Every once in a while, I give myself some time off. I leave work early and go straight to a book shop and just hang out. I breathe in the smell of books. I touch the shiny new covers. Smirk at yet another popular and pedestrian new release. (Yes, I work in a library. Yes, I breath in books in the library too. But books must be visited in varied environments.)

The past three years, it has been an interesting social experiment for me. What makes me pick up a book? The cover? The author? A recent review of the book? A prompt from a friend? Sometimes the blurb makes me think about certain incidents that happened in my life

My recent visit as a photo log with my though bubbles.

Chox, my friend, this is for us.

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I really wanted to buy Empires Of The Indus , but the print put me off. I find books by Feynman, Richard Dawkins, Hawking and quantum physics books end up in minuscule print like this. It makes me think the author in his/her  enthusiasm to educate and share, ends up producing a 1500 page draft that the editors could only edit so much without killing the spirit of the book and the only thing the publisher could do is to decrease the font and line spacing, increase the number of words in a page, thus effectively producing a 500 page book that doesn’t intimidate a potential buyer, but has to be read with a microscope.

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This is delicious. I have been eying Travelling In, Travelling Out for 6 months now, reading a chapter here and there. I am waiting for the price to come down.

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Jaishree Misra’s Rani is my first exposure to non-british version of the sepoy mutiny. When I read it, it brought home the point that history is subjective. Besieged is a translation of the mutiny papers by Mahmood Farooqui. I would like to read Besieged, but with a friend. The illustrations on the cover page made me pick up this book.

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And these for the child in me.

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And then, BOOM! this.
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The blurb reads:
Twenty-two-year-old Yash Birla wakes up at the break of dawn to a phone call that changes his life—a plane with his parents and sister has just crashed in Bangalore. Leaving his college in North Carolina on a flight to Mumbai, Yash finds out that they have all passed away. Everything he has known is destroyed and his world is suddenly torn apart.
Reeling from the loss, Yash is handed over a vast empire of companies that he is now at the helm of, where he has to fight for his rights and manoeuvre through relatives who have their own agendas.
This is the story of a man who overcomes one of life’s toughest hurdles and lives to tell the tale. It is Yash Birla’s journey from a state of oblivion to survival, where his deep belief in spirituality and his faith in true love act as a crutch for him to go on. Money, greed, God and an inside view of one of India’s oldest industrial families . . . that is the story of On a Prayer.

Errrm….. I feel that there is chasm between what I see on the cover and what the blurb says. It is as if some one at Penguin decided that for the book to sell there needs to be boobs and ended up with this picture. Oh, come on!