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A virtual treasure trove
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A rich haul of discounts online
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Apart from used and second-hand books on Amazon, there are several more stores, including the Indian portal firstandsecond.com, that have a discounted books section as well as a section for second-hand books. For a more complete list, check on Google, it's worth it, because the discounts are sometimes amazing, and if you get a second-hand copy, as you can of the four books listed here, it'll be a real steal. Prices are listed online.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North By Matsuo Basho Translated by Noboyuki Yuasa Penguin
If you like Basho, whose haiku An old pond/ into it a frog jumps/ splash, is possibly the world's best-known haiku, then you can't possibly not want this collection, which is glorious. It also has an excellent introduction by Yuasa, in which he tells you practically everything you need to know about Basho.
Basho can startle the life out of you when he casually drops a haiku, or a couple of prose lines about things that seem so deep and spilling over with significance that you want to tiptoe around it. Basho's love of life, and his even deeper love of the word, his total absorption in writing as part of the spiritual act of submission to life, all shine through wonderfully in this collection of travel writing. Basho writes herein a form that links prose with verse and you'll recognise a number of the more famous of his haiku scattered through these pages. At the end of this reading, you'll feel like you've just received a benediction of words.
The Diaries of Franz Kafka Edited by Max Brod Penguin
These diaries make absolutely riveting reading, edited by Max Brod, who was a lifelong friend of Kafka. They are left almost totally complete, with only very minor erasing. Brod and Kafka were so close with Brod having written a book based on their friendship, called The Kingdom of Love, and Kafka left all his papers with Brod to be destroyed. But fortunately for the world, Brod decided against doing that. In this collection are diaries from 1910-23.
Kafka's tumultuous emotional life, his involuntary almost melting into emotional extremes all come through in these pages. "... .The feelings of happiness which, like now, I have within me from time to time. It is really something effervescent that fills me completely with a light, pleasant, quiver and that persuades me of the existence of abilities of whose non-existence I can convince myself with complete certainty at any moment, even now."
The Diary of Anais Nin Edited by Gunther Stulhmann Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.
Anais Nin! Beautiful, wild, unrestrained, neurotic, in love with herself and the world and with her diaries, these diaries are as unrestrained as Nin was known to be.
And its all there, her life in Paris, in America, her emotional turbulences, her writing, her love life, therapy, her often cruel comments on contemporaries, her inner circle. Fascinating is too mild a word for these diaries. There are several of them, but the earlier ones are better than the later ones simply because in late years she became so obsessed with her views that she could not stop saying things and often the reading becomes a mite tedious.
The fascination come in part form her views on several writers and poets who later went on to become icons, like Pablo Neruda, who she dismisses rather unkindly as a phony, posturising kind of person.
Then there is Henry Miller, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Salvador Dali... So many of them.
Secrets of the Heart... Kahlil Gibran... Translated by Anthony R. Ferris... Signet
Generally considered to be autobiographical, this book has "electrifying revelations about men and women, life and love". It has both prose and verse, translated from the Arabic with a long preface that gives you some interesting glimpses of Gibran who is rather like a bridge to the Arabic world.
This is practically a compressed version of all that Gibran believed in, the things that he wrote about and wanted to be known for. It has a vision of the world that will appeal to many of us, because it is a vision of the mystical as coming through and because of love, friendship, of connecting with a soul mate and of remaining open to the impulses of the world, which touch human beings at stray moments.
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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