So Many Books

The internet at the apartment, hasn't worked since we got back. Although this has cut down a great deal on frivolous browsing, having to buy Wi-Fi in hourly chunks has also made me disinclined to blog much at all. I've been busy with some freelance projects, and Don's been busy at work, so we haven't seen so very much of India (at least Bloggable India) in the past few days in any case.

Yesterday, I headed up to the Palace Grounds, which do hold a palace. However, it's also used for a lot of other things, including the wonderfully named Princess Academy horse-riding school. But I wasn't there for horses, I was there for the Bangalore Book Festival, during which publishers and bookstores rented stalls to sell books directly to the public.

There were publishers in Hindu and Kannada, Tamil, and other major local mother tongues. There were stalls by university publishers, such as Oxford and Cambridge, and scientific/technical publishers, including Elsevier and Macmillan. But my favorites were the stalls of the local bookstores, and I picked up a couple oddball books from them, including Three Men in a Boat and some short stories by J. F. Powers.

Just about all the stalls seemed to be doing a good business -- I got there around noon, about an hour after it opened, and crowds were already dispersed through the whole enormous building.

Oh yeah, and there was parasailing! Behind the building, not among the stalls. I didn't get too close, but I did see a man's torso floating up, about 30 feet in the air. I couldn't decide if it looked just scary, or scary and fun.