A small haul of books at Frankfurt...

No…no…no…I didn’t go to Frankfurt, but somewhere that sounds similar, and that too in Hyderabad…

For Hyderabadi book lovers with modest means, this is the closest that we can get to the Frankfurt Book Fair…

There is this once-used (i.e., second-hand) books’ stall that had intrigued me whenever I travelled along the Begumpet road…and it was called Frankfurt Foreign Book Sale…I was tempted to go in and browse, but somehow I was always in a hurry…going somewhere…no time to stop…and so I missed visiting this books stall…

(This is how the Hyderabadi Frankfurt Book Sale looks like...this photo is taken from the justdial.com website)

Then this summer, I was on vacation and alone in Hyderabad and I had to pay some pending bills and wanted to visit some familiar shops in Secunderabad…then it occurred to me that I could visit Frankfurt…and I had run out of books of my favourite authors and wanted that familiar suspension of disbelief…ha ha ha…

And so with a heart laden with hope and anticipating a big catch of Parkers and Rankins and Leonards, I left the shores of the great city of Nacharam and headed bravely towards the heavily fortified shores of Begumpet weathering storms and battling mile high waves and choppy waters…and reached Frankfurt…

I entered Frankfurt tentatively and started looking around and at the far end against the wall were tables on which ‘pulp’ fiction books were arranged neatly and alphabetically… one of the salesmen there came to me and wanted to know if I was looking for anything specific…I saw Robert B. Parker…he pulled out some books from that pile and placed them in front of me and then went in and got some more…wow…so many Parkers!!!  I was prepared for this expedition this time and took out the list of Parkers that I had…I was looking specifically for Spenser novels…and in that pile of Parkers were a lot of non-Spenser novels…so, I kept them aside…and there were a lot of Parkers that I already had and read…so, those too went out of the pile…and after all this sorting and sifting, I was left with only three Spenserian Parkers…Cold Storage, Pastime, and Rough Weather…only three…not much, but okay…what to do…the dissatisfied soul that I was, I wandered around in the hope of finding some more and asked for Rankin…and they scurried around and ferreted out one Rankin from some pile…Exit Music…finally, I could manage four novels…

After I came home with the small haul, I read the blurbs and realised that Exit Music is the last in the Inspector Rebus novels by Rankin...and that gave me that much needed rush to start reading Exit Music first...

And for the next five to six days it was frenzied reading and I finished all the four, sometimes reading up to 4 in the morning and waking up groggily at 6…