Thursday, September 15, 2011

On the crime fiction trail - haul @ Best Books sale

This time when I decided to visit the old books' sale by Best Books @ YMCA, Secunderabad...I wanted to look out for crime fiction...and buy only crime fiction...of late, Vinod has been writing a lot about crime fiction and crime fiction writers who he had recently encountered and I have picked up the madness...I am already a fan of Elmore Leonard, whose books Vinod recommended and I have around 10 books of Leonard now...and recently Vinod wrote about Robert B. Parker and in a fit of enthusiasm and impatience, I ordered five Parkers from Indiaplaza...three of them are from the well-known Spenser series, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them...and Vinod was at it again more recently when he wrote about James Patterson...and fortunately for me Vinod also mentioned in a recent blog that the Best Books sale would be on soon at YMCA Secunderabad and that stopped me from ordering James Patterson books from Indiaplaza...and the Best Books people also sent me a message about their sale...and off I went there two days back...I had four authors in mind...James Patterson, Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, & Ian Rankin...

And this time at the sale, I didn't have to ask anybody where the books of these authors were stacked...most of the time it would be a random selection of all pulp fiction on one table, romance on one table, and two shelves of 'Literature' books and other genres scattered around...one had to really search through the stack of pulp fiction to find one book that one was looking for...but this time, quite surprisingly, I didn't have to search...all Pattersons where stacked in one place, similarly, were the Elmores and all the Rankins were on a shelf...so, no time wasting searching this time...only selection was left...I selected 3 Pattersons...Kiss the Girls, Roses are Red, and Four Blind Mice; 2 Elmore Leonards...The Hot Kid and Out of Sight; 3 Rankins...The Black Book, Mortal Causes, and Black & Blue...and I wanted to try reading an author who I'd never heard of earlier...and the books by Peter Robinson looked tempting...I added 2 Robinsons...Past Reason Hated and A Dedicated Man...I could not find a single Robert Parker book and enquired at the counter, and they promised to search for some from their stock and let me know...after putting together my murder and mayhem books, I strolled around to see if I can find anything interesting...I found a rather thick and nice looking book calling me out...I went closer and saw that it was Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle...I bought it for a lark and later I read about it on the net and discovered that it would make very interesting reading indeed...

3 comments:

Sammy Chanda said...

Read the Murakami one Jai....I like Murakami's style of writing.

For crime thriller, receinly I am reading teh entire Janet Evanovich series...try them...its "hilariously" good thriller...they are available in flipkart. I like Rankin and patterson...also try Claire Seeber

Vinod Ekbote said...

Good haul, Jai. You seemed to have cleaned up the place!! But I saw a Parker the day I went.

Jayasrinivasa Rao said...

Hi Sammy...thanks for stopping by...and for supplying names of some more CF authors...will try them...the sale is on till 25th I suppose...

Hi Vinod...arre no bhai...there were still lots left of these writers that I wanted to buy, but I ran out of paisa...and anyway I had reached my limit...what and all did you buy?

Jai