Friday, May 26, 2017

The Sunday Haul (on 21.05.2017)


Though it was forecast that the day would be very hot in the city I dutifully turned up at Abids last Sunday. It turned out to be one of the hottest days I had seen this summer with the sun blazing down as early as eleven in the morning. No one in his right mind goes out when it is so hot but I just couldn’t sit at home and think about all the titles I would miss spotting. In the end it turned out to be a good haul of three nice titles.
The first find was near the café where we have tea before we set out. I like to read Robert B. Parker’s Spenser titles and I have almost all the titles. Last Sunday I spotted an unusual Parker title-‘Love and Glory’ that wasn’t the type of books Robert B. Parker writes. It was a romance and the cover was quite enticing and I ended up buying it for thirty rupees.
The second find of the day was another wonderful book. I found the screenplay of ‘Taxi Driver’ by Paul Schrader. It was with another seller who has his wares just beside the café. Normally he quotes high prices but somehow he asked for only forty rupees for ‘Taxi Driver’ which I thought was quite low and so I bought it without a second thought.
Since a long time I am in the habit of jotting titles of books I come across in articles or other books that sound interesting. One such title that I had jotted down a very long time back, more than a decade or so, was ‘Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?’ by Edward Behr. I do not remember now where I had come across this title but I remembered the title because it so outrageous. I spotted this book with a seller who has hundreds of books spread out on low tables placed on the pavement and that he sells for twenty rupees. I picked it up feeling amazed that at Iast I had found a book I had read about long, long ago.

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