad. I drop in at least two such stores in the middle of the week even after I’ve been to the Abids book bazaar on Sundays where thousands of books are laid out on the pavements. But when a sale of second hand books is going on in Hyderabad it is impossible for me not to drop in there every other day. In the Best Books sale that took place in the first fortnight of September I’ve managed to buy seven books in the three visits I made to the sale. I went there once again last Friday and ended up buying six more books and added another book on another visit on Saturday which was the last day of the sale.

Despite possessing scores of books on writing I cannot resist buying more of then whenever I see them. This maybe because I haven’t yet managed to achieve a certain level of proficiency in writing. One of the books on writing I have is ‘On Being a Novelist’ by John Gardner that I found a couple of years ago. However I do not have his other book- ‘The Art of Fiction’ that I managed to read after borrowing it from a friend. I have been looking for this acclaimed title since long. On my third visit to the Best Book sale, a day before the last day of the sale this was the first title I spotted on a shelf minutes after I went in. Needless to say, I grabbed it. Later I found ‘Small Memories’ by Jose Saramago, the Nobel Prize winner. It was a compact little book and I felt terribly pleased to find it. I wondered why I did not see these books on my earlier visits to the sale.

In the section of books being sold by weight I was surprised to find some really interesting titles. Next to books on writing I never fail to buy books on books. So when I saw ‘So Many Books, So Little Time’ by Sara Nelson I was delighted. It was a sort of account of the year Sara Nelson spent reading one book a week.

Next I saw another wonderful title that I already have a copy of. I found ‘No Great Mischief’ by Alistair MacLeod on another table. It was a good copy and I grabbed it without much hesitation. I do not understand how it ended up in this pile of books being sold by weight. Since these two titles wouldn’t add up to a kilo which was the minimum to be bought I looked among the hefty titles but couldn’t find anything good. I picked a crime fiction title ‘Vendetta’ by Michael Dibdin and ‘The Italian Neighbors’ by Tim Parks. These four titles added up to a kilo of books that I got for only eighty rupees. I had bought my first copy of ‘No Great Mischief’ in a similar sale for two hundred and fifty rupees.

Next day, that is Saturday, was my friend Daniel’s birthday so he took me out for lunch at Paradise. After a long leisurely lunch I suggested that we drop in at the sale since he too is a book junkie like me. I was eager to visit since it was the last day of the sale and I thought maybe I would be able to find some title that might escaped my eye on my earlier visits. Luckily I was able to find another interesting title, a memoir of a writer, a well-known one. In the pile of books being sold by weight I found ‘Teacher Man’ by Frank McCourt. I added it to the pile of books that Daniel had picked up and also paid for which means I got it for free!

Adding all the books I’ve picked up during the four or five visits I made to the Best Book sale it comes to fifteen (15) books.

The Sunday Haul

After buying nine books at the Best Books sale during the week I thought it wouldn’t be such a good idea to pick up more books at Abids the following Sunday. Though I had resolved to only look and not to buy any books on my usual Sunday visit to Abids it did not take very long for the resolve to crumble. The first book I saw and picked up was yet another (my third) copy of ‘The Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad. It was a nice copy with a beautiful cover and the price too was just right so I grabbed it.

The second find was ‘Slow Man’ by J.M. Coetzee that I got for the ridiculously low price of only thirty rupees. It was in good condition and I picked it up the moment I saw it in the heap of books selling for thirty rupees only. In the adjacent heap of books that too were selling for thirty rupees I found ‘Paperweight’ by Stephen Fry. I found my first copy of this book maybe a decade ago and I still have it with me. It is a collection of Fry’s hilarious pieces that I read again and again.

I think the best find of Sunday was ‘The Name is Archer’ by Ross Macdonald that I spotted at a seller near the Abids GPO. I got this book for only forty rupees which was a steal. Another find was ‘Oriental Mythology’ by Joseph Campbell which is a fantastic book. I don’t know what prompted me to pay hundred rupees for this book but I am certain it will be interesting to read it.

With these six book the total number of books that I bought in September comes to fifteen and the tally of books that I have gathered till date is one short of a hundred and fifty.

The Haul at the Best Books Sale

Not content selling their wares on the pavements of Abids every Sunday, and also in their brick and mortar store the second hand book sellers of Hyderabad hold ‘Exhibition-cum-Sale’ of their books now and then. Best Books Centre is the biggest secondhand bookstore chain with three branches in Hyderabad. They usually hold a big sale twice a year usually at the YMCA in Secunderabad. I look forward to it eagerly but last year they did not hold the sale so I was disappointed. Finally, sometime last month I learnt that they were having a sale starting from the first of September till the twelfth. I was there on the first day itself.

The first book I found was ‘Do You Suppose It’s the East Wind’ edited by Mohd Umar Memon that I got for ninety five rupees. This collection of short stories by Pakistani writers has stories by Sadat Hasan Manto, Abdullah Hussein, Ikramullah and other writers I haven’t read about it. I bought it because it was a Penguin and also because I love reading short stories. The next find was a copy of ‘A Burnt-Out Case’ by Graham Greene that also was priced at ninety five rupees. I had been looking for this book since a long time and I felt glad I found it at last. This is one reason why I look forward to such a book sale.

The next title I found was another book that I missed buying when I first saw it a couple of years ago at another second hand book store. I picked up ‘The Sense of An Ending’ by Julian Barnes the moment I spotted it. This book was slimmer than the other two books I found earlier but it was priced higher at a hundred and twenty five rupees.

When I read the press release about this sale I was dismayed to find that there would be books being sold by the kilo. Somehow I do not like the idea of books being sold by weight because each book is different unlike potatoes or onions and hence has its own price. However, I was curious what I would find in the shelves of books being sold by weight. I was quite surprised to find a hardcover copy of ‘Education of a Wandering Man’ by Louis L’Amour. I already have a paperback copy of this memoir by this famous writer of Westerns but I couldn’t resist picking up the hardcover copy. This book alone weighed at least half a kilo I felt and since the minimum weight of the books you buy had to be a kilo I looked around for other titles to add to the scale.

Sometime I had picked up a copy of ‘Tumbleweed’ a book by Janwillem van de Wetering which turned out to be a fantastic crime fiction read. As recently as August I found another title by van de Wetering “Hard Rain’ at Abids so I did not hesitate when I came across ‘The Japanese Corpse.’ I was surprised when I saw ‘Evening Games’ Alberto Manguel in the shelf of books being sold by weight. It was a Penguin title and this was a collection of short stories which could have been sold for a higher price. But I was glad to find it and these three books weighed a kilo and a quarter which means I got these three titles for a hundred rupees at the rate of eighty rupees a kilo.

I went once again a day later and found a nice copy of ‘Avarana’ by SL Bhyrappa the famous Kannada writer. It was quite a tome but I realized I would never find an English translation of any work by SL Bhyrappa so I decided to buy it even though the price was 195 rupees. I resolved that I would not buy any more but would just look around. It was a kind of mistake looking around because I found another book I had to buy. I found an enormous volume which turned out to be ‘The Best of Quest’ that I discovered was a mine of essays, stories, and poems by some of the best names in Indian English writers of an earlier generation. When I saw one of the stories was by Arun Joshi I decided to buy it even though the price was 395 rupees. It was a collection I did not want to miss so in it went into my bag. Then I saw yet another book that I told myself that I simply had to buy for the simple reason that it was a book by Alice Munro. I already have a copy of ‘Open Secrets’ by Alice Munro but I decided to buy another copy.

The sale is on until the end of this week and I do not know how many more books I will buy if I go again apart from the nine titles I had picked up in my two visits.