Mumbaikars having finally woken up to the fact that December 25 is three days away, and the stockings have yet to be filled.
From The Secret to The Reluctant Fundamentalist, books are vanishing fast
MUMBAI: Mumbaikars having finally woken up to the fact that December 25 is three days away, and the stockings have yet to be filled. No wonder last-minute shoppers are turning to books to fill the stockings of their near and dear ones.
The city’s venerable Strand Book Stall says Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret continues to be a bestseller. “I’ve bought The Secret for my husband this Christmas,” says newly married 29-year-old Sunita Banerjee. “We are looking at buying an apartment in the city, and I want to leave no stone unturned. If The Secret can help us, then my husband needs to read it.”
Granth has a special Christmas section, with activity books and compilations like Famous Stories From The Bible. “November and December are good months for us, and customer entry is relatively high,” says a Crossword Bookstore spokesperson. “It’s also a time when NRIs visit town and purchase books.” The store’s bestselling fiction list is an eclectic collection of the old and the new. Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance Of Loss and The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho, all make an appearance. The non-fiction section includes Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, Dev Anand’s Romancing With Life and Larry Bossidy’s Execution.
By all appearances, bestsellers and the occasional classic seem to be the choice for last-minute buyers. “Books are a personal choice. Unless you know the person well, chances are you’ll land up giving them something they already have or read,” says 39-year-old Binal Shah. “New authors are a safe bet.”
But if you’re looking for something different, check out The Case For India, written in 1930 by historian Will Durant. It was banned by the British Raj and, according to Strand’s store manager, “has been out of print for at least 70 years”.
For the true bibliophile, the pleasure of gifting a book to someone is the hunt itself. “It’s when you ignore the best sellers and scrounge the streets and bookstores for that elusive book,” says Pratik Doshi, who is currently ‘hunting’ for Nick Bantock’s The Griffin & Sabine Trilogy — a series of graphically illustrated books that tell the story of two lovers through letters and postcards. The hunt has taken Doshi to second-hand bookstalls, and forgotten shops like Smoker’s Corner. He’s got three days left… and so have you.
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