A bountiful haul at Abids on 19th November …

As if to compensate for letting me return home with an empty bag on the previous Sunday, Abids bestowed a bounty of 8 books on me on Sunday the 19^th … ah well, but I am running ahead of my story …

Vinod had posted a couple of weeks earlier that he found a novel named Chinnery’s Hotel by Jaysinh Birjepatil at Abids (a heartbreaking-lost and serendipitous-found story … read here) and that it was listed by Khushwant Singh as one of the major Indian novels in the last sixty years that left a deep impression on him … and that the author had written two more novels … there was a vague memory of having read about the book when it was released … and also having seen it at Bookpoint here … I checked my online used book sources and was happy to find Chinnery’s Hotel at Abids prices!!  I also found two copies of the author’s other novel The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights … I bought both copies, one copy which I wanted to give Vinod …  

So, off I went to Abids on the 12^th … I called up Vinod to check his whereabouts at Abids and he told me that he is not at Abids and might not be able to make it … aww maan … that was a downer … I couldn’t give the novel to Vinod and I wandered around listlessly trying to see if I could find some books that could lift my spirits … I also had to locate some mathematics workbooks for Mamoon … I found two workbooks, but no novels, no nothing … and I trudged home … really, it was very boring at Abids without Vinod and our chai and chat session and later joint bibliovenating © (ha ha … just like that … I invented/created the word ‘bibliovenator,’ you see … yeah, really … god promise!) with us pointing out books to each other … ah, well … there’s always next Sunday …

But I was not sure because my Appa and Amma were arriving on the next Sunday morning and if I had to visit Abids, it really had to be a flying visit … I checked with Vinod if he would be going to Abids … yes, he said … I checked with Anand if he would be free to take me to Abids and back … he said yes … I told him I’d confirm in the morning … I also alerted Shruti … because this was unprecedented – me going to Abids on two consecutive Sundays!!  All things tied up and I finally decided at 8 in the morning that I’d be going to Abids after all … but I had only an hour’s window for meeting, chatting and bibliovenating …

So, off I went to Abids on the 19^th too … I met Vinod … Umashankar was there too … I gave him The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights … I was happy to see the gleam in his eyes … chalo, main job done … then we had chai and chota samosas … and we chatted for a while … and then we set out … I concentrated only on the ‘20 Rupees’ piles at three places and picked up these 8 books …

In A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters, I found the first novel in a series of ‘medieval whodunit’ novels featuring Brother Cadfael … I started reading this one … very very slowly … and I must say I am happily sucked into this medieval English world of brothers and priors and abbeys and herbariums …  

Another Gulmohar Tree by Aamer Hussein, a Pakistani writer living in London … Aamer Hussein is rather known for his short stories, and this book is a novella that tells a tale of east-west romance …  

I found two books by Elmore Leonard, one of my favourite crime fiction writers … Elmore Leonard wrote a good number of westerns too and Gunsights is one such tale and I haven’t read any westerns by Elmore Leonard, and so this was a good one … and after reading Ron Scheer’s article How to Write like Elmore Leonard: Gunsights (1979), Gunsights appears juicier … 

I have a copy of Elmore Leonard’s City Primeval already, but I picked it up along with Robert B. Parker’s Sudden Mischief, another doubles, for my colleagues … members of the small and informal book reading club for which I lend books from my collection … 

  

I found another Doctorow novel, The Waterworks, to add to my Doctorow collection all exclusively found at Abids … 

When I picked up Tarka the Otter, I thought I was buying a children’s book for Mamoon, and then the usual curiosity bug bit me and I realized that this book has quite some history behind it … Tarka the Otter, written in 1927, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1928, and has never been out of print!  It was not written for children per se, but became popular with young adults and the book was praised by Thomas Hardy and T E Lawrence and has influenced literary figures like Ted Hughes, Roger Deakin, and Rachel Carson and nature writers Kenneth Allsop  and Denys Watkins-Pitchford described it as "the greatest animal story ever written.” 

It was at Abids that I first ran into a David Quantick book, and then found another and I liked what I read … and then I found another one on the 19^th, The Dangerous Book for Middle-Aged Men … 

I was super happy after the haul and more so, afterwards discovering that some of these are real gems ... thank you Abids!!!