300 posts down and 10 years of blogging …

My previous post on the books haul at Hyderabad Book Fair was my 300^th post on my blog.  I started blogging in January 2008 and it is ten years now.

The first year was wonderful.  I had the enthusiasm of a beginner and posted a lot of articles on a range of subjects – books and pens were the major topics.  I wrote a little bit about music, and some on travel.  Those 74 posts in 2008 look huge now, in retrospect, considering how much less I have written in the subsequent years.  I am not doing numbers here, but yeah, when I look at the lesser numbers – in 2010 and 2011, I fell down to 12 and 10 respectively – I feel bad.  I have said this before … there were many occasions when I felt I could no longer keep this blog going.  Some other external pressure or personal frustration would bog me down and I couldn’t muster enough enthusiasm to write and there was this feeling that I was neglecting my blog.  This, kind of became a personal battle … it was a strange thing, but I also felt that if I let go of writing here and sort of close my blog, then there is no coming back … I am done.  I wanted to hang on … it was like that painted leaf in that O’ Henry story.  I don’t know why I get into such appalling mental situations.  So, year after year, meagre posts every year getting meagre-r, I hung on, climbing up bit by bit, and still climbing.  I was climbing, surely.  I identified my success or failure by how active I was on my blog.  It is also because I wasn’t doing anything else apart from my job, and I should have been doing something worthwhile … so this is my blog story …

It was much later I discovered that I could link my posts on my Facebook page and it has become much more convenient to give some publicity to my posts … now I provide a link on my LinkedIn page too.   Some people take it from there.   Sometimes I feel I should campaign to increase followers on my blog, only ten people follow my blog!!  Maybe there are more leaders than followers in this world … or maybe I am not sufficient leadership material … oh come on, maan, you’ve got nothing to lose …

I have written some reviews of books that I had read and liked … neither the publishers nor the authors had asked me to, but I wanted to and wrote them.  A couple of authors located reviews of their books here and linked them to their sites or pages.  I came across these links accidentally … ah well, chaps, a line in acknowledgement or a comment on my blog would have made me happy.  

So, what next, Jai … go on writing?  Oh yeah, absolutely … no question about that …  but this year I want to be a bit more eclectic and write about a lot of other things I like … I have some friends who have ‘liked’ my writings … KBS Krishna for one, Vinod is my earliest supporter … Shubha is another reader … Shruti reads sometimes.  Actually KBS Krishna, who teaches English at Central University of Himachal Pradesh, was instrumental in converting two of my travel book reviews into an article and having it published in the Spring Magazine on English Literature.  So, that is one point I have in favour of continuing writing on my blog.

A somewhat unusual book haul at the Hyderabad Book Fair 2017 (held in 2018!!) …

We, Shruti, Mamoon, and I, had planned this visit, some time back and yesterday, the 26^th of January was a sort of ¾ holiday, and so all of us went to NTR Stadium in the afternoon.  Vinod had already visited the fair many times and his blogposts and messages were making me envious.  I was looking forward to the secondhand books stalls from where Vinod had made his hauls. 

I went looking for the second-hand book stall that had a ‘3-for-100’ section, that Vinod had mentioned.  Shruti and Mamoon drifted off elsewhere.  It was quite a while later that I found the stall with the ‘3-for-100’ section and it was overcrowded.  I hesitated a bit and then waded in.  The first few minutes I found nothing interesting, and then this book caught my eye ….

The only reason I picked up this book was because I saw the name of one of my favourite crime writers, Peter Robinson, on the cover.  This book had a story by him.  I had no idea about the other writers, but the idea of noir stories based on one city sound good to me and the book looked good too.  And then I saw this book …

Waah ... another noir!!  And why not Paris too … Paris noir sounded good too …

After I reached home, I discovered that there is whole series on this city-based noir anthologies … San Francisco, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Rio, New Orleans, London, Brussels, Baltimore, Memphis, Belfast, Brooklyn … hmmm … now I have a new mission … visit all these cities … and see what noir has to say …

One particular book kept cropping up here and there among the piles, I knew about the book and had read about the author and I remember there was a flurry of articles in papers and magazines when some of his books were translated into English some years ago.  I kept temptation aside and continued my search and saw this book.  I picked it up and read the blurb on the back …

“He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem―ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory … She is an astute young Housekeeper―with a ten-year-old son―who is hired to care for the Professor.  And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor's mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities―like the Housekeeper's shoe size―and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.” 

This was more than enough for me to pick up Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor. 

Now that I had three books, I went back to the book that was tempting me.  I picked it up and further searches gave me two more from the same series.  Aah … this is good … yeh hui na baat … ab baat bani. 

Ibne Safi was a prolific India-Pakistani Urdu fiction writer, very popular in the 1960s-70s-80s, who wrote the 125-book series Jasoosi Dunya (The Spy World) and the 120-book Imran Series and …  “his novels were characterised by a blend of mystery, adventure, suspense, violence, romance and comedy, achieving massive popularity across a broad readership in South Asia.”  I noticed Ibne Safi’s books when they appeared in English translation published by Blaft, translated from the Urdu by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi.  The original cover images look smashing … all pulpy and massy and lurid(?).  Blaft has so far published four books of the Jasusi Dunya series and I got three of them yesterday.  I should have looked harder, I might have found the fourth too.         

While all this was going on, Mamoon and Shruti were busy too.  Shruti was guiding Mamoon to select books and finally Mamoon ended up with five books, two different sets of pen-pencils, a large map of the world, a reusable notebook, and god knows what else.  

Shruti is now seriously into kitchen-gardening and found a stall selling vegetable seeds and picked up some and she saw a mini sewing gadget that looked like a stapler.  She was actually looking for something of this kind.  I asked her if she found some books, she said she wouldn’t find the sort of academic books she wanted here and that she had made peace with this fact. 

They had apparently finished their shopping and left towards the exit and I wanted to visit the remaining stalls.  I quickly went towards the last two rows and saw a stall that had a ‘Rs.30’ board.  Lots of good-looking books and I wanted to make the best use of the offer.  I managed to find one that interested me.  The last one turned out to be a gem.

The book-fair ground was heavily crowded and I was pleased to see that and there were lots of children and young adults too.  Chalo, despite doomsday predictions about the demise of the physical book and exasperated hand-wringing about indifferent reading habits among the youth and children, the future did look bright at the Hyderabad Book Fair this year.  

More Cadfael mysteries … what to do, couldn’t resist the Cadfael world …

After I found the first Cadfael novel, A Morbid Taste for Bones, at Abids  in November last year (chronicled here) and started reading it, I found myself getting drawn into this medieval world of 12^th century England.  I liked the novel a lot and wanted more.  I looked around and found more, but exercised restraint bought only the next three in the series from an online used books portal (chronicled here).  I finished reading the second too, One Corpse too Many. 

After I read the two Cadfael novels, I felt immense respect for the writer Ellis Peters (pseudonym of Edith Pargeter).  How carefully and cleverly she has created this world and put this Benedictine monk as a detective in this world.  She gives him a background that furnishes him with wide-ranging worldly experience and an array of skills.  He decides to take the cowl and become a monk when he is in his forties.  Shrewsbury becomes his area of operations and the Benedictine Abbey there his home thereafter.  It is a world where there is no electricity and no ‘technology,’ that is so much part of crime detective novels of this age.  But the medieval world had its own technology, and Cadfael is a master of that technology.  He knows his metals and weapons, chemicals, wood; he knows the human body; he knows about food and drink; his knowledge of medicinal herbs and concoctions comes from his days stationed in Jerusalem working in a herbarium.  And he is patient and observant, and since he entered the cloister at a much later age after experiencing a lot that the world had to offer, knowing humans and their weaknesses and strengths, he is much tolerant, far more lenient and even-tempered, unlike many senior monks who had entered the cloister as novices and had no idea of the outside world and its people.

I knew that there were more Cadfael novels out there on the same portal, and the prices seemed all right for me.  I let go off all restraint and bought ten of them, the rest of the lot on that portal actually.  This lot came in towards the end of December last year. 

Look at the covers of the Cadfael novels in this  edition ... each looks a set piece, nicely framed ... and the scroll at the bottom the picture ...

Look at the covers of this set ... similar, no?  I have only three in this set, but I checked most of the covers of other Cadfael mysteries in this set, and all have a prone body on the cover ... 

I had finished the second novel by the time this package arrived and the first thing I did was to read A Rare Benedictine, a set of three stories.  The first story, A Light in the Road to Woodstock, gives us Cadfael’s backstory, the last part where he decides to become a monk, putting an end to his career as a soldier.  This story also sets the historical and political background for the rest of the series, a period that is termed as ‘Anarchy’ in English history.  There are two other stories too, sort of Cadfael’s early ‘cases’ in Shrewsbury.  Ellis Peters wrote these stories ten years after the first Cadfael novel appeared, and after fifteen Cadfael novels.  There are references to people in and places of his pre-monastic life in these novels but no details.  Ellis Peters writes in her introduction to these stories that despite expectations she didn’t want to write a full-length novel about Cadfael’s past, but only that brief period of transition where soldier Cadfael becomes Brother Cadfael.    

 

After two blockbuster surprises where I got author signed copies of novels (Ian Rankin  and George Lamming), I now look very carefully at the second-hand books that I buy at Abids or receive by post.  There was a small surprise in this lot.  The erstwhile owner of this copy of St. Peter’s Fair, a Cadfael novel enthusiast and admirer of the author presumably, has carefully cut out a fairly lengthy obituary of the author (who passed away in 1995) from a newspaper and pasted it at the inside back page of the novel; ‘1995’ in pen is visible on the top. 

I have finished the third Cadfael novel, Monk’s Hood, and am now half-way through Saint Peter’s Fair, the fourth.

Stopping by Abids on a January morning … first in 2018 … got a pearl ...

It was last Sunday actually, in the midst of festival holidays that I shook off some blues and went to Abids.  I reached early, according to Abids Sunday standards and saw that some sellers were already in place behind mounds of books.  I was going through one book mound of a familiar seller and saw a lot of ‘English literature university text books.’  It looked like somebody had offloaded a literary part of his/her life.  Moving sideways, I espied the raybanned Umashankar seemingly waiting for Vinod.  He was indeed, and shortly Vinod swung into view.  He had already made a purchase and it was be-clutched in his hands.  We sauntered along, the weather was fine, it was sunny, but not hot.  I located a book that I had heard about and saw frequently on amazon, The Girl with the Pearl Earring.   

The title of the book is the name of a painting by the renowned Dutch painter Vermeer.  I was at some point in time very much interested in western art and used to pore over paintings and books and bought those slim books in the Great Artists series whenever I could. I was familiar with this painting, but didn’t know the details.  Neither did I know any details about the book.  I picked it up and read the blurb and discovered that this is a historical novel written by Tracy Chevalier and she gives us a fictional story with Vermeer, the model, the painting, and 17^th century Holland.  I wanted this book, but the seller quoted a price which I felt was high and kept the book back.  There is this ‘boni’ sentiment among traders and I happened to be his first customer and he wanted to sell the book.  I asked for half of what he quoted, he smiled and asked for 5 rupees more.  I got the book for 80 rupees. 

When I checked out the details of this book later, I found that this book, published in 1999, has sold three million copies in 36 languages till 2008!!  It has received high praise, and was made into a film in 2003.

We turned left for chai and samosas and talked about among other things, recent Telugu films, books read, in-read and unread, and the upcoming Hyderabad book fair.  Time to hit the streets again.  My favourite seller, from whose book mound one can get books for 20 rupees each, was missing.  The shop whose front he used as his shop on Sundays was open that day, so he must have gone elsewhere or decided not to bring his wares for sale. I had got some good books from his shop during my previous visits and I was disappointed that day.  Anyway, I went along, and caught up with Vinod and Umashankar.  Vinod had found another book, and he showed me the inner cover … was it the signature of Asokamitran, the renowned writer?  It looked like the writer had gifted this book of short stories, which also carried one of his stories, to somebody and signed his name below … oye Vinod, you lucky fellow!!

I still had only one book with me.  We walked along till the GPO, eyes scanning the pavements.  Naah … nothing more.  We walked back till Bata galli and I saw that it was time and bid them farewell.  I had to do some sankranthi related shopping and returned home … with only one book … The Girl with the Pearl Earring …